RailsConf 2009 May 28 2009

Better late than never eh? Three weeks after the end of RailsConf, I thought I’d write a wrap-up post. Me and my wife turned the trip over to Vegas into a much needed holiday - we were out there four days before the conference began, and had a few more days left in Vegas after it ended too. Overall we had a great time, although I can’t say that it was a particularly relaxing break - Vegas tends to leave you more tired than when you arrived! In this post though I’ll focus on my thoughts of the conference itself.

Day 0: The Tutorials

I only attended the morning tutorial on the Monday sessions, as I was meeting with Mike in the afternoon. However, the jQuery on Rails session I attended in the morning was very good. It was a nice mix of things I knew (but good to run through again to reaffirm that knowledge), as well as some cool bits I hadn’t yet come across. It was very technical which was great, and while it was more of a jQuery focused session, rather than specific jQuery on Rails, that was fine by me as I was hoping for a real focus on the framework and it’s great features. This session didn’t disappoint, and Yehuda and Andy did very well given it was the first session, and there were a few technical challenges to overcome (namely, lack of power strips and issues with the wifi).

Day 1

Keynote: I enjoyed the keynote, but was also left a little disappointed by it in the end. It was well delivered, and had a good message, however some of the Rails 3 concepts touched on didn’t have very much detail with them (understandable, given the state of a lot of the Rails 3 features) - but in a few cases it may have been better to have left them out, rather than bringing them up and creating more questions than the keynote answered. Specifically, how some of the newer features would deal with legacy compatibility, and things like supporting HTML5 data attributes and how older browsers like IE6 might deal with that, or what could be done to support those browsers when they don’t support more modern features. I get that I could just stick with earlier versions of Rails, but it’d be a shame if the fancy new version (with plenty of other new features that would be useful regardless of which browsers you’re targeting) doesn’t work at all because of a few things that just won’t work on browsers older than three or four years old.

On the whole though, it was at least a thought provoking opening to the conference.

GitHub Panel: this session was excellent. The GitHub guys gave off a great vibe the entire time - it was fun, informative, and enjoyable. It’s obvious they are really doing something they enjoy, and they’ve built it all themselves from the ground up. Was great to see them answer a lot of questions about GitHub, and about starting up a business like GitHub; it was really very interesting.

Behind Call of Duty: World at War: this talk was a little disappointing. I expected a lot more technical detail, and was actually hoping for a focus on how they handled stuff like stats tracking, aggregating stats from millions of consoles into their community portal. Instead the talk seemed a little bit underwhelming.

Writing Modular Applications: I know this talk was a stand-in replacement at the last minute for something else, but it was an inspired choice. Fairly high level, but extremely thought provoking, it was a great 40 minutes. Jim himself said the title was a bit inaccurate, but it was interesting to see the topics he spoke about presented in the specific way he did - an almost out of context look at decoupling of code. Hard to explain, but it’s well worth trying to find video or slides for this one.

Smacking Git Around: I think on reflection, this was my favourite talk of the entire conference. Scott’s energy and enthusiasm for Git is incredible, and his talk was well delivered, had a decent dose of humour, but above all, was incredibly useful. I think it was actually about three or four hours worth of Git tips and tricks delivered in just 40 minutes, and it was brilliant. The slides are online, and for someone that’s got the Git basics down, but wants a run down of some of the more interesting tricks for Git, it’s very useful.

Scaling Rails: lastly on the first day, this talk from the guys at Phusion was a funny end to the day. A bit light on technical details, it was still entertaining, and it was a must see if only for the great demo of Rubystein 3D, a basic game they wrote in Ruby, borrowing heavily from Wolfenstein, and with a lot of “cameos” from members of the community. Funny stuff.

Day 2

Rails Metal, Rack and Sinatra: really interesting session from Adam Wiggins of Heroku, touching on a few of the more interesting aspects of Rack, and specifically what Rack allows us to do - from Rails Metal, through to the embedding of Sinatra apps within Rails apps. Very cool stuff, interesting from start to finish.

Rails 3: Step Off of the Golden Path: another interesting one, delving into some of the Rails 3 stuff in more detail than the keynote did. It’s still a little tricky to get into too much detail simply because so much stuff within Rails 3 is open to change, or not yet finished, but Matt did a good job here of bringing together some of the more interesting bits, specifically in and around the options you will have for alternatives to the norm when building a Rails app (testing, JavaScript libraries etc) and how Rails 3 makes using these alternatives easier.

What Makes Ruby Go: An Implementation Primer: this I think was my second favourite talk after the Git one - two guys who really know the topic (Charles Nutter and Evan Phoenix, who work on JRuby and Rubinius respectively) chatting over some technical Ruby stuff, including specific sneaky performance issues. Very interesting, shame it was only 50 minutes really.

Heroku Q&A: I was interested in Heroku already before this talk, so was pleased to get the opportunity to watch the guys behind it demo the service, and take questions. They started with the basics, getting started with Heroku and hosting basic apps, before answering some questions on more advanced stuff and demoing a few other bits. Was good to watch to get a better idea of how Heroku works, and how to use it.

Day 3

Building A Video Portal In Rails: this was a solid talk, if a little disappointing. I expected a talk on the more interesting technical challenges facing a video portal, specifically transcoding. Unfortunately, the particular solution being presented outsourced the video storage, transcoding and distribution to a third party platform, meaning that the talk was relegated to simply speaking about the integration. I was definitely hoping for more information on the technical side of running a site like that.

Skipped the next session and instead me and Mike went to LarkConf. To quote the always awesome Jon Larkowski who arranged it, LarkConf is “the premiere ad hoc coffee shop networking un-conference opportunity”. And it was awesome. Was cool to meet Jon, as well as a couple of the guys behind Exceptional, and the owner/founder of CafeCourses. Great stuff, and the most fun I had networking all week.

Russian Doll Pattern: Mountable Apps in Rails 3: this talk was a little underwhelming. Like the opening keynote, it left me with more questions than it answered, and while it went into a lot more detail than the keynote did, there was definitely some mixed messages coming across. It was unfortunate, but Drupal was mentioned rather a lot, and I think that confused a lot of the participants - it wasn’t entirely clear on the purpose of mountable apps, and it probably would have been better to make clear the relation this work obviously has to merb-slices. However, there were still some interesting tidbits of information in the talk, and it was obvious a lot of the confusion was down to most of these things still being up in the air, as Rails 3 is still a long way away.

Closing Keynote: This was a Q&A session with some of the Rails Core guys, and ranged from being interesting, to a little bit boring. It was a good way to end the conference, but obviously the content relied entirely on the quality of the questions. There was some great questions (things like the process for having patches dealt with by the Core team, with Koz pointing out that they are humans too, and sometimes make mistakes), to more boring questions. There was also the odd funny one (such as Obie asking “are you guys letting Yehuda turn Rails 3 into Drupal?”, which coming right after the Russian Doll talk, was forefront on a lot of peoples minds still). Overall, there were some interesting things to take away from the session, and it was a solid way to finish up.

Overall

On the whole, I immensely enjoyed RailsConf 2009. It was my first conference, and it was a good mixture of some fun networking, good sessions, and thanks to the location, made for a great break away too. My only real complaints about the conference itself is that there were a few weak sessions in there, and I definitely would have liked to have seen more technical content. While I understand that given the timeslots, there isn’t always time to do too much low level content, I do wonder whether a separate track on a slightly different schedule (one session to every two on other tracks, for example) could have held some more engaging talks on lower level ideas and concepts. Kind of a mix between the 40 minute talks, and the tutorial sessions held on the Monday. However, the Git talk and the Ruby implementation session were absolutely brilliant, and contained a great deal of useful information and content, packed into one session.

I’ll be interested to see where RailsConf takes place next year, but either way I definitely enjoyed the conference atmosphere, and meeting people, and will be thinking of attending a few other upcoming conferences, especially ones that have a more technical focus.