Fighting some rspec issues today (which is what I should *really* be blogging about). I stumbled across a post from Courtenay on the Caboose Blog about a new project. He stated that the origins were from the Meyers-Briggs (Jung) personality assessment type. I remember doing this a while back and being an INTJ. I was curious so I re-took the test. Oddly, I assessed as an INTJ again. While I don't take too much weight in these sort of things, I do think the profile matches to a large degree my personality. So in true social blogging fashion. If you read this post. Take the TEST YOURSELF and blog your result!
At Integrum we regularly do Tech Talks to help one another grow. Since a large group of our team is new to TextMate, I thought it would be fitting to do a little talk on using TextMate to boost productivity.
Along with that came a little lesson about the history of text editors (the emacs vs vi wars) and why it's important to know your tool set. (Click on image below to advance through slide show)
For those that didn't get to see Extra Action. I actually missed it as my session went long and I was lost looking for gang of nine at lunch, but we certainly HEARD them.
Well we got off the plane about 12:30am and headed down to baggage claim. All the luggage came off okay, but Kleetus seems to have misplaced his keys. This posed a small problem since nine of us came to airport in two cars (one of them Kleetus'). Luckily Aeree came to pick Heidmo up so Jay and Irish piled in the car with them. The rest of us squished in Josh's truck and Kleetus stayed to wait for his wife to bring him keys. By the time we got it all worked out and I got home it was about 2:15am in the morning. Woke up at 6:30am to get Brittany off to finals for school and headed into office.
Catching up on email and other communications as decompress and get ready for day ahead. Very proud everyone on team here bright and early and ready to work despite being utterly drained. Go Integrum. Jade and Josh released a teaser for RailsResources and we littered Portland with Integrum and Rails Resources stickers! What an event.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
This morning woke up and decided to forage for food. Jade asked the bell man where there was good food. He mentioned the Cadillac Grill. We walked for about 3 miles and never found this famous eatery. So we ended up landing at Starbuck's right across from the hotel. The gang of nine then headed to the convention center to get registered nice and early. We had several tickets that needed to be transfered so it was prudent to get that out of the way. They didn't have "fatboy" sizes left so Jay and I got tickets for redemption of shirts.
We decided to head on out to Powell's bookstore shortly after registration. We hopped on the metro and headed out. It wasn't long before we got a twitter and plans changed. We decided to meetup with Robby and crew for lunch. We jumped off the metro and quickly got lost. We walked South for a few blocks then north for a few blocks and finally found the destination. Of course, we had been out of office nearly 12 hours so the world started to fall a part. Both Jade and myself got panic calls from the office that things needed fixing. We took care of business and gobbled some lunch. It was cool to hear some of what Geoffery has going on with Peepcode.
After lunch several of us headed up to Powell's Technical bookstore after wandering the streets of Portland. Powell's is a thing of wonder. Kleetus, Jay and myself took a quick walk through the park and then hooked up with Irish, Young, Heidmo and Lindsay at a comic book/art store. We were accosted by the "crack lady". Talk about interesting people.... We then went down to 360 vinyl so that Irish could get his drum and bass fix in. We amazingly ran into "crack lady" again. She tried to push some meth on us. We laughed. Feet were tired and so we caught the metro and headed back to the hotel.
We stopped at the Red Robin right outside the hotel and grabbed a beer and talked about disruptive technology, twittering, sms messaging and the impact on the zen of life. The kind of great conversations people don't stop to take the time to have anymore. Young and I promptly ended it with an SMS fight that we both agreed was good fun! The entire gang of nine then met at the convention center to meet with one of our larger clients. We chose Thai for dinner and were back on the metro to have a meeting. The gang was now about sixteen.
Dinner was excellent and so was the company. Good times were had breaking bread and mingling about. Meet several people face to face that have only interacted with via phone. It's always nice to put a face to a name. There was plenty of good joking and tech talk happening. Despite some opinionated French snob at the table. (We love you Matt)
Rather than go back to the hotel we headed to an old skool arcade called ground Kontrol (with a K for those not observant *cough*). We shoved quarter after quarter in the machines playing our favorite games of old.... Jay, Kleetus and I had a marathon session playing Gauntlet. We SO NEED A GAUNTLET MACHINE AT INTEGRUM! Then there was an Integrum Dance Dance Revolution Dance Off held upstairs. All I know is Jay kicks some serious ass at DDR. The rest of us need some help.
We all decided it was too early to just go back to the hotel. So, we decided to stand on the corner and "decide" where to go. After a good 20 minutes of this "deciding" we just headed to Dante's where a killer AC/DC cover band seemed to be playing. The place looked hip. Unfortunately they didn't think Jade was over 21 and that his ID was fake so we got "denied" 404 ID NOT FOUND!
This progressed to another street corner where we stood and debated for another 10 minutes. Finally someone just walked into Ash Street which had a live band playing. We had a few beers and hung out watching local bands. Several of the guys started the "round of shots". Team Integrum was having too good of a time. Unlike the poor hippie outside that seemed to get hauled off for receiving pleasure from his co-pilot while driving. Many of us were done and so went back to the metro to head to the hotel.
Unfortunately Portland has 3 lines. Red, Yellow, Blue. The ONLY line that wouldn't get us to the destination was the yellow line. Of course, that is the line that we took. We were lost. We ended up spending 20 minutes waiting to re-catch the proper train and get back to the hotel. By this time we were starving so we decided to grab a 4th meal (Taco Bell). We walked about 2 miles to Taco Bell and then we realized they only had the drive thru open. Naturally, they wouldn't serve us so we walked to Denny's and macked down some food before heading to bed. So excited for the conference to "really" start tomorrow. Off to bed its going to be a long day.
Everyone was buzzing around the office this morning trying to get all the ducks in their proverbial rows so that we could hop on plane and head to Portland for the event of the year. The second annual rails conference.
We spent the morning rushing around trying to get t-shirts rush printed. Cindy at SportsStation hooked us up and we were able to pick up shirts as we headed out for the airport. Amazingly, even with Josh in tote we were able to take off on time.
Landing in Portland pretty late it was weird to see an *empty* airport. We seemed to walk forever to find our baggage and had to listen to stories about "apple carts" from the guys behind us. Jade took 40 minutes to get metro tickets but we finally did make it on the metro and to the Red Lion.
We grabbed some Denny's at about Midnight before turning in only to see a fight between a homeless man and the manager at Denny's. We got room assignments and are turning in for the night. [Kleetus, Derek, Jay] [Young, Heidmo, Josh] [Jade, Irish]
Looking for a fun day tomorrow.
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