Rails Conf Day 1

Headed to conference center with gang of nine and grabbed the continental breakfast. Stood in line for good seats to DHH’s keynote. It wasn’t as good as last years. Very much reminded me of Steve Jobs talk. We got told how successful rails was and the rate of adoption. We waited on our seats for the “iPhone” announcement. Instead we were simply told that 2.0 was going to be an incremental release of features nothing too much outside what is already in EdgeRails.

The first session of the day I attended was respond_to :voice—The Convergence of Voice and Web Interfaces with Rails and Asterisk by Jonathan Palley about using Asterisk with rails. Rails and Asterisk has come a long way since RAMI/RAGI days of old. Very much want to use responds to voice and this plugin. There is definitely motivation for me to get off my ass and install Asterisk at home.
The REST session I wanted to attend next was full so I went to an empty presentation by Alan Francis called Two Revolutions. It was incredible. No real slides and no technology. Just talking outloud. I took some notes and will blog about it later. It deserves it’s own post. Alan you are my hero. Not only did your presentation rock, but you worked in using 11 men on a pitch into the talk! There was great audience feedback for Alan including dialog from both DHH and Martin Fowler.

Lunch at the convention center consisted of a prime little lunch box of love. Gross, but sustainable.

Next stopped into a presentation Rails in Higher Education by Jeremy Sydik. It was not my bag of tea. I played some FIFA on the DS while hearing about patent issues in higher education along with some other moderately interesting topics.

From there went to Fixtures: Friend or Foe by Tom Preston-Werner. I loved some of the ideas and some comparisions to mocks and other solutions. The truth is that there are still too many issues surrounding fixtures and mocks aren’t perfect. There doesn’t seem to be a right answer just yet.
Josh and I escaped to the Joyent party at the double tree for free drinks and some networking. Bumped into Chris from Err the Blog and PJ from ErrFree, the guys from Joyent, Andre Lewis the principal of EarthCode and DrNic the author of MyConfPlan and a ton of other people. It was completely depressing to hear over and over that we are clearly the biggest rails company in the states, but people haven’t heard of us. I think will post more about this. IMG00082.jpg
As we were leaving the rest of the team was meeting at Old Town Pizza. I left with Matt A. to head down to meet everyone. Several people from the Joyent party ended up following and we had a good time eating pizza and talking tech. We had to rush pretty quickly to make it back to the Keynotes of the night. Avi Bryant had an excellent talk that raised lots of good questions. I ask is Ruby a toy language? Ari seems to think so (in a respectful way). In many ways I tend to agree. The good news is that people are working hard to step it up. Thanks Evan Phoenix and Rubinius team!!!
Ze Frank was next on the hit list. It was like being at the Improv for an hour and a half. Ze was hilarious. I haven’t laughed so hard in a LONG LONG TIME. Everyone seemed to thoroughly enjoy his sense of humor and delivery style. He reminded me of Dane Cook only with all his jokes revolving around technology.

We ended the night heading to the Thoughtworks Party at Rock Bottom Brewery. We had a BLAST! The entire team was mingling and joking around. We met with several groups out of Dallas including Big In Japan. Good Times. We finished the night talking with Aslak of rSpec fame before heading out to the metro and heading back to the hotel.

It is late and the starts early tomorrow. So it’s time to grab some ZZZ’s

More from Derek Neighbors

You Might Also Be Interested In

dneighbors uses Arkayne Socialize to increase relevant traffic.

Comments are closed.