This year I was honoured and delighted to have my submission to RubyKaigi 2015 accepted. This was the entire impetus for our trip to Japan, and I was incredibly excited to finally be able to start talking about the OMR project in public.

The Besalle-Shiodome, home of the conference.

The conference was excellent. It was my first non-academic conference, and the schedule was filled with great talks. I'll likely share my favourite videos when they start to show up on YouTube, and as a dual track conference, I'll have to catch up on some of the ones I missed as well.

As an english speaker, I was very happy that the conference provided English to Japanese translation services. It made it possible to enjoy some of the excellent content from the Japanese conference speakers, for example, @hsbt's entertaining talk on Ruby's test suites. I was really impressed with the live translation, so many thanks to the translation team, and to the organizers for hiring them.

View from the speakers podium in Hall A, though, not after my talk, as I totally forgot to take a picture like this after I spoke.

People tell me that my talk went well. It's hard for me to remember myself, from inside of the speakers-fugue I get into. I'll have to watch the video when it's available to confirm. It felt like it went OK, and I was pretty delighted with the questions I got.

I also really enjoyed talking with members of the Ruby community as well. It was nice to start to feel out their needs as a community. Though Kaigi has helped a lot, I am still ultimately an outsider to the Ruby Community, so I really appreciated everyone who helped me to understand their usage of Ruby, and their understanding of the needs of Ruby applications and how OMR might be able to help them.

I didn't go alone to RubyKaigi. Two colleagues of mine from Ottawa also went, to speak about our experiments with replacing Ruby's existing garbage collection technology with OMR GC technology. You can see their slides here. I enjoyed sitting in the audience for their talk; It managed to explain everything we were doing, while also getting a couple good laughs from the audience!

Overall, I really enjoyed RubyKaigi. I hope that over the next six months we can make enough progress on OMR to warrant getting talks accepted to RubyKaigi 2016, which will be held in September, in Kyoto. Next time though, I'll be prepared for picking up a conference-cold, and bring medicine...

Thanks again to the organizers, staff, and helpers for making the conference great. Thanks as well to the sponsors, for making the conference and excellent parties possible.