Rails Conf started in on Thursday morning with a 9 to 5 session called “Guidebook”, giving a tourists’ guide to ruby, rails, and the conference.
Dave Thomas and Mike Clark hosted this all day introductory session. They proved that they are more than just geeks and authors. They are teachers. They know the topic. Even more importantly, they know how to communicate the topic.
At 18:55 I grabbed my badge, t-shirt, and schedule and walked from the Wyndham to the Rosemont L station. It is almost a 40 minute walk.
The next morning I got there right on time. I decided to skip Dave Thomas’ keynote that morning and so I slept in and then showed up for Mike Clark’s amazing presentation on Capistrano.
Mike was standing in for Jamis Buck, the 37 Signals programmer who wrote the majority of Capistrano. Capistrano was first called Switchtower and then changed for legal reasons. “Legal Reasons” being a cease and desist letter regarding the use of that name for a network software package.
Mike did admirably well and even managed to get the audience really involved in the question/answer session at the end of it all. Several of the audience members were able to answer questions that had come before them and then ask their own questions to continue it all.
After that, Jim Freeze spoke softly, if knowledgeably, about using Asterisk and Rails. He built an automated appointment reminder call and phone system for his wife, Michelle Freeze, a dentist with a practice that involves three separate offices and several partners.
His talk was of interest to me, as I was just discussing setting up and running a doctor’s office with a good friend of mine who is on the fast track to becoming the most amazing podiatrist who’ll ever remove a bunion from your feet.
Starting the afternoon sessions, I attended “Monitoring Rails Applications in Production Environments” presented by Steve Smith of Five Runs, a web-2-dot-Oh company making a server monitoring application that checks up on and create advanced logs for any of your servers for you (Jboss, Apache, MySQL, Rails, etc).
I swear, I thought he said his name was Richard because he was a real dick. He bragged about his company’s “charitable efforts” overly much (prizes they provided for rails competitions). He let everyone know that he wouldn’t be talking system specs and then launched into a systems specs list of his company’s servers. He also swore that he wouldn’t be doing product demos of his company’s app and did just that.
So, if I ever want to monitor my Rails applications using Five Runs’ application, I’ll be just fine. If I ever want to actually monitor my Rails application’s performance, I’ll turn to the knowledge I gleaned from the next (and last) session of the day with Geoffrey Grosenbach.
Geoff’s talk was called “Deploying Rails in Shared Hosting Environments” but it ran the gamut, with everything from building, to deploying, to running, to monitoring, to debugging. It was great. The audience loved his funny and friendly demeanor. Everyone really got into it.
Once again I skipped the evening keynote sessions. As I will tomorrow night.
I’m going to be at Intonation over in the park watching Ghostface Killah, Lady Sovereign, and The Streets.
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