Posted by Doug
Thu, 29 Jun 2006 14:55:20 GMT
I and seven others from Rosetta Stone attended RailsConf 2006 last weekend. Somewhat surprisingly, after 12 years in the software business this was my first conference! I had a great time.
My favorite parts of the conference were the “softer” presentations. I liked Scott Laird Scott Raymond’s presentation on working with http://blinksale.com and http://iconbuffet.com. It’s a success story of a single developer working with a company to deliver fantastic results. I also like Nathaniel Talbott’s presentation on “Homesteading” as I mentioned earlier.
There were a couple of strong themes for the conference though. First, FastCGI is out or on its way out. Mongrel is the darling for deployment. In fact, it was during the conference that patches got applied to rails core so that script/server will use mongrel. More good news is that deployment is a hot topic getting a lot of attention. I fully expect deployment to become significantly easier soon. Towards that end, Rails Machine got some praise and keep an eye on Ezra Zygmuntowicz’s Engine Yard.
Seoncd, testing was a theme repeated over and over again. I’m definitely “test infected” and it was good to hear so much encouragement in that respect. Mike Clark did an excellent presentation on the basics of testing. Even for an old hand like me though there were still some good tips in there. Clearly Mike is a professional. Both of his presentations were top notch.
Dave Hoover also gave a presentation on acceptance testing using Selenium. It was very good to see where selenium testing is and what’s being done to improve it. I think the best solution right now is SeleniumRC
There were other topics as well I found interesting: meta-programming/DSLs, usability, accessibility, globalization, optimization…. It was all good stuff. I’d like to give a thanks to all the speakers and the work they put into their presentations and also the the Ruby Central guys for organizing it.
Oh, yes, it was ridiculous how many Apple laptops were there. I think you’d be hard pressed to find higher mac:pc ratios in Cupertino.
And finally, here are my notes from RailsConf I took with OmniOutliner. After reading this post from 43Folders I decided to really give OmniOutliner a go this weekend. It turned out to be an excellent note taking tool!
Posted in Programming, Software, Internet, Ruby on Rails, Community | no comments
Posted by Doug
Mon, 01 May 2006 15:55:12 GMT
My understanding is that one of Merlin Mann’s key tenets is to “do less better”. The simplicity of this statement struck a very strong cord for me:
It’d be interesting to consider how often the things you monitor most map to the things you (say you) value most. Or, as I might have phrased it in third grade, if you love Digg so much, maybe you should marry it.
Posted in Internet | Tags News | no comments
Posted by Doug
Wed, 19 Apr 2006 12:12:49 GMT
Productize seems like such a good idea. Even David seems to give it praise. It seems though this good idea had a short life-span.
For those who don’t know, Productize is a method of making a Rails app a “parent” and then having multiple instances of that app that all shares the same code base allowing for individual tweaks. For myself, I was wanting to productize typo so that I could easily host many typo blogs. At work we use productize on our website to provide our primary US site and also a customized UK website.
Productize was originally released pre Rails 1.0. With The Big Milestone, there was some scrambling to get productize to work. The problem is that productize pokes fairly deep in the internals of Rails class loading. That code seems to be not yet as stable as it should be. Each release of Rails seems to break productize.
To make matters worse, it doesn’t seem like Duane Johnson is still using or working on productze. With the 1.0 release, the patches and work arounds for productize came from the community. I never did see anything directly from Duane.
Now that Rails 1.1 and 1.1.2 are out, productize is broken again. For such a good idea of minimizing duplication, it doesn’t look good for productize. Members of the core team have said there’s no interest in making it part of Rails core and no desire to “support” it and the internal hooks it needs. In my mind, this moves productize into the “high risk” category.
I never did get typo to the point where it would work nicely with productize. Right now we depend heavily on it at work, but that’s changing. We’ve decided to take the core pieces of our app and make them into and engine/plugin and then split the US and UK sites into separate apps. When we first introduces the UK site, productize’s primary assumption held true: everything is the same unless it’s different. Now that our UK site is fairly mature, the department heads of the respective sites are pretty much assuming everything is different unless it’s the same.
Posted in Programming, Internet, Ruby on Rails | 2 comments
