Today I went to the RubyEnRails 2008 conference. Last year I went there as well and was really enthusiastic about the presentations I visited. This years’ conference was good, but didn’t manage to come close to what I expected. Maybe my expectations where to high this year.
Zed Shaw gave a really nice opening presentation. He addressed some interesting problems of current software development and benchmarks using some great examples.
After this Obie Fernadez showed some crappy Rails code and told us not to write that sort of stuff. To bad he didn’t show how we _should_ code.
Sam Aaron tried to tell us something about the aesthetics of code. Nice presentation. Nothing really conclusive which I didn’t know before (yes, domain specific languages are useful).
Mod_rails… interesting nice to have. Next.
JRuby. Good presentation. The JRuby team is really delivering great stuff. I’ve been spoiled though; Not to different from the one at JavaOne 
Then Roderick van Domburg tried to tell something about code metrics. Auch. Apart from really straightforward metrics like the LOC in tests vs the LOC and the average number of lines per method he showed Heckle, Flog and rCov. Which have all been around for years now. Nothing new here.
The Rails Q&A with David Heinemeier Hansson via iChat was horrible. I’m not interested in whether David prefers his Macbook Air over his Macbook Pro.
I did met a lot of people and had some interesting discussions in the corridors; which was really nice!
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- The building
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- Finalist Stand
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- Zed Shaw
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- Obie Fernandez telling us what _not_ to do
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- Charles on JRuby
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- David via IChat
Thanks for the review. If you have any suggestion on how to improve next year’s conference, then we’d certainly love to hear them.