I made it safely back from Germany on time, in spite of a little confusion with the airport train.

My second EuRuKo was well worth the trip to Munich. Someone counted forty people on the Saturday; there were certainly many more than last year. The schedule was ad-hoc, but worked out very well both in terms of time taken and in the range of topics covered.

I think that my speech went down well; I received some positive feedback. I hope that a few more people now know the difference between a character and a codepoint. I was also told that I am a confident public speaker—I suspect that my short time spent teaching six-year-olds might have helped me a lot in this regard. Giving a talk on Unicode also made me realise that I really ought to put some of the helper libraries I’ve developed into wider circulation.

It was very interesting to see the kinds of things that other people are using Ruby for, and what a wide range that is. It was also fascinating to see some of the oddball things that Ruby’s dynamic nature facilitates.

Ruby seems to attract a decent class of human being in general, and one of the best things about this kind of conference is the opportunity to make friends and contacts and to exchange ideas face-to-face with others. I’m sure that the weekend’s discussions have paid dividends in saved development time.

Nonetheless, more details will have to wait. I have exhausted myself hacking C++ all day today. It’s a lot less fun than Ruby.