ThoughtWorks organizies first 'RubyConf India'

By siliconindia   |   Monday, 22 February 2010, 21:23 IST
Printer Print Email Email
Bangalore: The Ruby Community in India is excited to announce 'RubyConf India 2010' on March 20th and 21st at the Royal Orchid Hotel in Bangalore. Taking the lead in organizing and sponsoring this event is ThoughtWorks Technologies, a global IT consultancy specializing in Global Distributed Agile delivery. Spread over 2 days, 'RubyConf India 2010' will offer Ruby enthusiasts an opportunity to network with key people in the international Ruby community, learn about the latest technology changes and deepen their expertise in the field. The event is co-sponsored by Castle Rock Research Corporation, Mahaswami Software and U.S. based Hashrocket, this conference will draw active participation and sponsorship from the Ruby ecosystem in India and is made possible by a grant from Ruby Central - a non-profit organization in the U.S. dedicated to the support and advocacy of the Ruby programming language across the globe. It will feature keynote addresses and talks by the likes of Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto (the creator of Ruby himself will speak via a video call), Chad Fowler (author of "The Passionate Programmer"), Obie Fernandez (pioneering Rails developers and author of "The Rails Way"), Ola Bini (core committer on JRuby since 2004) and Nick Sieger of Engine Yard and JRuby fame. Ruby is an open source, dynamic programming language that runs natively on Linux, Windows and Mac OS. It runs on the Java and .Net platforms as JRuby and IronRuby respectively. It offers an ideal development environment for Agile practitioners with one of the most active open source communities worldwide which produce and support tools and projects like "Ruby on Rails" - a powerful web application development framework that significantly reduces time-to-market and is used by top web companies like Twitter and Shopify. Chad Fowler, Co-Director of Ruby Central, Ruby enthusiast and author of books such as "The Passionate Programmer" and "My Job went to India" said, "As a one-time expatriate living in Bangalore, Ruby and India are two of my greatest passions. It's wonderful to see Ruby and Rails spread into India. This event is a major step in spreading the productivity and joy of Rails development into the Indian IT industry." ThoughtWorks has consistently participated in Ruby conferences and this year it instituted the "Innovation & Technology Trust", a public non-profit with the objective of providing a support system and networking between professionals in the field of emerging technologies and open-source by bringing them together during workshops, seminars, conferences. Explaining the rationale for ThoughtWorks organising 'RubyConf India 2010', Mahesh Baxi Managing Director ThoughtWorks India said, "Open Source software is here to stay and ThoughtWorks has been an active contributor, supporter and user of Open Source software like Java, Ruby and JRuby." RubyConf India 2010 was sold out within the first 5 days of opening registrations. The Spokesperson for the event Sidu Ponnappa said, "The fact that RubyConf India was sold out in just five days is a strong indicator of the change that is occurring in the Indian software industry. We're seeing the beginnings of a shift from conservative development that we've been doing for the last two decades to the more exciting and challenging world of high-end engineering."