RailsConf 2006 Report 5 – 8:30 PM CDT

My final RailsConf summary post of the day...but check back in for updates on Saturday's goings-on. And if you get a chance, listen in on Friday's podcast.

In a session titled "Overcoming Scaffolding Addition", web developer Amy Hoy shared her best practices and valuable experience working with Rails beyond the auto-generated scaffolding that newbie Rails developers rely upon for their web presentation needs. Leveraging partials, helper methods and other Rails internals, complete with clear code samples accompanying the concepts, helped to further educate those developers ready to take Rails apps to the next level.

An entertaining, informative talk presented by Geoffrey Grosenbach (with whom I had the pleasure of interviewing a few weeks ago for this Dr. Dobb's podcast) about Rails Deployment on Shared Hosts. He recommended to keep shared applications small due to contention with other shared customers server resource demands.

Thoughtworks' Chief Scientist Martin Fowler admitted in his keynote that he never even used Ruby on Rails, but was an avid Ruby user. He compared Active Record to other patterns he worked with in his past and questioned its usefulness in an enterprise setting but added that he had never seen an active record implementation as powerful and easy to use as the one developed for Ruby on Rails. He also applauded Rails drive toward simplicity and proposed that the influence Rails has had over other frameworks, with these alternatives asking how they can make their frameworks as easy and uncluttered to use as Rails. Martin emphasized that "Quick doesn't have to be dirty."

Lastly, keynote speaker and dot com success story Paul Graham closed the evening with his talk on "The Power of the Marginal". I really enjoy Paul's intelligent, well prepared speeches and this was yet another one of Paul's priceless deliveries. He masterfully weaved the genesis of Apple Computer, the US Civil War, the glut of Java books, with truisms like "Don't learn things from people who are bad at them." and "If you're not good at anything yet, consider working on something that no one else is good at yet either," and "Work on things that can steal prestige from eminence," and "You're on the right track when people complain you're unqualified and working on things that are inappropriate. So be inappropriate!"

These and other such comments placed the RailsConf attendees into a festive mood. Speaking of which, it's time to unwind after a long yet informantive day while listening to Why The Lucky Stiff and his band The Thirsty Cups live performance in the background.

Posted at 08:42 PM  Permalink

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