Todd Pinkerton

I attended RailsConf 2007 last weekend in Portland, Oregon. As I sat delayed at the airport, I have a chance to write up some of the highlights from the conference.

Thursday was a pre-conference day dedicated to tutorials. These were optional, and at extra cost. I ddin’t opt for this because it seemed like a lot of the topics were pretty basic. The one that did look interesting to me was already sold out, so I ended up skipping the entire tutorial day and arrived on Friday.

Here is a link to the full schedule. Most of the session presentation slides are here.
David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), creator of Ruby on Rails, gave the keynote speech on Friday. He introduced some of the features arriving in Rails 2.0, including built-in REST, debugging and breakpoints, and some performance enhancements like query caching and css/js resource bundling. Nothing revolutionary, just a bunch of nice, useful enhancements.

The conference was multi-tracked, meaning you get to pick-and-choose the sessions you attend; it also means you may miss out on something you want to see because it is scheduled at the same time as something else. So Friday I attended Building Community-focused Apps with Rails. The talk covered some best practices for building any site, not just communities, and how to make using your app easier and more enjoyable for your users. Dan Benjamin (of A List Apart) gave the presentation, and Cork’d was used as a case study.

I also attended the talk about scaling rails on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). The presenters were from Rightscale, which I have used before, but so far I’ve been pretty unsuccessful getting a rails app to run in a clustered fashion on EC2. I hoped this talk would shed some light on this, but it didn’t (at least not for me). They chose a case study which was atypical for web apps — it was an audio-transcoding application with little web traffic, so the EC2 cloud was used to process the audio files, rather than serve web content. I think this niche was pretty unlike most other web apps, which are more concerned with how to handle a large request load.

An impromptu musical guest um, “performed” for us — the Extra Action Marching Band.
Most importantly, I got a chance to catch up with some old friends and collegues.