Positive Notes on Railsconf

Although I've been critical about Railsconf (easier to criticize than to say positive things), the experience was generally positive. I'll devote another column to things I didn't like about Railsconf, but even if that column is much longer, overall I was pretty happy with attending.

To put things in context, you're not going to (for the most part) get a lot out of the talks in the conference. Unless you learn particularly well listening to not very good talks that are a bit too high-level or a bit too in-depth, your goal as an attendee is to get enough ideas and concepts to move on.

In particular, I'm at least a lot more stoked to try the stuff out on my own. I've heard of Ruby on Rails for a while now, at least a year, but haven't really pushed myself to actually do anything about it. I had hoped attending this conference would push me to take that next step, and I think it's done just that.

I've also gotten more excited over test-driven development. Indeed, I'd say the most effective tutorial (I know others who already do TDD found that talk a bit boring, but I liked it) was the one by Dave Chelimsky and Aslak Hellesoy (I'm missing an accent somewhere), two of the core members of the RSpec team.

In particular, they did something you would think anyone who talks about TDD would do. They did a TDD session. And it really helped to have both of them up there. If, for no other reason, it gave two slightly different styles of TDD. Indeed, if they would create some videos of them doing some significant TDD, I think it would really help. Ruby makes TDD significantly simpler than, say, Java.

I can't tell you how many testing talks I've listened to (mostly through No Fluff, Just Stuff, even though their talks are generally of a higher quality than Railsconf) where testing is advocated, but not a single test is written! It baffles me how people can say it's good, and not write a test.

So, I'll rattle off some of the keywords I heard during the conference that I didn't hear before this.

"Edge Rails", which I assume is the latest cut of the Rails team developing Rails 2.0.

Mongrel. I still have no idea what this is, except it's related to servers and such.

Rails consulting. Because Rails is so easy to get off the ground (at least, compared to J2EE), people who wouldn't normally do their own websites can now do it. I think this, of everything, is the real big boon for Rails. Enterprise Java typically requires big companies to manage and develop. When running a decent website with a database becomes easy enough for one person to do, you're going to see more of these tiny sites.

Capistrano. It's supposed to make Rails deployment easier. Ah, deployment. When did that become the thing you had to know how to do? Imagine explaining this to someone who teaches programming that there's more than writing a program and getting it to work. You have to put it out so people can access it.

memcache. I'm assuming this is what it says it is. Caching in memory. The Twitter guys say they use the heck out of this.

Ditching the DB. The one really intriguing comment that Evan Weaver made was about getting rid of the database (i.e., Active Record and the DB) because most people don't really need it for the kind of sites they run (although he needed it). Indeed, he could have spun a talk out of this one titled Living without the Database: Alternatives for hooking Rails to DBs and gotten some traction.

The accordion guy. I plead guilty and say I've been watching American Idol. The guy who did the spoof on Creep by Radiohead not only did a funny spoof, played credible accordion, but didn't embarass himself with his singing. Lines like "You're so f'ing handsome, David Heinemeier Hansson". Props to Chad Fowler doing ukelele backup.

RailsEnvy. Both of the guys are way geeky, especially the guy who played the Rails part in this spoof of the "I'm a PC, I'm a Mac" ads, which have been spoofed often, but never quite as good or relevant as this (second place--the PS3 vs. Wii ads with women playing the roles of the two consoles).

Chad Fowler. Two words. Ukelele cool. Actually, he did a very nice job without drawing a great deal of attention to himself.

Dave Thomas. Still, for my money, one of the best techie speakers ever. He does so many things so well that you forgive him for his t-shirt/jeans combo that probably actually increases his geek quotient, even as it earns sartorial groans.

Portland Convention Center. It's a really nice convention center. Lots and lots of space. It lacks one thing which is a credible outside patio. ETECH, being held at a hotel, was able to host lunches outside, and that's nice (it was Portland, so eating outside was often not an option).

PDX. Wireless at the airport? For free? How excellent is that? Other airports, please take a note.

Portland. OK, I can't find any good restaurants, but free trains to downtown, Powell's Books, and wireless pretty much everywhere. Mad props to the city. That restaurant thing, though.

I'll add a blog about the downsides, which I've been kinda doing off and on anyway.