An Early RailsConf 2009 Roundup

We're two days into proceedings here at RailsConf and things have gone pretty smoothly. One day of tutorials and one day of the conference proper with over 1000 developers in attendance.

Gregg Pollack of RailsEnvy has put together a 4 minute video with a basic, atmospheric look at the first day and the opinions of some of the attendees. Nick Quaranto has also live blogged several sessions (and will be continuing to do so tomorrow); his notes are pretty deep.

On day two (or the first day of the true "conference") the centerpiece was David Heinemeier Handsome's keynote, well written up by Arun Gupta, where he suggested everyone should stop worrying so much. He then quickly moved on to Rails 3 developments. No defined alpha version is available, but there's some code that we can "play with." DHH looked quickly at some changes to defaults in Rails 3, such as automatically escaping all output into views (you can override this with the "raw" method) and using unobtrusive JavaScript techniques out of the box. He concluded by saying that the secret to high productivity is to "renegotiate requirements" (i.e. people tend to come up with specific solutions to vague goals, when you could just resolve the vague goal instead).

Other presentations included Ilya Grigorik's Building a Mini Google in Ruby, Jeremy Hinegardner's Crate: Packaging Standalone Ruby Apps, and Phusion's Scaling Rails, among others. Scaling Rails was particularly notable because even though the content was quite basic, it was concluded with a demonstration of a Wolfenstein 3D clone written in Ruby which featured Zed Shaw as a boss. It's called RubyStein and you can play with it right now. It'll be written up in more detail on Ruby Inside soon.

The general reaction to the conference (and Vegas) so far has been positive. People seem to like Vegas a lot more than was anticipated (though true Vegas haters probably didn't come anyway) and everyone's been having fun enjoying the various facilities Vegas and the Hilton have offered. So far, an interesting conference with little controversy, except...

And.. that's the topic of the next post ;-)

Update: Scribd has links to presentations from all of the RailsConf sessions so far. Nice!

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