FutureRuby

July 9-12, 2009, Metropolitan Hotel, Toronto, Canada

People who program in Ruby aren’t like other coders

We are the artists, philosophers, and troublemakers. We realize that the fringe of today is the mainstream of tomorrow. We grease the engines of progress, even when we're working outside of the machine.

FutureRuby isn't a Ruby conference, but a conference for Rubyists. This is a call to order - a congress of the curious characters that drew us to this community in the first place. We have a singular opportunity to express a long-term vision, a future where Ruby drives creativity and prosperity without being dampened by partisan politics.

In search of Laika

June 10th, 2009

For today’s daily dose of speakers, we’re pleased to welcome the brilliant Austin Che (MIT) of Synthetic Biology to the roster.

What’s the nexus between biology and Ruby? How fortuitous that we just launched the the talks page today:

I will discuss a programming language that makes Ruby look like child’s play. The language of life, DNA, has shown its robustness and expressiveness through billions of years of pervasive use. Engineers have recently begun to use DNA to reprogram life to create a myriad of novel biological systems. Biology is currently at the tip of a revolution similar to that of electricity and magnetism at the beginning of the 20th century. The electrical engineering revolution has allowed non-physicists to program in high-level languages like Ruby by distilling classical physics into a set of engineering design principles. Similarly, the emerging field of synthetic biology applies engineering principles to biology. Efforts to bring modularity, interchangeable parts, abstraction and standardization to biology is beginning to allow non-biologists to quickly and predictably design and build biological systems. Soon, it may become child’s play to program with DNA.

We’ve also posted talks by Dr. Nic Williams, and Giles Bowkett – more to come next week, including the announcement of one final speaker.

Some gentle reminders:

The companions track is sold out. That’s right – продан. Thanks to all the supportive significant others who registered!

FAILcamp is almost sold out. Even if you have already registered for the conference, you have to register for this free event separately.

What, you expected a soviet-themed conference sans bureaucracy?

Mobile Orchard has laid claim on a bigger workspace, and in turn Dan has extended the iPhone workshop registration deadline to coincide with the end of FutureRuby ticket sales – snag one of these puppies if you can make an early appearance in Toronto.

Finally, you only have until this Monday, July 15th to snag a regular-priced ($800CAD/$719USD) ticket to FutureRuby. After that, we move up to rush tickets (available to the 29th) residing in the realm of limited quantities and a sloth tax.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 10th, 2009 at 12:11 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “In search of Laika”

  1. Future Hacker Biologists of Tomorrow, Today! « FutureRuby says:
    June 25, 2009 at 9:51 am

    [...] a lot of anticipation for Austin Che (MIT/Synthetic Biology) to give his ‘Programming Life’ talk – we can only suspect you’re all envisioning an early retirement where you spend your [...]

  2. hyfen.net » FutureRuby, Day 1: biology hacking and rooftop partying says:
    July 14, 2009 at 11:47 pm

    [...] mandate to be a “congress of the curious,” Pete invited Austin Che to give a talk about hacking biology (but more on the talk in a later post). To warm up the audience, he ran a hacking session during [...]

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