Luca Guidi

© 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!
. 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.

Subsonica is one of my favourite band. It's a Torino based pop electronic quintet, that just turned 10 years of activity.

They just posted a video of their recent dig in Rome. I was there, near the stage. Great experience!!

In the last week-end I was at the Pop Art! exposition.

More than 50 artists (including Warhol, Lichtenstein and Rauschenberg) 100 works, from 1956 and 1968, for trace the history of the pop art movement.

Roberto Manicardi © 2007

The conference

It was a great conference, with more than 1200+ people, 24 talks, distributed in 5 parallels sessions:

• Core Java, what's hot
• Next generation Web
• Java enterprise
• Open Source
• (Plus)

Impressions

The first impression was.. Wow!! The college was full of students, developers, managers, sponsors and whatever.. Surely, the tons of mails has worked.

My speech was about JRuby and DSLs. I talked of the theory of the Domain Specific Language with some Ruby examples.

Of course, I'm proud to be a speaker of the biggest italian IT conference, but it was hard to talk to an audience made up, for an half, of people that never worked, and for the 95% never heard about Ruby and Rails. Anyway, I received positive feedbacks, and a lot of guys asked to me and Paolo Donà (speaker of the following talk) some questions about the language and the framework.
You can find my presentation on my slideshare page.

Thanks

Thanks to all guys. See you at the next event.

Everything is ready for the Rome JavaDay 2007: 4 parallel sessions, 24 talks and more than 1000+ subscripters.
See you there.

© 2007 Thomas Fuchs

Rails To Italy was an interesting event, the first one organized by the italian rails community. It was great experience, expecially because it was my first time in a conference, as speaker, of course. I'm receiving a lot of mail about my speech a ton of guy are interested about the plugin I have presented.

Luca Guidi

My talk was about a plugin that I have realized as extension of Globalize.
i18n is an annoyng issue, because of you have to deal with a lot of problems regarding different people from different countries. Globalize try to make easier those problems, but not enough.
Click To Globalize try to make things more easy: you can translate your views in place!!.
You can find it into the 23 Labs repository: [Click To Globalize].

David Heinemeier Hansson

A Q&A videoconf session with the Rails creator.

Zed Shaw

This guy is the creator of Mongrel, he talked about the programmer ethic and about the communication of a team. Of course he has exalted Ruby as self-speaking language, it's ideal for DSLs and a better communication.

James Cox

This talk was very interesting, it was about Rails scalability. It's the hot topic of the community. He gave a lot of tips and snippets to improve the prerformances of a Rails application.

Desi McAdam

She's the founder of DevChix a foundation which promotes and encourages girls into the programmin world. She talked about her association and REST design in Rails.

Nicholas Wieland

Lead developer of Zooppa, a user-created advertising platform, born in 40 days. They haven't had analysis or UML diagrams, just few jpg mocks.
I think it's a great example of agile and pragmatic programming: no over-engineering stuff, just code it!!

Thomas Fuchs

This guy is a myth!! I love his works and his developing style!! He is the creator of script.aculo.us, member of Prototype and of the Rails core team.
He showed a 2.0 Preview of his framework: plugins, console, rewriting, performances, effects reusability and concatenation!!

Paolo Donà

He is a showman, nice presentation of his widgets plugin.

Ettore Berardi

A quick comparision of: Ferret, Sphinx and Solr from real applications.

Eyal Oren

A great talk from a great researcher and also the author of ActiveRDF. He talked about semantic web and about the web 3.0 (web of the data).

Lisa Todd

This girl from DevChix was at her first tech speech, she talked about the Rails testing with RSpec.

Daniel Hahn

He is the team leader of Talia: a web semantic application I'm working on. He showed the state of the art and some nice features.

Ben Scofield

Unleashing the power of blocks: a very interesting speech on Ruby blocks.

Luca Mearelli

A quick overview about Capistrano 2.0.

Norbert Crombach

This young guy showed some nice tips and tricks about Rails.

Thank you to all, guys. See you the next year!!.

[Flickr]

Il BarCamp è una (non) conferenza sul web 2.0, blog, reti sociali e i modelli di business. Sarà un'occasione per interagire con gente simpatica e appassionata di nuove tecnologie.
Soprattutto partecipare, una delle regole fondamentali dei BarCamp è che non ci sono spettatori, ognuno deve contribuire all'evento.
Il BarCamp si terrà a domani, 20 Gennaio, al Linux Club di Roma. Io ci sarò e seguirò l'evento, aggiornarnando in diretta il blog.

Gli aggiornamenti dal saranno raggiungibili presso l'apposita pagina.