Rails Conf Day 3

Breakfast attendance very light this morning. Think the long week is making it hard for people to get up in the morning! The Railsway keynote was great as anticipated. Koz and Jamis reviewed a number of items including thin controller, fat model and how to better use ActiveRecord associations among other things. I really like Koz the more I hear him speak. I wish he were more vocal in the community. Kiwi’s just make good programmers.

Several of us headed on to Javascript-fu by Dan Webb. What a great presentation. The delivery was hilarious and the accent added to the -fu, but the content was great as well. From how to better optimize Javascript to getting the most of doing things on multiple browsers. Definitely will need to check out the extensions LowPro. From there went to Laying Tracks: How to Contribute to the Ruby on Rails Open Source by Josh Susser it was a good introduction on how to get started contributing to Rails. There definitely is a backlog from core with 800 outstanding patches to be denied or applied. Encouraged Kleetus to fix the replace_html partial bug he found while hacking the other day. Maybe will spend an afternoon pairing to create a patch and submit it (or at very least a bug report with failing specs). Do your part! Contribute to the community.

Half the team went to Red Robin for lunch but I already a lunch box in hand so decided to stay eat the status quo. Irish, Heidmo, Young, Kleetus and I had a good healthy discussion over the sessions we had seen thus far and talked a lot about the rails “community” and our observations. I hope to blog about that separately later.

Not liking any of the options in front of me for the next session I headed into Solr on Rails by Erik Hatcher author of Lucene in Action. I was impressed. I have never really researched ferret or Lucene. I can already see several uses for this technology in things I am playing with or having in the back of mind. Erik could have made the presentation more exciting, but it definitely wasn’t short on technical details. I am hoping to install and play with some of this in the very near future.

Getting ready to close out the conference the gang of nine headed to the Dave Thomas keynote. Unfortunately, I was ready for something great as I thought Dave was one of the best speakers at last years conference. While he kept up some humor and folded in some stuff on the fly overall the presentation left a lot to be desired. I think the overall ideals he portrayed were valuable, but weakly pronounced. Better luck next year?

The conference ended and there was a brief after party. This very well could have been the highlight of the conference. Why? Because Lindsay was in a massive crowd and mentioned that she REALLY wanted a Snickers bar. We all were swept up in the crowd flow and ended up 3 buffet stations away and I young man approached her sheepishly. Pulled a Snickers out of his pocket and said “I found you a Snickers bar.”. Lindsay already having gotten items off the buffet tray replied with “No thanks, it’s okay”. I don’t know if the guy was more sad or pissed off at being rejected, but he definitely was muttering cursings under his breath as he walked away.

Went to pick up luggage. Kleetus lost his ticket so did Young. Some how Kleetus found Young’s ticket so got Young’s bag. My ticket was really for Kleetus’ bag so I was without recourse to get my luggage. Luckily the staff was understanding and I was able to get my bag and get on the metro to head to airport. Kleetus, Jade and I played some Mario Kart on the way there. Was very nervous about getting plane flight moved (long story), but Josh’s “magical status” helped out and not only did get on the flight but got an upgrade to First Class. Josh I don’t care what my mom says about you, you aren’t half bad.

Sitting on plane decompressing from conference and catching up on blog posts. Was able to set a real Mephisto theme and get it working with Marsedit while at the airport so maybe I will be more inclined to blog again? The problem is I like narrative to reflect on, but I’m sure its too verbose and irrating.