The Second Annual Los Angeles Ruby Conference will be held this year in Burbank, California from February 19th to the 20th. The LA Ruby Conference covers a wide variety of topics on the Ruby programming language, ranging from getting started in Ruby to running a large-scale enterprise Web site, and everything in between. Coby Randquist, founder of LA Ruby Conference, speaks about the conference’s inception and growth.

Q: What inspired you to organize an LA Ruby Conference?

Coby Randquist: When I moved to Glendale in April of 2008 to take a position with YELLOWPAGES.COM. I was surprised to find that the local ruby meet-up was struggling and only meeting once in a while.  I got involved and we started holding meetings on a monthly basis.  We’ve held that meet-up at least once a month every month (with only one exception)  since May of 2008.  In November of 2008 a group of us decided that we had a strong enough community here in the Los Angeles area to support a regional Ruby conference.   So we started planning and held the conference successfully in April of 2009.  Last years attendance was about 120 people.

Q: How many people do you expect to attend this year?

Coby Randquist: We expect to have about 120-150 people attend this year.

Q: Are there many Ruby developers in the Los Angeles area?

Coby Randquist: There are 100′s of ruby developers in the Los Angeles area.  They work for companies like AT&T Interactive, CPO, Oakley, CitrusByte, and Border Stylo .

Q: How many people come to learn Ruby?

Coby Randquist: This year we are offering a full day of workshops on Friday, two of the classes are dedicated to teaching the basics of ruby and the basic of rails.  We have capacity for about 50 individuals this year to get hands on introduction to ruby and rails.  Everyone who attends does so to learn about new topics and to help keep up with the ever changing technologies.

Q: What are some highlights from last year’s conference?

Coby Randquist: Highlights from last years conference included Ron and Daemon Evans presenting their flying Arduino project which featured a Ruby controlled flying blimp, Jim Weirich’s keynote on Building Modularity was a great presentation on the global view of software development.  It’s worth watching the video.

Q: What is it about the Ruby programming language that makes it compelling to use?

Coby Randquist: Ruby provides a programming experience that yields the least surprises, which is refreshing after working with so many programming languages that require the developer to bend to strange and some times bazaar conventions.  Ruby supports multiple programming paradigms, including functional, object oriented, imperative and reflective. It also has adynamic type system and automatic memory management.

Q: Is the Ruby programming language creating new job opportunities in the Los Angeles area for software developers?

Coby Randquist: In the past two years I’ve hired over 20 engineers at AT&T Interactive because of the skills that they have in ruby.  I have not researched the overall dynamics of the industry in LA, but feel that there are numerous companies who are hiring people based on their ruby skills.

Videos from the 2009 LA Ruby Conference are available at http://larubyconf2009.confreaks.com

LA Ruby Conference Registration http://larubyconf.eventwax.com/la-ruby-conf-2010/register

LA Ruby Conference Web Site http://www.larubyconf.com