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RailsConf Europe, day 2

Posted by Roo - 15/09/06 at 11:09:57 pm

Jim Weirich (author of ‘rake’, among other things), presented on tips to avoid being a Leeroy Jenkins in the Rails community. He gave some very helpful, concrete examples of things to avoid when modifying or adding behaviour in other people’s classes.

Next was the much anticipated presentation by ‘why the lucky stiff‘, author of Try Ruby, Why’s (poignant) Guide to Ruby, YAML, etc. The delightful why gave an overview of some of his characters, gave us a Sandbox demo (momentarily reduced by a technical gitch to picking up his laptop and showing us the screen), pronounced “Hpricot” out loud for the first time and shared some cute Ruby tricks. My favourite bit of the talk: “Is anyone working on Wasabi for Ruby?” (a throwaway reference to a recent flame between DHH and Joel (1, 2, 3). It got very little response, but maybe that’s why it was my favourite bit.
In the elective sessions, I learned about JRuby from Churles Nutter at Sun, and Rany Keddo described how he turned his bank job into a Rails playground,

Later In the afternoon, James Duncan Davidson (writer of Ant, Tomcat and an amazing photographer) covered why ‘The Web is a Pipe‘ on the benefits of HTTP, the need to flatten storage and memory and, interestingly, raising the issue that CPU cycles do matter because of the environmental and carbon cost of machine power.

Finally, Dave Thomas (pickaxe author) wrapped up the event, breaking the ice by pointing out that it was perhaps the Rails conference with the highest density of swearwords so far, so proposed a new Rails logo. His talk compared terrorism to FUD and listing some hints to avoid it in relation to Rails. He received a standing ovation.

(There are a load more photos in my RailsConf Europe set on Flickr, and other peoples tagged with ‘RailsConf Europe‘ too.)

More observations:

• Being the (first) European Rails conference, there are plenty of European accents in the room. I’m hearing more of them today than yesterday. Perhaps they take a while to open up. Some American, though many of those are speakers.
• Dan Webb’s ‘Unobtrusive JavaScript with Rails’ was so oversubscribed yesterday that it was re-run today.
• MySQL is named after the creator’s daughter, ‘My’ (pronounced “Mee”). I did not know that. I don’t think I’m going to start calling it “Mee SQL” though.
• Lots of the cool factor in the Rails community is about life on The Edge.

Update: DHH has done me the serious honour of using some of my photos in his recent blog post about the event.

RailsConf Europe, day 1

Posted by Roo - 14/09/06 at 09:09:03 pm

A very short walk from my hotel to the conference center. More mingling (checking out the free t-shirt, getting on to the wireless network), before we take our seats and David Black introduces the first speakers.

David Heinemeier Hansson (or ‘DHH’), the creator of Rails and a partner in 37signals, gives a deeply technical roundup of recent and forthcoming changes to Rails. Highlights include SimplyRestful, (a pretty cool step to make Rails a lot more RESTful), ActiveResource (like ActiveRecord, but for HTTP-based resources rather than databases) and SimplyHelpful (bringing more conventions to the view). All very cool. What struck me most was the use of code as a presentation medium. DHH (named ‘hacker of the year’ by Google and O’Reilly in 2005) is a truly talented hacker and the Linus of Rails.

Next up, Kathy Sierra (of the Head First books) speaks on the subject of creating and keeping passionate users. This is something Rails rightly enjoys a pretty good reputation for. For anyone who has been following her blog, the talk was a welcome roundup of her thoughts this year.

I managed to squeeze into a very well attended ‘Unobtrusive Ajax with Rails’ by Dan Webb. Rails is not great at spitting out perfect JavaScript, and his Unobtrusive JavaScript plugin seems to go a long way to addressing the problems, and helping the Rails developer generate JavaScript closer to that which you would lovingly craft by hand.

Jamis Buck on Capistrano (an automation tool which works over SSH, and is useful for deploying to multiple servers). Jamis points out that it can be used for more than deployment, and it does indeed look like a flexible and impressive tool. It was certainly enough to make me want to try it properly.

David Black spoke on “Database Engineering and Rails: Notes from a curious developer”. It was a talk more of questions than of answers, encouraging some thought towards some of the disciplines of database engineering, and how Rails might reward good practice as it’s now starting to do with REST.

Marcel Molina, Jr presented on RJS. Although I must confess I only just followed the technical details, I was deeply struck by the incessant focus on making code cleaner. Every little ugliness and minor design smell gets an impressive amount of attention from Ruby’s comitters, and no stone seems to be left unturned in helping the developer create really beautiful and enjoyable code.

After a (ridiculously uncontroversial) panel session, DHH enjoyed a quick rant on ‘Vendoritis’, railing against the false sense of entitlement of Rubyists. His premise was that downloading a free product does not give you license to complain about it, illustrating his point by translating Rails’ MIT license into “I don’t owe you shit”. DHH is the sort of person who can get away with this. By warning people not to have any sense of entitlement unless they contribute something to the community, he seemed to make people want to do just that.

Some observations about the event:

• There are a lot of MacBook Pros, Powerbooks and iBooks in the room. All the speakers today have been using Macs. (The one exception being David Black, who runs Linux on his laptop but actually ended up borrowing a Windows machine for his talk.) Mac OS X and TextMate are pretty ubiquitous, and I feel rather out of place with my big black ThinkPad.
• There are a very large number of photographers in the room. Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising, since we’re in the age of Flickr, but a question from Kathy Sierra earlier also revealed there are a lot of musicians. These modern hackers really are a creative bunch.
• The wireless connectivity in my hotel (the Radisson on Great Russell Street) is better than the wireless in the conference center. Certainly nice to have both though.
• (Realised when eating breakfast in a noisy room with a headache…) we can choose to close our eyes, so why can’t we similarly close our ears?
• Lots of 37signals staff here. Again, probably not a surprise; much of the Rails core team is there.
• DHH is not afraid of a bit of swearing.

Update: the fun continued on Day Two.

RailsConf Europe, day 0 – PizzaOnRails

Posted by Roo - 13/09/06 at 11:09:36 pm

RailsConf Europe starts tomorrow morning. I arrived this evening for PizzaOnRails, a social gathering for Railsters, tonight held in 1 Leicester Square. It’s a chance to meet people who’ll be around for the conference (and, it turns out, people who won’t be there and came just for the pizza event). It was a good evening with free pizza, free beer (at least, to begin with) and unfortunately rather a heavy recruitment vibe. At least one big recruitment company was working the room quite hard with about 4 staff, plus random freelancers were looking for talented hackers.

I had a fun evening, and made a few new friends very quickly. One of the first people I met turned out to be a fellow Hursley-ite, which was quite a coincidence. No other IBMers to be seen so far.
At various points during the evening, ladies would appear in front of a camera and drape themselves over the crowd. Here’s me being draped on.

Perhaps sensing my nervousness (my wife spends nearly as much time online as I do), my draper did at least introduce herself to me first. Notice my fixed grin, and how my hand is kept firmly in my pocket! :-)

RailsConf Europe

Posted by Roo - 13/09/06 at 01:09:55 pm

I’m off to RailsConf Europe later. Registration and the first session is tomorrow morning, but tonight the participants have been invited to attend Pizza on Rails, a social with pizza and beer.

I’ll be taking my laptop, a camera, some business cards, and a Moleskine notebook. Looking forward to taking plenty of notes and photos.