Rails Conference 2006 - Day 4
Posted by Mike Blake Fri, 14 Jul 2006 00:14:00 GMT
Flashdotted
As the conference winded down, the great information was coming fast and furious. But my mind was a bit overwhelmed. I took in a talk about Laszlo on Rails by Mike Pence. Laszlo is an open source platform for developing Flash applications. Well I saw the last 15 minutes of it anyway, I got in a bit late that morning. And England was up in the world cup shortly.
Internationalization
So I headed over to the lobby bar to watch Soccer. England was playing Ecuador, and I sat there and watched the match with most of the English supporters including Martin Fowler. Martin Fowler is a very cool guy, and sat there and joked around with the attendees like any good Englishman would while watching soccer with the lads. If there was a bartender that morning (or if I’d found any beer behind the bar) the conference would have been over right there.
Meta Programming
But the learning wasn’t over. With England up 1 - 0, I decided to go see Stuart Halloway talk about Meta Programming in Rails. Stuart showed us tons of great programming tips:
- Symbol.to_proc
- Configuration with the Rails Initializer
- Handling undefined methods with method_missing
He also expanded a bit on what David Heinemeier Hansson touched on the night before, natural language modeling, that is looking at adjectives and adverbs when defining a model.
Meta Configuration
After lunch I saw James Duncan Davidson speak. JDD created Ant and now is championing the effort to simplify Rails configuration and deployment. He spoke to us right from the trenches and I could tell he’d been through the pains of several deployments. It’s fascinating how many of the leading software engineering minds have embraced the Rails platform so quickly. Now it was time to meet the core team.
The Rails Core Team
We stayed in the main conference room and watched as a panel discussion with the core team began. The last time I saw a panel discussion like this was at Java One in San Francisco. But at that panel discussion I got the sense that everyone was trying to outdo each other with trendy acronyms starting with X. I didn’t see any of that attitude here. The Rails core team seems like a pretty down to earth bunch of guys. They’re also wicked smart and good at what they do. They politely disagreed at times, and admitted when they needed to be educated more, such as with accessibility issues. One member talked about learning a new language every year, sort of mental calisthenics. DHH also suggested that the best way to contribute to Rails right now is documentation.
Meta Presentation
The conference organizers then said a few words and gave out prizes. Mike Clark, Chad Fowler, Jay Zimmerman and several others seemed like the were enjoying themselves, and their exuberance helped set the tone for the conference.
The conference finished up and I said goodbye to some brilliant people. Then I enjoyed dinner in Chicago with 2 of my new friends Peter Krantz and Andreas Ekström. At dinner we conceived of BatroomAttendant an application to help people improve their careers. Peter and Andreas completed a working model with just 2 hours of battery time on their flight to Sweeden. I’ve register the project at rubyforge so stay tuned for updates.
