RailsConf is over. I’m finally back at home and happy to be in my own bed. But I’ll miss being around so many rubyists! What a great feeling being around sooo many people just purely amped about something.

While it was great to see everyone so excited about Ruby and Rails, it was just great seeing so many people excited. The motivation level was super high.

Watching everyone hacking on their projects 24/7 was great.

Speakers are already posting slides, so I thought I’d aggregate them as they came in, starting with Ezra’s.

• Discovering a World of Resources on Rails - David Heinemeier Hansson
• Agile Rails Deployment - Ezra Zygmuntowicz
• Globalizing Rails - Jeremy Voorhis
• Overcoming Scaffolding Addiction - Amy Hoy
• Metaprogramming Writertopia - Bill Katz
• Rails, Ajax, & Universal Design - Jason Kunesh
• Meanwhile, In The Rest Of The World… - David Demaree
• MetaRails - Stuart Halloway
• Domain Specific Languages as Rails Plugins - Steven Hammond
• Lucene Eye for the Ruby Guy - Seth Fitzsimmons
• Agile Migrations - Damon Clinkscales
• Using Ruby on Rails to Succeed in Selling Music in the 21st Century - Ben Curtis

No, its not. What the hell happened to Coke? It use to be that where ever you could go, you could rely on getting a coke. It seems that nowadays wherever I go is loyal to Pepsi products.

Every restaurant I go to now brings me a Pepsi when I ask for a Coke. “Is Pepsi fine?” hell no its not fine, its Pepsi, did I ask for a Pepsi?! What happened to Coke in restaurants. Pepsi used to be the exception, not Coke.

On my flight to Chicago all they had were Pepsi products. What the hell happened to choice? I remember when they had both. I can only assume that Pepsi paid for the exclusivity.

Even at RailsConf they were serving just Pepsi. When was the last time you saw 6 empty cans of Pepsi on a programmers desk!? When asked “Coke or Pepsi”, half the Rails Core said Coke. The other half didn’t even raise their hands. Coke or nothing for them. I’m sure the same goes for the entire community.

This post doesn’t really have an answer or a finish. I’m just on a plane coming back from Chicago with a screaming baby and an environment of about 78º. And was just asked if “Pepsi is fine?”. No.. its not.

“You can find me last in the phone book”

Case study on the yakkima herald.

Going over shared hosting and why it sucks.

VPS Servers, better, but you better know how to admin the server.

Mongrel is apparently where its at now. Its all anyone is talking about.. gem installing now.

Nice overview of cluster deployments.

Ezra is going over his backgrounDRb plugin. Its nice to see it explained after seeing it on his feed over the last few months.

Good overview of deployments, but I still need to get some more info. Its enough to get me deep into it though.

Time to play with mongrel :)

“Some things I learned when trying to build my program up toward a DRY domain specific language” - nice

“Language and program evolve together” - Paul Graham

Whoa, he covered a ton, his slides are going to be posted, so I’m gonna have to grab them and go through them soon to realy grok it. Its made obvious how powerful ruby can be with the creation of DSLs, and how friendly you can make your code with a little bit of investment.

I can’t wait to try to apply this a bit.

Read more

• Pickaxe - Chapters 24 & 26
• Ruby for Rails - Chapter 13
• Why’s Meta Programming

UPDATE: Bill Katz posted his slides

Vitruvias’ 3 Big Things:

• Firmitas - Foundation
• Utilitas - Utility
• Venustas - beuty, grace, delight

Firmitas

Working with Designers
Complete XHTML templates done, including full forms and interfaces.
Mockups in SVN. Validate all markup.
Begin to rip apart markup into partials and what not
Constant communication. Not necessarily milestones or hard edged rules. Talk about what is being made, if it still looks like its supposed to. Catch things early. Non communication can’t do that.

Utilitas

Scott’s showing the site he did for his church. He had a good deal of time to do it, so he spent a while interviewing and investigating before any work was done.

Set aside the technology for a minute and spend a good deal of time in the thought process. Figure out your problem domain. Rails lets you develop so fast, you actually have the time to do this now. Take advantage.

Venustas

Delight & Beauty
DRY
has_many :through on a single model - create new models based on a single model using has_many :through. client.completed_invoices == Client.invoices but only pulling invoices with status of completed - works without a seperate table? hmmm, maybe thats why I wasn’t the most excited about has_many :through, I didn’t think about using it within a single model.. refactor time!

Finite

Another great talk. Overall theme was to really spend a good amount of time identifying where you can optimize and abstract. Rails allows so many ways of doing that, so use it.

“Ajax is crack.”

USE a no-op form - # is bad, use ‘javascript:void%200′ for ajax links that shouldn’t submit…

Ruby hashes become JSON notation.. whoa, news to me!

Dealin with DOM IDs - From bruce williams’ blog - www.codefluency.com. Create a method for your ActiveRector model for its DOM id. Rather than using

id="< %= "person_" + @person.id%>“
extend the model so you can do

< % =@person.dom_id%>
Sick! What a simple but great idea. Thats gonna be in my arsenal for sure. Very Clean.

Degrading AJAX
Give the form an action and a method of post. If the user has no javascript, the form will just post. If they have javascript it will submit asynchronously. So you now you have 2 actions that can read the form. DRY as needed.

At the end he demoed Streamline. Which is an unreleased generator plugin. It seems to be scaffolding on crack. You get an entire ajaxed admin section for your models. It looks very interesting, and almost something that scaffolding should do on its own.

Overall a good overview. I thought it would be more basic than it was so I was pretty happy.

Dave Thomas opened up with a keynote on the 3 things he’d like to see Rails accomplish. The short of it was better db support as far as natural and composite keys , better CRUD, and better deployment. I think his ideas for Capistrano are great especially for shared hosts. Even if you own a box full of your customers.

I hit Mike Clark’s standing room only session on Capistrano and he did a great job demoing what it can do and why you’re crazy if you’re not using it. I went in to it hoping to figure out what was wrong with my cap setups. What I walked away with was that my cap setups are fine, its my deployment environment that is out of whack… Maybe its time to play with Mongrel.

Next up was David Demaree’s session on how to introduce regular users to web 2.0 ideas like tags and rss. This was perfectly in line for me because it sounds like his work mirrors mine quite a bit. He did a good job explaining how to think when designing a site with more features and how a normal user parses it, and the methods you should go about introducing features.

Next was Stefan Kaes’s session on rails optimization. He went over a few tools including his own project that would optimize rails’ more fluffy helpers. He spent a good amount of time pointing out parts of rails that get a bit bloated, and how to work around them. Overall it was pretty good and worth touching on.. Maybe now i’ll do some benchmarking… heh

Into the night….Martin Fowler gave an amazing keynote on what he liked about Rails. Overall he communicated that what he liked most is the methodologies that the community are embracing. Agility and simplicity over all excited him the most. Thats exactly why I’m where I am this weekend.

Third keynote of the day was the ever controversial Paul Graham. He gave a hilarious and precise speech on marginality and what you get out of being marginal. He contrasted it with larger organizations and explained why being marginal will get you further faster. I’m really hoping he posts the speech on his site because I know quite a few people that should read it.

And to top it all off, Why the Lucky Stiff and The Thirsty Cups performed to close up the night. What other programming language has an band play at their conference? If you’ve never heard any of what Why does, he’s a genius. His combination of extremely slight context of programming in his songs and his talks are a precious gift every rubyist should cherish. I’m pretty buzzed to be able to have been here for it.

Phew. Day 1?? Today alone paid for the conference already. And we have 2 more days. I’m curious what DHH has to say to 450 railers sitting in front of him tomorrow night. It should be pretty interesting.

Finally made it.. phew… There’s railers everywhere!

Here I sit at RIC airport, delayed. I checked the flight tracker widget this morning and everything was A_OK. No Delays. I get here and bam, delayed till 12:22pm from an 8:00am schedule… fun.

The airport is under major renovations and no restaurants are open. Just kiosks.

On a good not, the wi-fi is on and free. Thats the least they could do I guess. Well that and have their AC temp lower than 82º.

Its almost time to go. I”ve been tieing up loose ends before my trip. I just got my Macbook Pro fixed. The mouse button had this horrible double clicking action going on. Not in the interface, but physically. It was crunching. It was really unbearable, gahhh. But the local Mac shop was able to fix it for me in 2 days before my trip, where the Apple store couldn’t even take my reservation, there were too booked up. Suck.

Thumbs up to Rick Olson and Bruce Williams for throwing together the RailsConf Facebook! What a great idea.

Just a bit of packing and decision making on the toys that will go with me, and then I’m off. I’ll be blogging the entire conference, so keep a look out here as well as my flickr stream.