What a cool day. Here’s a quick summary of everything I attend:

• Jeremy Kemper’s keynote - Rails 2.1 is getting released! Awesome changes to migrations (no more migration number collisions), timezone support, tighter integration with memcache. Coolest of all and something that always bugged me in ActiveRecord - being able to check is an ActiveRecord object was actually modified. The introduction of the changed? method should be very handy.
• Mingle - I love Mingle. I checked out this talk because I wanted to learn how to really use Card trees and aggregate properties (some new features in Mingle 2.0). I ended up finding out some really cool functionality that I didn’t know existed (read: project variables). After every iteration rolls by, I previously had to go in and change all the views to reflect the change in iterations. Now, I can do it in one place with project variables. Rock!

• Advanced Restful Rails - I thought this talk was pretty cool. He addressed a lot of patterns that do not fit in the stereotypical resource generator. I really dug the overall message - there’s really 2 steps to making a good restful architecture. It’s really that simple, and it’s not far off from good Object Oriented design.

  1. Identify your resource
  2. Expose the methods you want to

• Fast, Sexy, and Svelte: Our Kind of Rails Testing - this was a good talk. Mainly impressed with DeepTest - it runs your RSPECS in parallel rather than sequentially. For acceptance testing, the recommended Selenium, but I actually prefer SpiderTest. It’s not so dependent on markup and is done in memory rather than in browser

• Integration Testing With RSpec’s Story Runner - yet another great talk on testing. I’m still not sold on stories as part of the RSpec framework, but I’m at least willing to give it another try after David’s great walkthrough
• The Great Test Framework Dance-Off - Josh gets my talk of the day award. This was a totally unbiased look at three popular frameworks RSpec, Test::Unit, and Thoughtbot’s Shoulda
• The Great Kent Beck - I have to be honest, I didn’t get a lot out of Kent’s talk. It was cool to reminisce about TDD, but I didn’t get inspired. Honestly, Q&A was the best part of the keynote.

So today I attended:

• Keynote - Joel Spolsky is pretty entertaining, but I didn’t get a lot of substance out of his talk. He touched upon keeping users happy and what it take to do it. Overall, a humorous way to kick things off.
• Entrepreneurs on Rails - this was really inspiring. Dan Benjamin shared his experiences and some of the pitfalls. It was great to get some insight from someone that’s walked the path I’ve wanted to: start off as a service oriented business and break out into some product based businesses.
• 10 Things I Hate About Web Apps - I honestly wish I attended a different presentation. The end was ok, as the speaker introduced LimeLight - it looks like it could compete with AIR - what I liked is that it runs on JRuby - so anything with a JVM can run it.
• Faster, Better ORM with DataMapper - this was probably the highlight of the day. I really think DataMapper could be a replacement for ActiveRecord in the Rails framework. I’ve played with it when I was looking at merb. Better handling for legacy databases, eager and lazy loading. When version 1.0 comes out in the Summer, I will definitely look at it as a primary Ruby ORM.
• Flexible Scaling - this was a great talk. I’ve been playing with Amazon EC2 (a scalable way to create infrastructure/hosts), but now I’m even more intrigued. What’s interesting is that the speaker is hosting his database cluster off of the cloud
• UI On Rails - Connecting Designers and Developers - I was kind of disappointed with this one. It seemed like it surprised a lot of people to give Designers access to source code, but Kyle seems to handle it without issue.

Overall it’s been a fun day, but man am I exhausted. My favorite session was definitely the one on DataMapper. I’m hoping Rails adds similar ORM options and configuration like Merb.

I was pleasantly surprised last week when I was at a Boston Web Innovators Group session. At the same bar, there was a consortium of various Northeastern user interface and user experience groups meeting. Of interest to me were UPA (Usability Professionals Association) Boston,  and Boston CHI.

Second Rotation is still looking for front end developers, so I was initially intrigued. Regardless of our need for front end developers, these communities are really interesting to me. With local usability authorities like Steve Krug (who I met briefly) as members, these communities have a lot of interest and value. If you’re a web developer in the Boston area, I heartily recommend you check these groups out.

Dev House Boston 3 is now open for registration. Last year, I helped a team build a component that searches Amazon for album information via web services. Of course, we built it with Ruby on Rails.

It was a lot of fun and it was great to meet some local developers. If you have a project you’d like to hack around with, I highly suggest checking this event out. I want to mess around with some API’s - maybe EBay, Shopping.com, or Amazon. I definitely want to create some kind of Facebook app, so we’ll see who’s interested in that idea.

I’ve been away for a while but it’s been with good reason. We’ve been working hard on launching www.secondrotation.com, and the company is really excited about starting it up.

Do you have an old digital camera, camcorder, GPS Device, Cell Phone, or MP3 Player that’s just collecting dust in your closet? Sell it to us.

Of course, we built the site out using the Ruby On Rails. It uses some cool open source projects like GBarcode and Shipping.

Launching SR.com has been a really fun project for me. It has been a great opportunity to refine not only my programming skillset and architectural ability, but also my XHTML and CSS skills. I think we’ve done a really good job of maximizing our capabilities with the Rails framework, and there’s a lot more in store architecturally.

The office has been buzzing with activity, we’ve picked up a lot of great press (Gizmodo, Yahoo, and CNet’s News.com). Perhaps the most most exciting exposure was Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht (Revision3) digging our site on CNET’s “Best of the Web Feature” (It’s about 34 minutes in)

What do you think of the site? I’d love to hear your feedback and the business would be all the better for it. Would you sell us your old electronics?