Rails Conf Day 2
May 19th, 2007
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Breakfast time came a little early this morning after a late night. Headed off to see Tim Bray's keynote. It ended up mostly being a 90 minute commercial for Sun. I was greatly disappointed. Tim is a smart guy and normally a decent speaker. This clearly was not his morning. I think one thing of truth that we can walk away from is that Time to Market and Maintainability are both IMPORTANT parts of technology today. I was impressed by some of the NetBeans IDE features he showed and will like download and play with NetBeans at some point.
A few of us headed over to Teascript: A Homesteader's Story by Matthew Bass. Decent presentation given in a audience participation format. Home schoolers now have a web 2.0 option for getting school transcripts and I now have some ideas on how to bootstrap ideas. I think that it inspired Young into pursuing a product idea. Hopefully he will blog to tell you about it! The next stop on the tour was the Business of Rails panel including..
I really didn't like how this was moderated or the flow. All of these guys are bright and have interesting dialog, but the way the session was conducted seemed to kill the flow. An interactive session with less structure would be MUCH MUCH better for this. The extreme upside is that I got to sit next to Jim Weirich of Rake fame and had good dialog about his new position at EdgeCase while thanking him for bringing us such a great tool. |
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| We had the same boring lunch box again today before heading to the afternoon sessions. However, there was special lunch time entertainment a la "ExtraAction". A wild marching band act. Attended Angel on my Shoulder by Jarkko Laine the author of Building Ruby on Rails E-Commerce. The content was decent and the humor was good, but the translation to English was VERY choppy and made it hard to keep focused. I think if done in his native tongue this would have been really good session. Instead it ended up being a bit of a dud. |
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| One of the most anticipated sessions going into the conference for me was Anthony Eden's on Data Warehouses with ActiveWarehouse. We are getting ready to start a big data warehouse project here and I have been following his blog. The good news is that it did not disappoint. This plugin is maturing very quickly and I am excited to get my hands into it. I was able to meet and talk to Anthony after the talk and am hoping to start contributing to this project in the very near future. This was one of the better technical sessions at the conference. Nice job Anthony. | |
| The next session was open mic. There were presentations on Master View, Revolution Health, CruiseControl.rb, YikeSite, Mole and others. The Revolution stuff was some wicked Javascript-fu but other than that nothing too incredible. Jay, Kleetus, Lindsay and I were all hungry so headed to Red Robin for dinner. It was a nice calm meal in the midst of the Rails Conf storm that had been brewing around us for days. We wanted to relax a bit so we walked a few blocks to the local mall. It was HUGE. There was nothing good to be found to bring home for the kids, but we did find "Portland Smash" and thought of Conrey. |
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| There were Birds of a Feather sessions running so we headed back to the convention center. Kleetus and I did some hacking on socialdrinkr.com. Lindsay and Jay headed to the rSpec BoF. We met a cool guy named Rohit that was preparing to interview at Google. Good luck Rohit. Came back to hotel and am ready to get some sleep and prep for a long day ahead tomorrow. | |
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