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.

A nice video tutorial showing you how to flash your DS lite to play backups and homebrew

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Phew. What a long day. It was fun while doing it. But I’ll tell ya, 24 hours to do one project is a killer. its really tires you down. We had a ton of fun doing it, but it was even more fun in the Railsday Campfire. What a great community!

Heres what we ended up with. Its a way to create forms to put on your site without any coding ability. A hosted forms and data store.

ooops, didn’t post all day!! We’ve been at it. and we almost have a real product!! Fo REALZZZ!!

More to come….

Gahh! I overslept! Time to kick into high gear!

The customer authentication is done. Registration & login. Time for a nap….

All the migrations and models are done! Merging xhtml into views now. On my second cup of coffee. Its light out side. I can hear birds…