Ola Bini, TweetLanguage Geek
Biography: Ola Bini
Ola Bini works as a language geek for ThoughtWorks in Chicago. He is from Sweden but don't hold that against him. He is one of the JRuby core developers and have been involved in JRuby development since 2006. At one point in time, Ola got tired of all existing programming languages and decided to create his own, called Ioke. Then he did it again, and started work on Seph. He has written a book called Practical JRuby on Rails Projects for APress, and coauthered Using JRuby for the Pragmatic Programmers, talked at numerous conferences, and contributed to a large amount of open source projects. He is also a member of the JSR292 Expert Group
His main passion lies in expression engines and trying to figure out how to create good YAML parsers.
Presentation: Tweet"Wikileaks and a free internet"
The events that unfolded when Wikileaks released their cache of diplamatic cables where many and varied. Among the most worrying was how many larger companies immediately cut off contact with Wikileaks and even shut down their DNS entries and stopped them from receving donations. What happened there serves as an indication about what might happen when corporate and government interests get in the way of due process. It also serves as a warning about how vulnurable our technical infrastructure is.
In this presentation, I will first recap some of the more salient events in the Wikileaks story, then talk about the main technical pressure points that made it so easy for the US government to shut down Wikileaks. Finally, I will talk about what will happen in the future and what we can do to secure our infrastructure from threats against freedom.
Presentation: Tweet"Java as a platform"
Java is a fantastic place to build your language on. The next version of Java will include JSR 292 which makes it even easier to build powerful implementations on Java. This presentation will cover what's coming in Java 7 and Java 8 for other languages, how you can use JSR 292 to implement a language, and also what other things are on the table to improve Java as a platform.
Presentation: Tweet"JRuby for the win"
JRuby is emerging as one of the most interesting language implementations on top of the JVM. Together with Groovy, Scala and Clojure, it is changing the way people are using and combining languages together with the Java platform.
The Ruby language is beautiful, powerful and extremely malleable. By using Ruby on top of the the JVM it is possible to create the most unusual combinations of languages, principles, paradigms and libraries.
This presentation will introduce and explore JRuby, by first looking at its place in the Ruby ecosystem and then rapidly explore the many possibilities a life on the JVM gives. JRuby can be used as an excellent platform for polyglot programming, and can take your project to the next level. But it can also be lots of fun. Doesn't that sound like winning?