RailsConf ‘09: After the RailsConfening

Noel Rappin, Friday, May 8, 2009 @ 2:52 pm

RailsConf attendees patiently await my session. They have no idea what they are in for...

A rambling set of notes and things while it's still in my head.

Overall Notes

Starting with the positive... I had a great time. There's nothing like getting to be around hundreds of people who share the same excitement for programming, Rails, learning new things, and doing things well. The sessions were quite good overall, it was great to meet several people I had only interacted with online. There are always things to grumble about, but overall it was well-organized and exciting and fun.

Attendance was definitely down. I don't have exact numbers, but it was about 1/3 less then last year. The exhibit hall seemed down even further. On the other hand, there seemed to be an unusually large percentage of first time attendees. Not sure how to explain that, although it did seem like the Las Vegas location turned people away.

Insecurity over doing things "the right way" was a common concern, from the tutorials, to DHH saying in his keynote that even he doesn't know all the Rails internals any more, to the questions I was getting on testing, etc...

On the plus side, all the keynotes were recorded professionally, and are being turned around very quickly. DHH's keynote Tuesday morning, the Tim Ferris interview Tuesday night, and Chris Wanstrath's talk Wednesday morning are online as I write this. Robert Martin's just went up.

On the down side, unlike a lot of the regional conferences, the individual sessions were not recorded. O'Reilly tried to organize the community to record sessions, but there was nothing like enough of a critical mass of people with Flip cameras to make that work. Although, who knows, maybe things will trickle in.

All available session presentation slides are available at http://www.railsconf.com/presentations.

Rails 3

Rails 3 was a common topic, although an alpha version was not released. New features discussed included:

• Brand new router, with a cleaner DSL and the ability to be more modular
• A change in output to where the new default is to escape output to prevent XSS attacks, and raw output must be explicitly specified
• New, unobtrusive JavaScript and Ajax handlers.
• Easier support for different ORM and template engines

DHH assured everybody that the Rails defaults will still "kick ass" (Kathy Sierra fan alert!), but that developers with specialized needs will find it easier to meet their needs.

The JavaScript mechanism looks particularly nice. Using the new HTML 5 "data-" prefix for custom attributes, a remote call like the following:

<%= link_to "Delete", @comment, :remote => true, :method => :delete %>

Would be turned into the following HTML

<a href="/comments/1" data-remote="true" data-method="delete">Destroy</a>

From there, it's easy to see how an unobtrusive JavaScript library like jQuery could latch on to those custom attributes. In fact, the plain is for Rails to provide adapters for common JavaScript toolkits in the same way that adapters for databases are provided.

Rack

Lot of discussion of Rack, Rails Metal, and Sinatra this year, including two sessions that had very similar focuses, plus a significant section of the Rails Envy session (which dug into the actual Rails core Rack middleware code), plus the announcement that next year's Rails Rumble will be open to any Rack-based application.

There's a general consensus that Rack is very powerful stuff, and that we are just starting to see the beginnings of very cool tools. At the same time, it seems like nobody is quite sure what web applications will look like when everything that can be refactored to Rack is refactored to Rack.

Testing

Testing was a big theme, with a lot of sessions on testing tools and processes, including my own. Bob Martin's keynote, which you should definitely check out, was very emphatic on the idea that testing is part of what makes programming a profession. (It was also an interesting counterpoint to recent discussions about "professionalism" in the Rails community).

Cucumber was very prevalent. In addition to a dedicated session from tool maintainer Aslak Hellesøy, it was mentioned in several other talks, including mine.

I learned about some new tools.

Dave Chelimsky announced stubble, a new API for stubbing ActiveRecord objects away from the database for the purpose of testing. Pretty cool.

I only saw part of the talk, but Relevance presented Blue Ridge, a plugin for testing JavaScript code.

Non Rails-Core keynotes

Tim Ferris... I'm sure you may have seen some of the reaction online to this talk. While I appreciate the general idea of bringing in speakers from outside our little bubble, and I can understand the potential appeal of Ferris from a lifestyle or productivity standpoint. I think the nicest thing I can say about the talk was that it didn't work. The conversation format veered off into topics of dubious relevance, and worse, Ferris veered between low-energy and coming off as kind of arrogant. And not in a good way.

Robert Martin, on the other hand, was outstanding. I was just skimming through that talk again for the purposes of pulling out the best parts to show people here, and it's hard to limit it. Smart, funny, and inspiring in the sense of uplifting the daily programmer routine into something professional and profound.

Entrepreneurship

Side projects and entrepreneurship were less of an explicit theme this year than last.

I went to both Obie Fernandez' session on being a successful Rails consulting company as well as the panel on entrepreneurship prominently featuring him and DHH. I appreciated Obie's willingness to give out actual numbers, that was very useful, and the interaction between him and DHH on how much a dedicated business person is needed was interesting, but probably more reflective of those two specific personalities than general guidelines.

Related posts:

1. RailsConf 2009: The RailsConfening
2. RailsConf 2008: A Belated Look Back
3. Welcome To RailsConf
4. It’s Only Rack on Rails But I Like It
5. The Rails Edge: Notes

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