RailsConf 2006

Doug — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 09:55:20 -0500

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!

@Lathi.net: RailsConf 2006

RailsConf 2006