So RailsConf Europe is over, and it was great. There is a slight possibility I may of overdone it, a bit too much burning the candle at both ends but, hey it is the weekend now!!
I had originally intended to post from inside the conference. However, the fact that I couldn’t get the wifi to work in the main auditorium kind of scuppered that. My next plan was to write up anything useful at the end of the day. However, beer scuppered that. So I then gave up on that and decided to post on Friday evening after the event. So, here I am Saturday morning grabbing a full english in the pub over the road from my house – I love it when a plan comes together!!!
So what where the highlights, or to be more accurate, my highlights. Well, running chronologically the pre-conference do put on by PizzaOnRails (sponsored by Cominded, a startup based here in London, which I’m part of) was great (not that I’m at all biased). Don’t take my word for it though you can check out the pictures on Flickr (where else!!).
Onto the actual conference, from a technical perspective the talks that really stood out to me were these:
1) David Heinemeier Hanson – Keynote. David gave a good overview of SimplyRestful and SimplyHelpful as he outlines in his post Decompressing RailsConf Europe. Although it has to be said that the final installment of David’s talk (well it was more of a rant by then really) was by far the most entertaining. The podcast will be available soon and is well worth a listen.
2) Dan Webb – Unobtrusive Javascript. This is something we should all be doing, so go get the plugin and get started.
3) Why The Lucky Stiff – Keynote. Why’s talk was great (as I think we all expected), some good tips on using the “splat” operator (*) and the Sandbox stuff looks very interesting too.
4) Marcel Molina – Sharing RJS. Marcel’s talk was interesting in a couple of ways, the most obvious being the neat trick he outlined for sharing rjs among your views and controllers. Basically the idea is to wrap the rjs in a helper using update_page. This returns javascript which can be included in controllers using “page <<” construct as so:
The helper
module CommentsHelper
def replace_comment(comment)
update_page do |page|
page[comment].replace :partial => comment
end
end
end
Use in a controller
def update
@comment.update_attributes(params[:comment])
render :update do |page|
page << replace_comment(@comment)
end
end
And in a view
<%= link_to_function "Update", replace_comment(comment) %>
Cool. The other reason the talk was interesting was the way he outlined the path to his solution and why he wasn’t happy with the initial (and more obvious) solutions to the reuse issue.
5) Till Volmer – Localization of Rails Applications. There is a live blog of this talk from the Copenhagen Ruby Brigade
6) Dominic Mitchell – Unicode on Rails
. Another talk outlining use of UTF-8 in Rails, or more specifically the problems with it. Outlined was the UnicodeHacks plugin.
Off the purely technical track, which to be honest David’s rant was too (that will no doubt be everywhere soon anyway), there were two talks that really stood out for me.
1) Cathy Sierra – Creating Passionate Users. There is a live blog of this presentation. For me this was perhaps the highlight of the conference. Cathy was interesting, funny and as far as I am concerned hit the nail square on the head. Her points on the hi-res experience and the flow state of mind were all very insightful and will provide a great basis for further investigation on the topics. Much of what she talked about is available on her blog so go read. She also brought my attention to the following three books (well the games one isn’t the LeBlanc essay she mentioned but I found it while looking for that) which are currently being packed and shipped for me by the lovely people at Amazon.
2) Dave Thomas – Keynote. Well, this was a great speech from Dave Thomas. Inspiring, insightful and greeted with a standing ovation. I agree with so much of what he said, especially about FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) or as I like to call it the ‘Fear Economy’. I won’t do him the dis-service of attempting to summarize his points here though, wait for the podcast, download, listen and absorb.
I will borrow this image from his talk though, this was Dave’s suggestion for a new Rails logo:
Wondering why? Check out DHH’s rant……..
So there we are all in all a great experience. Thanks to all the speakers, Ruby Central and Skills Matter for all their hard work and of course DHH for Rails. See you at the next one (or the German one, or the Italian one……..)
Oh and don’t forget to check out the full Flickr stream.
