Simpltry

Recapping the official start of rails conf.

The morning Keynote was by spolsky. He was entertaining, but mostly content free.

Dan Benjamin gave a talk called entrepreneurs on rails, I thought it would have something to do with rails, my mistake. It was still a good talk about making decisions to market and promote in addition to code.

Next, I went to a talk called the hosting woes, by the engine yard peeps. It was not that organized, more of a panel style discussion. They had some interesting things to share about how to structure your server environment. Like, put a few mongrels and a memcached instance on each “app” server, because that will be the most effective use of cpu and it scales more naturally.

Then I accidentally ended up in the DataMapper. I like DataMapper way more than I thought I would. I still don’t know if I have a place for it in my life right now, but I will definitely evaluating it when I start a new rails project.

The rubinious talk was awesome. I think in 3 - 6 months it will be production ready. One very cool thing they did was implement a version of eval in ruby in like 12 lines of code. It mad me feel like I could contribute, which I believe was the point.

DHH keynoted about, well, I am not sure. I guess it was about “the surplus”, which refers to the productivity “surplus” we have in the rails community. Mostly about how either rails will become “mainstream” or it will be passed by something else. Then the second part of his talk was about using that “surplus” to become a better programmer. That way if/when the good times end you will still have a competitive advantage. Some of his assertions were you should, sleep more, do things not in programming, read books not tech related, programming less, start something from scratch, start sharing, and spread the good word of rails. Mostly I think, if you read signal vs. noise, it was kinda obvious. Still, it was good to here it reiterated. Although, it kinda seemed like a sermon, mostly information you already know, but when you hear it, it makes you happy. But mad props for using the phrase, “go dubai”.

Again, more to come later, but if you want less information more frequently, you can follow me on twitter @schlu.

and/or subscribe to my RailsConf ‘08 flickr stream.