From: James Gray <james@...>
Date: 2008-11-01T03:50:11+09:00
Subject: Re: What do you want to see for my Prawn (Ruby Mendicant) talk at RubyConf?

On Oct 31, 2008, at 10:42 AM, Gregory Brown wrote:

> In the spirit of Ruby Manor[0], I'm asking for feedback on what people
> would like to see in my RubyConf talk[1],
> which will be on Saturday November 8th, just after lunch (1:15).

I can't make it, sadly, but I've seen you discuss Prawn before and I  
can sure tell you what I liked.

> I sort of assume people want to see Prawn in action, so I'll be sure
> to have some demonstration code.

Yeah, I thought that was the awesome part of the OK.rb talk.  It's  
just awesome to see 20 lines of Ruby code generating usable PDFs,  
quickly.  We've never had that before.  Period.

> The next most interesting thing is probably some of the techniques we
> used while building Prawn.

This is nice, but not as important to me.  I think we've all seen  
quite a few successful projects now covering most of the options.

To me, Prawn sells itself.  I'm far more interested in what it really  
is, now, and how I can use that than how it grew up.

Maybe others would prefer to see this though.

> If we opted for something more hard core, I could spend a little time
> talking about what it's like to translate such a low level format as
> PDF into Ruby.

I find this very interesting, but I'm a geek that way.

Translating binary formats like this is generally just more tedious  
than hard.  However, I think a lot of people just don't know where to  
start when doing something like this because no one has ever shown  
them.  That's why I think this is valuable.

> Finally, I could give my impressions on the whole "Ruby Mendicant"[2]
> idea.

This is more interesting to me than traditional testing,  
documentation, and contribution standards because it was a unique  
approach that has been pretty successful.  Others might see new ways  
to used techniques like this.

Good luck with the talk!

James Edward Gray II