RubyKaigi 2024

I presented my Cross-platform mruby on Sega Dreamcast and Nintendo Wii at RubyKaigi 2024.

I think it was well-received, and I received lots of nice comments afterwards.

I was in the smallest of all 3 rooms but as far as I could tell, it was full. So happy about that.

Some random notes

I went to lots of sessions, spoke with lots of people, and there were lots of memorable things, and this is just a small sample of what I remember.

  • @tompng showed us some amazing programming as an art form in the opening keynote. This is something you have to see to get what I mean.
  • When Namespace by @tagomoris is merged, Ruby may reach version 4.
  • @joker1007 and I were both wearing Jungle Moc from Merrell (different colours). He also wrote a rather nice paragraph on my presentation in his blog post.
  • The talk by @coe401_ on the Happy Eyeballs protocol was really well-presented, and interesting. The challenges of using multiple versions of IP, and how they were solved, and the challenges arising from the undefined parts of the protocol were explained very nicely. She also wrote a really detailed report of RubyKaigi 2024, which includes really nice things about my session.
  • The parser session by @hasumikin covered integrating parsers in the limited memory space of embedded environments. Really interesting to see how he measured usage and removed dependency one by one. He also saw my previous session on mruby on Dreamcast and Wii in Taipei, and commented rather nicely about the progress on my project. A memorable quote from his presentation: “parse.y is no longer a labyrinth”
  • Running mruby/c on SNES by @gedorinku was really interesting to me, and he mentioned that his project started partly because he saw me running mruby/c on Sega Mega Drive. I was stoked.
  • It’s great to see the type definitions will be included in Ruby source file as comments in the future, although @soutaro would prefer first-class support rather than comments.
  • The story behind the world-record Pi computation by @Yuryu was really inspiring. It made me want to take on a really challenging project (but probably a lot smaller-scale)
  • The 2nd-day keynote by @ioquatix included the demo of his mostly server-side Flappy Bird on the browser. It was really fun to watch and nice to see Matz on stage to give it a go.
  • The closing keynote by @yukihiro_matz had many interesting bits, but in particular, I found it intriguing that he mentioned the AOT compiler for Ruby. Also, he still prioritises performance: “Performance heals every issue”
  • On Saturday after the event, I was wandering around Naha on my own, and went into a beer bar, and ran into @kwappa. Naha is a small town but what a coincidence. He also wrote up nicely about my session in his blog.