RailsConf 2006: Day 1
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.