In the midst of COVID pandemic lockdowns, a Muay Thai kickboxer reached out for the only sparing partner left that she could compete with, Ruby. Is it possible to fight Ruby? Is it possible to create a hardware-sparing robot running Ruby and integrated it across the web to track her training progress as well as verse her coding pair in a battle of real vs virtual fighting? Come on a journey of ups and downs and the state of MRuby for hardware dev, JRuby running on mobile, and CRuby for the backend.

Details
During the lockdown, Selena and Michael missed not only in-person pairing but also Selena's other side passion of Muay Thai Kickboxing and maintaining and extending her State Title. As pairing went remote so did the idea of training in gyms and sparring partners. This is how Selena hatched an idea to build a sparring robot to train and fight against. Given her familiarity with Ruby, she thought that was the logical place to start with a sparring robot. This is how a long journey of ups and downs started that overviews the current state of Hardware development and using MRuby, mobile development using JRuby, and tying it all together on the server with CRuby.

The talk will demonstrate how to get started with MRuby for hardware and what are the limitations as well as benefits of using Ruby. It will touch on what is involved in using JRuby to power Android mobile devices and it will wrap up with a demonstration of a system composed of MRuby, JRuby, and CRuby. Finally, a demonstration of the sparing robot will be performed live on stage - it will be a show not to be missed

Pitch
Selena and Michael have done a number of talks as a duo and bring a lot of energy, laughter, and a different perspective to conference talks.

This talk will cover a getting started guide in MRuby and the current state of JRuby on mobile from a beginner's point of view. As both presenters have recent experience in being beginners with these particular technologies and they paired on these experiences, they are perfectly positioned to share this information with a broad audience and give the audience hope for also diving into these technologies.