Here’s my pitch for Baruco 2013, September 14-15th in Barcelona:

Ignore me.

Use my session to catch up on tweets, emails, or sleep. Instead of wondering what I might fumble my way through, plan your visit around attending talks by great people like Sandi Metz, Avdi Grimm, Bryan Helmkamp and Katrina Owen. I’ve personally heard all of these people speak, and walked enlightened, each and every time.

Take a few extra days to explore Barcelona and Catalonia. I might walk around and listen to the album Gaudi. Then again, I might just listen to the voices and sounds of a great and historic peoples.

Eleven years ago, I went to a one-day conference and listened to talks by Joe Armstrong and Yukihiro “Matz” Matsmoto. Joe talked about Erlang, and it was obviously fascinating. Matz talked about Ruby, and I thought it was interesting, but didn’t seem to cover any new ground compared to Lisp or Smalltalk.

But for some reason, when I sat down a few days later at my PC, I installed Ruby and tried a few things. Like many others before and after me, I found myself just plain using it. To this day, I can’t point to an “aha!” moment. This was before Rails, I had no “killer app” to convince me that I needed to learn Ruby. It sneaked up on me.

Funny how a talk and a language can work on you without being obvious that it’s working on you. That talk changed the next decade of my life. At Baruco, I’ll have another chance to listen to Matz speak. I can’t wait to see what he does to the next decade.