I attended RailsConf in Chicago about 10 days ago. It was a great way to find out what was happening in arguably the most vibrant part of the web development community. I met a lot of people over those three days and would always ask them: "So, are you doing rails by day, by night, or both?". Most of the answers were "by night", with a few "just starting by day", and one "both". From my unstatistical sample, it seems like rails clearly had people's mindshare but getting it into their "workshare" is a different story.
A quick search on google or technorati will turn up a lot of info on the conference. Here are some of my favorite moments (in no particular order):
- Martin Fowler's keynote: he spoke for over an hour about ruby, rails, frameworks & their (dis)advantages, etc. All pretty much ad lib. I have a number of his books and it was great hearing him speak live. Very interesting.
- Why the lucky stiff's concert / monologue / animations extraordinaire. A glance at his site will tell you that all is not as it should be in Why's brain, which made his concert that much more fun.
- Mike Clark's intro to Capistrano. This is the utility I really want to play with.
- Justin Gehtland's overview of Ajax and RJS with Rails, and esp. the sneak peak at the new version of scaffolding he and his colleagues are working on called Streamlined.
- One of the pleasures of attending a conference is discovering great new speakers. Out of the railsconf crew, my pick goes to Matt Biddulph. Matt's presentation was not only engaging, enlightening, and full of cool annecdotes but also focused on a BBC-related project. Having grown up in London, the beeb is still near and dear to my heart. I've found lots of interesting topics on Matt's blog, such as this great example of putting the Wikipedia and Yahoo APIs to use. Cheers Matt!
- DHH's keynote started off with me thinking "CRUD? Why is he talking to us about CRUD?" and ended with the thoughts "Wow! This is a cool way of looking at things, must try it out!".
- Last but not least, hooking up with a long lost friend and, as it turns out, rails and OSX fan Steve Chanin.
Next year's conference is in Portland and will be co-organized by O'Reilly. They're clearly pursuing rails as strong alpha (and dare I say beta?) geek territory. Lots of fun in store!