Posted by Paolo
Fri, 21 Sep 2007 14:43:00 GMT
Wow, the RailsConfEurope07 is over.
For those of you who are in a hurry I’ll list here my random thoughts:
- The RejectConf has been the funniest event I ever attended!!! (pictures – coverage)
- Ian White’s resource_controller plugin is really cool if you don’t want to mess with REST! You MUST check it out! He should have been accepted as a speaker.
- JRuby is cooler than I ever thought. Definitely worth taking a look at.
- Rails is now officially mainstream.
- The overall experience at the RailsConf was pretty good but not great. The tutorial day was pretty boring, and many speakers weren’t good communicators despite the good content of their speeches.
- I gave a good speech and the room was really full! Thank you all for your support!!!
- The best speech as been “Best Practices” by Marcel Molina Jr and Michael Koziarski.
- I love Dr.Nic.
- Bradley (owner of RailsMachine.com) is a very nice and prepared guy. We’ll evaluate his services soon.
- I missed last year’s _why, Jim and Kathy.
Now let’s dig what we’ve seen and talked about:
David Heinemeier Hansson keynote
He introduced a few new features we’ll be using in Rails 2.0. Nothing that makes me scream, but many many little improvements are coming soon. What I wasn’t really prepared about was his attitude. Very calm and laid back. He took off the “James Dean Jacket” and slowed the pace down. I kind of loved last year’s angry DHH, now everything seems less exciting. He gave us an interesting talk but without emotion in it. I’m wondering if the Rails community will keep doing good without its typical guerrilla attitude. Emotions have driven many Rails developers until now… we’ll see.
Deployment and continuos integration from the trenches by Fernand Galiana
Fair talk about Capistrano and how to dry up your recipe files extracting common behaviors. The only disappointing thing: he didn’t talk about continuous integration!
Screenscraping as changing the legacy world by Jesper Ronn-Jensen and Mads Buus Westmark
These guys put up a talk about their reform plugin. This plugin is capable of screenscraping an html form and gives you an ActiveRecord proxy to that form. This way you can use old legacy applications from your new Rails apps. I don’t like this approach but have to admit thev’ve done an impressive job.
They have been very fair about their plugin telling us it’s not working and not well tested… but… is a speaker supposed to act like this? I mean.. you don’t have to fake if you say “we’re using it in a internal project and it doesn’t work” you don’t make me feel like trying it.
If you want take a look at http://reform.quickanddirty.dk
ThoughtWorks Studios by Ola Bini
Ola Bini, what a guy! He’s a really strange looking person and at first I didn’t like him that much. He reminded me the typical rockstar attitude I hate. Well, I was plain wrong. He gave a good speech about JRuby explaining why it is really worth taking a look at. I used to be a Java programmer and he convinced me.
Great Job Ola. A few things I’ve annotated during his speech you could be interested in:
RubyWorks – Production Stack
A Russian guy working at ToughtWorks Canada (I don’t remember his name) explained the production stack they’re using for JRuby deployment. The presentation content was pretty good but the speaker has been really boring. However, it’s really interesting that a company like ThoughWorks is pushing so hard on JRuby.
Outsourcing to Open Source
Tobias Luetke gave a very interesting talk about his interaction with the community during the development of Shopify.
I wanna start using Liquid ASAP!
Slingshot
Slingshot is a way to let your Rails app work like a desktop app wrapping it in an executable with ruby/rails/mongrel/sqlite3. Pretty clever stuff. You can also sync your local DB with the same app online!
There are probably many other things to say… but nothing that hasn’t been already said somewhere else.
That’s all for now.
Socialize it: 
Posted in Ruby + Rails | Tags RailsConfEurope07 | 1 comment | no trackbacks
Posted by Paolo
Tue, 18 Sep 2007 22:01:00 GMT
I’ve just finished my presentation at RailsConfEurope and probably a bunch of people are taking a look at our blog right now. If you want details about the Widgets plugin I’ve just shown you can read these posts:
We’ll be writing a lot more about it so be sure to subscribe to our RSS feed!
update: we’ve got presentation files online! speech detail at oreillynet.com & presentation files.
What do people say about my talk?
Socialize it:
Posted in Ruby + Rails | Tags RailsConfEurope07 | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Paolo
Tue, 18 Sep 2007 03:48:00 GMT
The first RailsConf day has just finished. A really intense day…
I’ve been attending 2 workshops: “Refactoring Rails” by Trotter Cashion and Jason Hoffman’s “Scaling a Rails Application”.
The tutorials were good, but what drove me crazy was Dave Thomas after-dinner keynote. He’s so amazingly inspiring. He did a speech about “Art and engineering” which remindend me some old Guy Kawasaky talk. There’s no Art without engineering and there shouldn’t be engineering without Art…
Now I’ve got to rewiew my Widgets speech… I’ll tell you all the stories tomorrow. In the meanwhile enjoy a few pictures.
Socialize it:
Posted in Ruby + Rails | Tags RailsConfEurope07 | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Paolo
Mon, 17 Sep 2007 12:28:00 GMT
September 16, Sunday. Our backpacks are ready. We are ready. Michele and I are leaving Padova, Italy to get in Venice and take a flight which we’ll be sending us in Berlin to attend the RailsConf. Last year we where in London attending the past edition and it has been a great experience. We’re expecting even more this time.
Not a great start though. We missed the flight. It was scheduled at 11:15 AM, then it delayed. While we were sipping a hot coffee with a friend the flight has been rescheduled as on time, and we didn’t notice it.
7 hours and 300 more Euro later we’re in Berlin, eating Kangaroo and drinking Beer, wondering what great Rails people will be telling us…
[paolo] btw I’ll tell them something too :-)
Socialize it:
Posted in Ruby + Rails | Tags RailsConfEurope07 | 3 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Paolo
Fri, 14 Sep 2007 01:45:00 GMT
As you probably know we’re doing a cool rails workshop in about 2 weeks.
We’ve really packed up a lot of information in that workshop and
in order to be able to do everything in a single day we need our students to waste no time.
What we discovered in past workshops is that we could speed up the pace if only our students could easily remember syntax or code fragments. Of course that’s not possible, we cannot ask them to remember by memory a hundred methods a day.
They need a way to cut and paste snippets of code whenever they want to. They need a quick reference without the hassle of asking the teacher “excuse me, can you get back to that slide? I don’t remember how to…”
That’s why we set up a support site they’ll be browsing during the workshop. When they need to do something we already explained, they’ll just browse the right section and they’ll find all the relevant information to complete their task.
This website (available only to workshop students) is built with Radiant and it’s pretty simple. It contains a list of pages (one for each covered topic) we’ll walk trough during the workshop, and there’s a nice sidebar with links to those pages.
What’s the problem in it? Students like to skip forward pages. They browse this support site and start reading advanced topics without having mastered the basics concepts. This has proven to be a waste of time.
We need them to listen to us.
In order to keep them focused on the right page we decided to hide/publish pages during the workshop. This way they can only see what’s important in a given moment (and of course what we’ve done before).
So what? Well.. I get bored pretty quickly :-) I didn’t like to go inside each page’s detail in order to publish or hide it. Imagine when I want to start over and need to hide every page… It’s a very tedious task.
Solution? In a few minutes I set up a Radiant extension which provides a new page, listing all the nodes in my Radiant site. From this page I can quickly publish/hide contents during my workshops!
How does it look like?
How can you install it?
Enter your radiant site root folder and do:
$> cd vendor/extensions
then download the extension with:
$> svn co svn://svn.seesaw.it/radiant_extensions/trunk/quick_publish quick_publish
Now restart your webrick/mongrel and you’re all set!
I don’t know if that’s useful if you’re not running workshops like I am, but, who knows… Enjoy!
Socialize it:
Posted in Ruby + Rails | Tags extension, radiant, railsworkshop | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Paolo
Thu, 13 Sep 2007 03:16:00 GMT
Well, not a great post today but I wanted to report a great video I discovered trough www.presentationzen.com. I hearthly share its content so… go on!
I have a bad relationship with emails. It’s not that I don’t like them but I think that checking the inbox too often is a compulsive action, not a necessity.
I hate those email clients which notify me when a new mail arrives. It’s distracting… it’s totally unproductive… I mean, the power of emails is that you can receive them when you’re offline or busy and you can read them when you want to. I said WHEN YOU WANT TO.
Whenever I find myself hitting F5 on Gmail I feel like a dog waiting for a cookie. And even when people are not compulsively checking their inboxes… they’re probably scanning their past messages in order to organize their days.
Scanning messages over and over again. Not a good practice if you want to get things done.
Are email clients becoming our new to-do managers? Should we spend so much time on our email inbox? Should our lives be email driven?
On this subject Merlin Mann gave us a great presentation inlined here:
