© 2008 James Duncan Davidson
This RailsConf has been very special for me for two reasons: it was the first time I joined this event, and because I was invited as speaker.
Berlin is a quite beautiful city, the ideal context for this kind of events, because its new breed in web and marketing entrepreneurialism. Try to go around in the north-east side, there is an huge amount of design firms and Starbucks shops full of creative people. Amazing.
The conference was full of talented developers, I met a lot of them, it's always inspiring to talk with people like them.
The speechs
Sep, 02
Ben Scofield has illustrated how to maintain a Rails application, through RESTful plugins, explaining why its the convenient choose in despite of gems, engines, and libs. Honestly, not so much interesting, I had expected something better by Ben.
Jonathan Weiss and Mathias Meyer talked about deploying solutions and monitoring for Rails. It was a nice overview, but, unfortunately, not so exhaustive, due to the speech duration.
Core Team panel: it was a friendly chat with three members of the Rails core team. They talked about the last year on Rails and about the future of the framework.
Sep, 03
David Heinemeier Hansson has talked about how to deal with legacy software. Very inspiring.
Michael Bleigh and Chris Selmer has explained how to enhance the user experience using javascript, and how get rid of it. Interesting.
Stefan Kaes, David Anderson and Larry Baltz, they gave an overview about their CRM product. Too detailed.
Alex MacCaw and Stuart Eccles presented their fantastic gem for realtime applications. They wrote also a Rails plugin to allow server pushing. Amazing!
Nick Sieger has introduced himself and his recent work on ActiveRecord connection pooling.
Jeremy Kemper in his speech about scaling web applications, has shared a lot of technical tips he used to speed-up Basecamp at 37signals. Priceless.
Sep, 04
David Black talked about the Ruby runtimes, language changes and adoption. Nice collective hacking session.
Christian Lupp is a designer and he showed us how Rails is a good prototyping tool.
Rany Keddo introduced a lot of Rails plugins for backgrounding time expensive tasks, including its solutions.
Sven Fuchs leads the Rails i18n team, he talked about the history of the i18n support in Rails, why they choose to create this group and about the work we are doing (me included) on the upcoming Rails 2.2. Interesting.
My speech
My speech has followed the Sven's one, it was concerned with the same argument: I presented to the big attendee Click to Globalize.
As you probably know, it's a Rails plugin, which extends the first version of Globalize, and allow to translate your page in-place.
The guys was attended my presentation, has appreciated how my software is focused on its goal and leaves out all the bloated stuff.
The rest
I spent the rest of the week visiting Berlin. Sven guided me in the east-side and the Mitte, and let me appreciate a wonderful place. Thanks man!
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Noteworthy was the dinner with David Black at the Japanese restaurant, just near the hotel.
Very nice experience. I hope to meet all of you, the next year.
