RailsConf Europe Report Day1

Paolo — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 01:00:00 -0500

We just got back from RailsConf Europe in London.. we’re tired but happy and excited. What is really great about attending this kind of meetings is the motivation and stimuli you get from all the great guys there.

We’ve finally seen all of our heroes at work and had the possibility to talk and share ideas with them… I’m wondering what we could ask more…

We had also a good Italian presence there with 2 speakers, it’s a pleasure to introduce our friends Luca Mearelli and Ugo Cei.

For a brief showcase of the talks we attended just keep reading…

David Heinemeier Hansson: ActiveResource and SimplyHelpful

David is surprisingly a very very good presenter. He came in without a keynote presentation ready… it just wrote a bunch of pages with textmate and did the talk with that. It turns out that has been really amazing! Good points, good style… his mastery and vision about how web development should be is impressing. Now I’ve figured out why he’s so popular and so “leader” in the rails community.

The tack was about ActiveResources, a new way to intend REST web-services and the brand new SimplyHelpful plugin that will get some order in rails view. You’ll be able to do things like:

<% div_for(person)  # convention for generating div ids
   render(:partial => @people) # convention for partial names
%>

This will add even more conventions on how people do things in Rails, giving you the freedom to think about higher targets. Nothing spectuacular yet ‘per-se’ but how Rails is using its building blocks to provide high level funcionalities is just impressive. We hope to see how this is evolving after release 1.2.

Kathy Sierra: creating passionate users

Kathy has a strong background in game development and gave us the best presentation I ever seen! She wonderfully explained us how to turn your “sucker” product into a better percieved one and deep digged the reasons that make users passionate or not about a product. Brain vs Mind, being provocative, read the f. manual, the learning path… she’s been so smart we can just love her work! I thing everyone interested in developing products should subribe to her blog.

Her talk also convinced me to read these books:

Jamis Buck: Capistrano

Jamis from 37Signals entertained us with a brief talk about Capistrano 1.2 and the new shell feature. For sure a nice tool to play with but nothing so new or revolutionary to drive the crowd crazy.

Marcel Molina Jr: RJS reuse

Marcel (he’s from 37Signals too) gave us a simple but smart presentation about how we should try to reuse RJS fragments. The technique explained is not rocket science but seeing the chain orf thougts that drove him to that solution has been heplful. You just put your shared RJS methods in helpers and add it to a page object like:

page << replace_xxx(@article)

This way you won’t mix your page code with custom extensions and will made your methods available on views.

link_to_remote_function(replace_xxx(@article))

Nice to see that guy at work.

David Black: Rails & Databases

David Black is famous for running RubyCentral and organizing all these great conferences we’re attending. Is commitment to Ruby communities improvement is impressive, and he’s the man you have to talk with if you want to organize something in your country. I talked with him… so you can imagine we’re trying to organize something cool in Italy…

The speech has been an interesting overview of the approach Rails is using on different areas such database integration, controllers, views, pointing out differences and noncoherent things we should be aware of.

Thomas Fuchs: Javascript Testing

Thomas is the scriptaculous author, a smart guy who shown his way to UnitTest Javascripts. Great talk but I’m wondering how many people really need to unit test their js. Not all of us are scriptaculous developers…

Panel Discussion Rails Core Team

At the end of the day the rails core team answered attendants questions and DHH did a mini talk about those people who feel entitled to talk bad about rails even not contributing at all. He’s right there has been a lot of discussion about those people who felt offended by the rails incident (routing bug) a few weeks a go… His way to say what he thinks is somtimes rude and not polite, but otherwise he couldn’t have gotten the “rock star” status he has. For sure his strong points will make some people go away but will keep other stay even more firmly. Here a piece of code he shown and made me laugh:

Vendoritis.symptoms = %w[Entitlement Indignation]
Vendoritis.tratments = [
  Range('Fuck You'..'Yes Massa')
  Range('Sarcasm'..'Umor')]

That’s it for the 1st day. Doesn’t sound like we had a great time? Soon we’ll report the 2nd one too… keep in touch!

Finally we've got it!

Michele — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 10:35:00 -0500

Against all odds and ‘fish & chips’ we are comfortably sit infront of David Heinemeier Hansson, attending the first european RailsConf

:-O

Amazing!!

GMail for your domain opens for testing

Paolo — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 11:38:00 -0500

It seems that the long awaited GMail for your domain has opened to the public for testing pourposes. If you want to manage all your domain’s addresses via GMail now you can ask for an account.

This colud solve the hassle of managing and mantaining emails on your servers, freeing you from wasting time on stuff that’s not your core business.

You can imagine how important is this for small startups that need to stay focused and be higly productive all the time.

Just go here and share your thoughts about it.

Paul Graham's RailsConf Keynote

Paolo — Tue, 18 Jul 2006 11:05:49 -0500

Being a startup and being in touch with other startups too, I know our readers could be interested in this Paul Graham’s RailsConf 2006 Keynote.

Check it out, have fun and feel free to drop your comments here.

Google Earth goes linux

Michele — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 11:27:00 -0500

Amazing! Google has released version 4 of his famous 3D view application: many improvements on UI, textured buildings, better internationalization and a native linux version available for download. Yes, it’s still in beta state, but who’s not?

Ruby@JUGPadova has been a big success!

Paolo — Wed, 24 May 2006 19:34:08 -0500

Hey guys, Paolo and Jacopo held a speech at the last JUG Padova meeting. I can proudly say it has been a big big success!

You can find our photostream here.

We actually love to digg things in public and really seems attendants appreciated our effort. It’s not the first time we’re going public but this event has been somehow special. It gathered more people, more interest, more ideas.

I want to personally thank ChiaroScuro who had enough patience to not kill me during our crazy and tiring weekend.

Well, I guess we’ll repeat this meeting somewere else someday… so stay tuned!

Apple: Effective Marketing

Paolo — Sun, 07 May 2006 02:07:00 -0500

Have you seen the recent Apple ads? Apple has always been really good on promoting the brand, and Steve Jobs has always been a good speaker, but those ads are really driving me crazy. I’ll hardly stop laughing. Check out the “Restarting” one, it’s awesome. They surely know where to point their knife…