RailsConf 2007 at the halfway point
RailsConf 2007 is going well. I found the RailsConf slides that are available already at http://wiki.oreillynet.com/wiki/railsconf2007/index.cgi?PresentationSlides. I hope that all the speakers get their slides up on the web at some point.
A few highlights so far:
memcached presentation by defunkt with gratituous shots of burgers and lots of code. I love burgers, but I love code even more.
Joey "the Accordion Guy" DeVilla and Chad "Ukelele" Fowler rockin' the house with "Newb" (sung to the tune of "Creep".) I wrote down the lyrics as best as I could if anyone wants me to post them up.
Avi Bryant reminding us during his keynote last night that Smalltalk is the past and future of Ruby. More on this later. I like that the planning committee provided a different viewpoint at a keynote. Sorta like when Dave Thomas gave his Ruby for Java Programmers presentation at the Java-oriented No Fluff Just Stuff conferences.
Matthew Bass had a presentation on his creation of Teascript, which was like Being a MicroISV / Indie Developer with Ruby on Rails. Not so much code, but shows that you can build and deploy a niche web app and the steps you need to take.
Uncle Bob and Jarkko Laine had a pair of presentations that covered the process side of things so you end up with Clean Code and good Ruby on Rails code with continuous builds.
Ze Frank: "What's up with having a keynote at 8:30pm at night? Did you shift all the conference hours to be programmers hours? What's going to happen at 9pm? Mountain Dew break?" Ze was hilarious - probably the funniest guy I've seen at a keynote ever.