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.

Tags: Rails, railsconf, railsconf08, rubyonrails, Software

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