John Feminella
John Feminella is an agile booster, codesmith, and occasional public speaker hailing from New York and Charlottesville. Along with his two partners, John is the cofounder of Fluxcrux, a nascent technology solutions consultancy and laboratory of fun ideas.
He contributes to open-source software on a regular basis, and has answered hundreds of questions on StackOverflow and GitHub. When he's not developing software or leading technical teams, John enjoys getting soundly thrashed by his betters in tennis and golf, teaching short courses at the University of Virginia, and trolling the Internet.
Ruby's Object Model: Under the Hood with Metaprogramming
Ruby is an effective general-purpose language that's been gaining widespread popularity with web developers for its expressiveness and clarity. But while Ruby and web development are a comparatively recent phenomenon, the Ruby language is a rich, mature distillation of many of the best features of programming languages created over the last thirty years.
In this talk, we'll take a look at some of those features, and understand how Ruby puts them together to provide powerful tools for modern software development. We'll also do some live demos, where we'll exploit Ruby's metaprogramming capabilities to provide interesting results. Often these results aren't possible or as easy to accomplish in other mainstream languages, and we'll show you some cool tricks that you can do with them.
To get the most of out of this talk, you should be proficient with at least two or three programming languages, including at least one strongly-typed language like Python or C#.