Why do we do devconf

Which is better, PHP or Ruby on Rails? “Holy Wars” around competing technologies is a well-known phenomenon in the web development industry. Is such fierce competition for minds always useful? Do we, the developers, sacrifice our professionalism by becoming adepts (and simply speaking fanatics) of a particular programming language, operating system or database server?

UNIX philosophy says that for each task you need to use the most appropriate tool. Many developers try to adhere to this very pragmatic principle. A few years ago, he worked well on the web. Perl developed complex applications, fast and dynamically developing websites were created using PHP, complex databases with many connections were stored in PostgreSQL or forked out on expensive Oracle and MS SQL, and in places with special performance requirements MySQL always worked fine.

Recently, the boom of universalism has reigned in web development. Any problem suddenly became possible to solve with the help of any technology. PostgreSQL has become fast, PHP is object-oriented and has acquired many interesting frameworks, and Python and Ruby have gained a critical mass of developers. All this, in addition to the mass of positive consequences, led to a sharp fragmentation of the community. Inclined to optimize including their investment in new knowledge, programmers dispersed in the corners, locked themselves in the framework of their once-chosen favorite languages ​​and systems, and began to duplicate efforts to reinvent the wheel and create parallel civilizations.

Perlists are happy that they finally managed to invent PSGI, which is a complete copy of the well-proven Rack interface from the Ruby environment. At the same time, the rubists still fight with the support of unicode, and this despite the Japanese origin of the language. PHP developers are “reinventing” the concepts of templating and sharing namespaces, and Microsoft is discovering the virtues of open source. Narrow conferences such as PHPConf or YAPC (Yet Another Perl Conference) have become massive, where young programmers are convinced that the path they have chosen is the only correct one, and experienced comrades persecute stories about bugs in “neighboring” technologies.
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On May 17, the first superconference of Devconf developers will take place in the huge Crocus Expo. “Super” is not because it’s the best, but because it connects 6 different communities built around separate technology platforms: PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, ASP.NET and Rich Client. We clearly set a goal to try to destroy the walls built between the platforms by their followers. We really want PHP programmers to listen to what is happening in Perl now, Ruby developers are interested in the latest inventions from the ASP.NET camp and so on. It was in this way that the reports were selected and foreign guests were invited.

See the program.

Among the guests who will deliver key presentations are Yehuda Katz — one of the key developers of Ruby on Rails, Karl Masak — developer of Perl 6, Michael “Monty” Widenius — a star from the MySQL world, Stephen Walter from Microsoft, Ilya Alshanetsky, PHP release master 5.2 and others. We hope that their reports will be the “nails” of the conference.

Programmers will get a chance to quickly and painlessly plunge into unfamiliar or forgotten technological stacks. In one day, you can increase your own capitalization in the labor market and at the same time enrich your arsenal with techniques that were invented in other communities.

By the way, right at the entrance to the Crocus Expo in December 2009, the Myakinino metro station opened, and now it is very easy to get to the complex.

On the second day of the conference, May 18, at the Oksana Hotel, next to the All-Russia Exhibition Center, there will be several master classes for those who want to dive into the topics of interest to them. In particular, an up-to-date master class by Alexei Rybak from Badoo will be held.

Author: Alexey Kapranov (DEVCONF Organizing Committee)