Man, am I beat! RailsConf was a lot of fun and I learned a lot. Day 3 was a bit shorter and I ran a little late. But here’s some of the highlights from the talks I attended:

• DeRailing: Smashing the Rails Stack – started off a little slow and a little basic, but the main thing I got from this talk was Tarantula – it’s inspired by SpiderTest and gives you the ability to test your site against cross site scripting. Don’t forget to escape your erb with the h() function! (I’m definitely guilty of this faux pas)
• Everyday DTrace – it might have been the late night or something. I just was not into this demo. It was pretty low level and I couldn’t really see myself using DTrace everyday, or anytime soon.
• Advanced ActiveRecord Refactoring – Hats off to Chad Pytel from Thoughtbot on this talk. It wasn’t too advanced, but I think he covered some great ground. I hope it helped a lot of people new to Rails. One important thing to note that he highlighted and continued to emphasize – you can’t actively refactor code without good test coverage. He also talked about overarchitecture in role based permission systems. If you’re practicing Agile, you should only be building for what you need.
• Rails Core Panel – It was a bummer that DHH had to catch a flight. I think the core team is really cool, though. Diverse with different interests and backgrounds. I was sort of tuned out at the end, but they addressed a lot of questions about alternative frameworks. Before David left, he made a really good point about Rails clones. Instead of rebuilding it, why not just contribute and make it better?

I got to meet some cool people, and the irc room was pretty happening. It was also great to spend sometime with James after the conference while we waited for our flights back.

Also, if you’re a Rails developer, check out acts_as_community. It needs a little polish, but I think it’s got potential as a cleaner WorkingWithRails

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.