I may be a little late writing this one up, but that’s cool. It means I have that much more to link to.
On Saturday, I showed up for breakfast and then listened to Obie Fernandez talk about Thought Works, a huge development company, and his experiences using Rails. Thought Works’ clients tend to be larger companies than the average Rails application is currently serving. They also used Rails to make touch screen kiosk applications using lots of Scriptaculous magic. It was a good talk, interesting, very “insider-y”.
I stayed planted in the same spot and listened to Scott Raymond, recently hired as a full-timer at Firewheel Design. He has been working for them as a contract employee for a while now and was the sole designer of Blinksale and Icon Buffet.
Scott’s talk centered around concepts first written down by an architect, Vesuvius, and translated them to the web designers’ realm. It was quite interesting and taught me a bit of history as well. The concepts were: firmness or solidity, utility, and beauty (except in Latin).
I went and watched MetaProgramming with Bill Katz. He made some website called Writertopia and when he wrote it’s user tracking and permissions system he also happened to write a DSL for it. I showed up late for this one and he was super-quiet so I’m still not sure exactly what was going on. I also was in the midst of attempting to down my fifth cup of terrible coffee.
After lunch I made sure I was in early to see Ezra Zygmuntowicz ( zig-mun-tuv-itch – as his slides helpfully pointed out ) speak on Rails Deployment. I met this guy the day before during the Rails & Asterisk talk and he seemed like a genuinely nice fellow.
I’m really glad I made sure to catch his talk. He touched on a ton and a half of deployment issues. He went through the steps of a crazy, topsy-turvy development/application/install he did for a newspaper in Washington. He also showed how his new company will be configuring their new high-availability Rails hosting environment.
Ezra also pointed out in what seemed like the meta-theme of the conference, “Zed Shaw is the man!”.
Matt Pelletier pointed this out during his talk on “Rails Beyond Site and Full-form Applications”, and I would bet that Amy Hoy probably brought it up during her talk on “Overcoming Scaffolding Addiction” despite the fact that that title has almost nothing to do with deployment (except maybe “don’t deploy scaffolding as production quality”).
I hung out Saturday night to listen to Mike Clark talk about testing in Rails (unit, model and integration tests) and then I skipped town. Well, I left Rosemont and headed down to the home-turf in Wicker Park. I went to see the Streets and Lady Sovereign play at Intonation Music Festival. I also happened to catch Ghostface Killah’s set and it was terrible! I may be in love with Lady Sovereign, now.
On sunday, I sat through the OpenLaszlo on Rails talk given by Mike Pence and then went over and introduced myself to Jim Greer, who had been asking questions that pointed him out to me as a person that Jon might like to meet and talk with.
Laszlo seems like it could be a really interesting tool, it’s just another one to add to the stack of “oh, i should maybe learn that.” It was used to create Pandora, that new DNA music profiling/listening site.
Matt Pelletier talked about using Rails to run the new openID servers. He mostly talked about openID and it’s possibilities with the wide-eyed enthusiasm of the geek. I asked him a question regarding governmental involvement (either data/information wise or through lawmaking) and he had no idea how to answer. It does seem, though, that his bosses at Verisign and Eastmedia would be better equipped to answer my question. He was, after all, talking tech to a tech crowd.
Stuart Halloway gave a great talk about programming the guts of Rails iteself right before the closing of the conference. James Duncan Davidson got up on stage and talked about deploying Rails and how troublesome that world is right now. During this talk we also witnessed Zedas Shaw jump up and ask “If I redo rcgi, would you use it?”. JDD said that the current rcgi code is crap and that yes, he would use Zed’s version if he made it. Zed then let him know that he wasn’t really asking he was just “priming the pump” eliciting the comment “the pump has been primed” from JDD.
A Q&A panel with all but three of the cores rounded out the event, making for a fun four days. The entirety of those four days I felt as if my brain would explode, having overheated from being shifted into overdrive by so many interesting talks, conversations, and ideas.
Sphere: Related Content