Red Artisan

Arriving back in Melbourne, after having such a fantastic trip through Europe to attend RailsConf, visit clients and travel, it was great to see everyone at our local user group again at the end of last month.

I gave a quick presentation covering all the fun we all had at RailsConf while away.

It was particularly cool being able to talk about the excitement and atmosphere at the conference, and also at RejectConf which was once again a highlight of the trip.

In just under three weeks we’ll be hosting RailsCamp in Melbourne, which I’m also looking forward to. The previous camp held in Gosford was a blast, and I’m excited to see it happening again!

RailsConf has been an absolute blast, with many very cool sessions about all kinds of topics. There’s also been quite a few late nights in Berlin with Rails peeps after hours as well :)

David’s keynote was great, particularly the discussion of how Rails has progressed from its early development stages to the form it’s in today, the introduction of several powerful factors such as REST have really solidified the concepts of how Rails works and can be so powerful.

Edge Rails will be released as a 2.0 preview release soon. In Portland, RailsConf US, we saw several of these (Edge Rails) features demonstrated and I’ve been using them in several projects since. It will be great when it’s officially released.

Jason Hoffman gave an interesting talk about scaling, and in particular how Rails is a small part to the larger picture when examining how to get the most out of your hardware and architecture. There was one slide in particular where Jason listed perhaps 35 different things that need to be examined when scaling up your application, of which only perhaps 3 of them were Rails application based.

I also enjoyed Craig McClanahan and Nick Siegers talk, particular the discussion of using ActiveResource to allow your applications to communicate between each other. I’ve used ActiveResource in the past, so it was good to hear about others using it in similar situations as well.

Evan Phoenix also gave a fantastic talk about Rubinius, which is the alternate Ruby VM implementation that I’ve also been contributing to over the past few months. In particular, some of the statistics Evan showed were great, and be sure to take a look at them when he publishes his slides :)

Geoffrey Grosenbach gave a top talk about the various ways of DRYing up your CSS. I particularly liked the discussion of using Sass to do so. I’ve looked at Haml before and love it, it’s great to see those ideas now available in CSS.

Many of the presentations are already available online as well.

So that’s it for this year, next year RailsConf US will be in Portland again, and I’m also looking forward to seeing which city the next RailsConf EU will be located in. The 26 hour flight from Australia was certainly worth it, although I’m glad I came over for more than a week to take advantage of the trip.

I’m currently writing this entry from Auerstedt, a small village in the east of Germany, near Weimar. Thursday afternoon we arrived in Frankfurt via Dubai and Singapore and will be in Europe till the 12th October.

The primary reason for the trip, RailsConf EU. After deciding to start my own company in March, the decision to attend both RailsConf US and EU was automatic. No other venue can provide such a wide variety of networking, technology, teaching and pure fun as these two events can.

RailsConf US in Portland was a blast, and I’m looking forward to having similar feelings this year in Germany. After having lived here for a few years it also has quite a special touch to be back. I’m particularly looking forward to another sensational RejectConf edition as part of RailsConf EU as well.

I’ll also be presenting about rSpec, one of my favourite gems/plugins at the Frankfurt Rails user group meeting on the 11th September as well.

If you’re coming over to RailsConf EU, and hear a strange Australian accent in the background, be sure to come over and say hi :)