So, this is my “live from Vancouver” Canada on Rails blog. Registration was predictably busy, but they pumped people through the line quickly. The venue is cramped, and hot. This room is undoubtedly over it’s official fire-regulation limits. People standing around the edges for the first talk, but they brought in more chairs (there was room?
for more chairs) in the break.
DHH gave the keynote speech. You can probably find MULTIPLE versions of one of his slides up on Flickr(warning:NSFW) already. He seems to (at the same time) embrace and resent the term “arrogant”, which has been universally applied to him, and that slide is his response. OTOH, his talk was interesting, and he presented his vision for Rails well.
More to follow…
Next day. Sorry, I ran out of power before I had a chance to blog again. I have a better seat today, since I arrived 35 minutes early, and claimed a seat by a wall plug.
Back to yesterday. Basically good presentations. I felt sorry for Joe O’Brien. He had to follow DHH’s talk, and his presentation was all about the Enterprise. Not the best placement for his talk. Lunch was less than memorable. Note to Nathan. Charge a few more bucks next time, and supply better food.
Kyle Shanks (Mr. RadRails) presented, not to surprisingly, an introduction to RadRails. He is showing signs of actually being an effective speaker, something which was not universally true of the rest of the roster. Since I’ve been using RadRails off and on, there was nothing new there for me, but I’m sure that others were more interested than I.
Then we had back-to-back talks on testing. These were interesting. Dave Astels’ talk about Behavior Driven Development was more about the future of testing Rails applications rSpec looks really interesting. When it’s further along, I may have to consider refactoring our tests to use it. The second talk, given by Steven Baker, was more of a nuts-and-bolts talk about testing in your Rails application today. I find it bizarre that more people don’t do testing. I can’t even imagine developing my applications without tests anymore.
Ok, now we get to the weird part. A talk by David Black. Topic changed at the last minute. IMHO, this was a big mistake. I was interesting in the talk he was originally supposed to give, and completely bored and turned off by the talk he actually gave. Note I said… IMHO. Bumped into an old coworker, who lives and works in Vancouver now, and he LOVED this talk. Like I said. Weird.
From the beginning, I was looking forward to Amy Hoy’s introductory talk about AJAX, and I was not disappointed. Although I learned very little that was new (since we’ve been using AJAX for months), she is a very entertaining and engaging speaker. Having read some of her blogs, I would have expected this, but it does not always follow that good writers are good speakers. Amy is good. Ok, IMHO, Amy is good. That weird friend of mine decided he didn’t like Amy’s talk. I guess there is no accounting for taste. ;-)
Ok, I confess. I skipped the last talk. No need to convince anyone to let me use Rails on my next project, since I already am.
I’ll get to today’s talks later.