Rails Conf Day One Impressions

I ended up with a major migraine yesterday towards the end of David Black’s talk so I didn’t get a chance to finish up the post. Don’t worry I probably won’t.

My overall impression of the pre conference tutorials was that they were aimed at beginning users. If you have background in any of the topics then you might get a little value but 4 hours is a high price to pay for a little value.

I was originally critical of the first part of Jason Hoffman’s talk but last night I met some guys that really liked it. I guess it depends on what information you need. As a side note of all the talks yesterday Jason’s is a favorite. You can download the slides from his blog. If you have to scale any kind of web application, not just Rails, download and look through his slides. There is information in there that would cost you a small fortune to research.

We had time to chat with other developers from Utah last night. There are a decent number of guys in Utah working in either Ruby or Rails or both. We spent a few minutes talking about user groups and how they are and aren’t successful. We talked a bit about the Mountain West conference – mainly Chad Fowler’s talk. I’ll post about that in a minute. It was interesting to note that Carl Youngblood has moved to Surgeworks. He is the guy that gave Bayesian networks talk at the Mountain West Ruby conference.

As a side note Portland offers some nice restaurants. We had some really good seafood last night. River City Bikes is a pretty sweet bike shop and gave me the opportunity to try out a Calfee which is just an awesome bike.

More from jbasdf

• A copy of ApplicationController has been removed from the module tree but is still active! And can’t dup NilClass
• How New Carpet and Rattlesnake turned me into a Consultant or What the Hell Happened?
• Rails Conf Intro from Chad Fowler and Some Stuff from the Mountain West Ruby Conference
• Ruby on Rails i18n with the Rails I18n Textmate bundle
• Mac OSX and the Samsung ML1740 on a network