Hi guys, we’re receiving many emails regarding our beloved Widgets plugin. We’re happy to receive them but we’d like to keep the discussion open, because so far it’s been like a one-to-many chat.
That’s why we just opened a Google Group about it. You can subscribe and start asking questions, share ideas about new widgets and give us feedback.
This just to let you know our next RailsWorkshop will be held in Rome on December 12, 2007. Among different available places we’ve chosen the Polo Didattico which seems the best solutions for our needs.
Very well served by public transportation, large and comfortable room with projector, dashboard, large desks and broadband internet connection for everyone!
What are you waiting for? You can subscribe and find out more info at www.railsworkshop.it!
I just got back from RailsToItaly, the first italian conference about Ruby on Rails. It’s been a good conference, and the staff did a great job given that this is the first time they organize something like this.
The conference, with about 80 attendees, wasn’t too big. I see this as a big pro. It was very informal and you could talk freely with the speakers without encountering that ‘rock star’ attitude of the european RailsConf.
So, what did I see?
Zed Shaw – Keynote: The ethic programmer
Zed Shaw is a great speaker, It’s been a pleasure to meet him. In his talk he explained why most code doesn’t communicate well its intentions and how programmers should behave in order to be good citizens in their development environment.
The great thing was his laptop didn’t work well with the projector so he gave his speech without slideshow, and he did a great job indeed. This should let you understand how prepared and confident he was about the topic. Worth paying for.
James Cox – Scaling your app
James Cox has been another unexpected surprise. Very skilled and laid back guy, very easy to get along with. He gave us a presentation on scalability techniques. Maybe I just wanted a few more examples.. but maybe I’m too hungry.
Desi Mc Adam – DevChix + RESTful apps
Desi did a fair job and it’s been nice to have a chick speaking at the conference. She explained her effort behind devchix.com and gave a basic explanation of the REST achitecture in Rails. Maybe I’m too picky but she said nothing you can’t already find in the rails doc or in old posts online. Her speech has probably been good for beginners.
Nicholas Wieland – The Zooppa experience
Nicholas explained us how Rails let him set up zooppa.com in 40 days and 3 programmers involved. His presentation resembled the book “extreme programming: embrace change”, nothing less, nothing more. He’s a nice guy but didn’t give concrete advices to help other people achieve the same goals. Grrrrr… and he forgot to mention I trained his team.
Just one suggestion: next time show us at least one screenshot of the application you built!
Thomas Fuchs – script.aculo.us 2.0
Well, Thomas needs no introduction, everybody know how smart he is. He’s shown new features that will be available in forthcoming Scrip.aculo.us 2.0. If you wanna know more, just check out his presentation material. Side note: I loved his slideshow! gotta checkout the font: kofler.dot.at/c64/!
Paolo Donà – Rails Widgets
That’s me, what can I say? I feel my presentation went pretty well, with many questions and suggestions at the end. Maybe I was just a bit tired, due to my Japan trip. A few questions from early widgets users made me think I need to set up a better web page for it… and maybe a mailing list. We’ll go for it, just let me recover from the jet lag… or maybe I’ll let Chuky do it!
You can find my slideshow here. I don’t think it’s very interesting without me speaking along with it (damn Kawasaki style).. but.. maybe you just want to see my monkey!
Ettore Berardi – Search engines and Rails
Ettore gave a nice speech comparing different search engines and their use with Rails. This is a hard topic and it’s not easy task to explain everything in just half an hour. It’s clear that he’s tried them all and he’s confident with them. Even if he hasn’t put jokes in his presentation, it was funny enough… just reading a few plugin names made me roll on the floor laughing!
David Heinemeier Hansson – Remote Q&A
Nothing to say. Nice to have him remotely here, he’s always the rock star we all love and talking with him is interesting. as usual.
Eyal Oren – Semantic Web + ActiveRDF
Eyal made one of the most appreciated talks. He’s a very laid back and knowledgeable guy. I never dug into semantic web before and he made me understand the topic keeping my attention up for the whole speech. Very interesting the discussion after the talk. What would happen if all web data were really interrelated/connected/searchable? What if someone could query the web with something like “tell me all female people against George Bush”? This topic raises questions about our privacy and the power of owning informations rather than mere technical implementation details.
Lisa Todd – Rails Testing with RSpec
Wow, two girls speaking at the same conference! This is a blessing! Beside that, the speech was interesting, well prepared and the topic surely hot.
Just one note: I couldn’t read the code very well on the screen… but it’s an issue many presenters had at this conference. Next time bigger projector please (the font size wasn’t too small).
Ben Scofield – Unleashing the power of Blocks and Procs
I liked Ben talk because many ruby novices have troubles understanding blocks&procs. Pretty clear explanation. He even mentioned my Widgets effort during his speech… what a pleasure! Keep the good job Ben!
Clive Vassel – Model driven development with Hobo and Rails
I’m sorry to say that, but I didn’t like Clive ’s talk at all. I don’t want to be one of those guys who say everything’s fine when it is not. Clive’s speech was boring and didn’t give clear advices or informations. It wasn’t even inspirational. The slideshow was filled with words and statements and he kept reading them like a book. The problem is that attendees could read much faster than he could speak, so basically nobody listened to him. Clive don’t take it personally, I could feel you’re pretty good at what you’re doing, but as a speaker you’ve got to improve a lot (try to read made to stick, it helped me).
Luca is a friend so my comments wouldn’t probably be fair. He gave a very pratical and interesting speech about Capistrano 2 and useful techniques to ease your deployments. You can find out examples and the slide show here.
Conclusions
The conference has been worth the money. I sadly couldn’t see all the presentations and I’m sorry I missed Peter Amstrong speech about Rails and Flex2. I bet it has been interesting.
I want to spend a word for the staff that’s been great, you know guys I owe you a beer.
Next year I’ll be there again. For sure.
Btw, there is some magic happening here, let’s see:
Where is the question mark image taken from? It’s automatically copied into your public/images/widgets folder during plugin installation!
Where is the javascript file that handles everything taken from? It’s automatically copied into your public/javascripts/widgets folder during installation, and you don’t even need to include it with javascript_include_tag because I’ve hacked it for you!
Where’s the CSS? It’s automagically inlined in your HTML, you can customize it of course.
It’s an early stage release so please report any bug you will find.
NB: As I said some code gets executed on plugin installation so please install with script/plugin install, just unpacking the plugin under vendor/plugins doesn’t work as expected (you’ll miss necessary images and javascripts).
RailsToItaly in Pisa, oct 26/27 is going to be the the first international conference held in Italy about RubyOnRails. It seems these guys succeeded where others have failed (the highly anticipated ItalyOnRails 2006 conference never happened in fact).
The preliminay program is very juicy and I’m very happy to tell you we’ve been accepted with our Rails Widgets talk.
Another edition of our beloved RailsWorkshop is over. What can I say? Once again it’s been a great experience! We met very passionate people willing to learn every single detail about Ruby and Rails, and it’s been a pleasure seeing them make excellent progresses with it throughout the day!
We introduced something new this time: a support site that can be browsed while listening and compendious cards with pratical steps to follow in order to complete our exercises.
These tools can dramatically speed up the pace of the workshop giving attendees the basic info they need to see the stuff work.
