RailsToItaly report
Posted by Paolo Mon, 29 Oct 2007 14:32:00 GMT
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| From RailsToItaly07 |
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 Mearelli – Capistrano 2 – beyond hassle free deployment
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.
Hi Paolo, thanks for the write up. I said for first during the speech that my speech was taken from various sources (I cited Getting Real and, of course, the Agile manifesto, directly pasted in my slides), but my point was totally different, it wasn’t about how to “improve” the development process or using XP or SCRUM or whatever for having better products, but how to use (some of, I would say less than a half) them to increase drastically a team’s productivity. I’m sorry you didn’t get the sense of my speech, probably I’m not a good speaker or I wasn’t clear enough, but honestly I have no clue how you could go that far from the sense of what I actually said, english speakers got it … :) I actually gave as much advice as I could on how to be productive in Rails, my speech was about it – probably I just failed to make people understand the whole point. I didn’t say anything about the fact you trained the team for 2 reasons: 1) they’re not Zooppa team anymore 2) On 3 developers you trained just 1 was actually trained, other 2 were pretty clueless :) (of course, this is far from being your fault in any way, it’s not possible to teach to someone who doesn’t want to learn)