When I started at my Ruby gig last month, my co-workers encouraged me to attend JRubyConf. I am really glad they did.

This conference was exactly what I’ve wanted from conferences in the past:

• Primarily expert level talks on technologies that we already use (or new versions of technologies that we already use)
• A good amount of inspirational or non-technical talks
• Three talks in a row on testing! (and none of them were intro-level)
• Most of the room raised their hand when someone asked how many people do TDD

The Ruby community is very willing to learn new and better ways to do things, and learning is encouraged and appreciated. This is very clear from the way this conference has been run, and it’s not being done in a condescending way. The bar for conferences that I attend has been raised quite a bit now.

Jim Holmes has been promoting JRubyConf (which has been known as eRubyCon in prior years) for awhile now, even for people who didn’t do Ruby. I would definitely second that, a .NET or Java person could learn a lot from seeing how things are done in Ruby (and the less technical talks apply to anyone). However, you may leave frustrated if you’re not currently able to use Ruby at your day job!