Last weekend, I flew down to Santa Ana to represent Pivotal Labs at the Los Angeles Ruby Conference. I used to live in SoCal – I went to school in the Inland Empire – so I’m really excited about Pivotal becoming a part of the Los Angeles Ruby community.

Pivotal is setting up an office in Santa Monica and are looking for our first client there. If you’re interested in working with Pivotal, you can email Ross Hale, our LA director at ross@pivotallabs.com.

Getting ready for LA ruby conf! Cc @moonmaster9000 @msfionatay @robb1e @dipolesource @thecodeword twitter.com/rrrosss/status…

— Ross Hale (@rrrosss) February 23, 2013

This year, the program committee did a great job putting together two days of workshops and the one-day conference. (see full schedule at the website)

I’m proud to say that two talks by Pivots were accepted, including my own, Why JRuby?. For the past six months, I’ve been working on Greenplum Chorus, an open source platform for data analysis. We chose to use JRuby because many of the Big Data tools were written in Java, and JRuby supports integration with Java libraries really well. JRuby is a great choice for integrating with Java and for scaling and performance, and I think more people should consider it. You can view my slides at SlideShare.

Matt Parker and Robbie Clutton gave a talk on Sustainable Behavior-Driven Development, right after me. BDD is a personal topic of interest for me, since I think BDD can provide a lot of business value, but it’s so hard to get right. Matt and Robbie have been strong advocates for BDD within Pivotal, and their talk draws on Pivotal’s experience with BDD to diagnose common problems and offer solutions. And, in true pair fashion, Matt and Robbie co-did the talk (pun intended). Their slides are online at Speakerdeck.

Yes “@jimweirich: Really liking the message @robb1e and Matt Parker are giving in their “Sustainable BDD” talk.”

— Corey Haines (@coreyhaines) February 24, 2013

The talk videos will be up at Confreaks within the week.