RailsConf Europe - Choosing sessions is so hard...
September 18th, 2007
Tuesday at RailsConf and choosing sessions is damn hard. Am I missing out on something really great going on in other room? Could the other guys be as boring as this speaker? With nothing more than a title and a synopsis we select from our buffet.
My bad decisions so far:
- Chose Making Rails More (Artificially) Intelligent. Should have chosen Deployment and Continuous Integration from the Trenches. Although non of the first sessions were apparently great
- Chose Meta-Magic in Rails: Become a Master Magician. Should have chosen Meta-Magic in Rails: Become a Master Magician. Very funny, entertaining, informative and very very popular.
- Chose Really Scaling Rails. Should have chosen Utilizing Amazon S3 and EC2 in Rails
- Chose Tabnav: Do We Really Need a Plugin for Tabbed Navigation?. Should have chosen Tabnav: Do We Really Need a Plugin for Tabbed Navigation?. Although I hear Rubinius, Improving The Rails Ecosystem was really good, the Tabnav talk was entertaining and something I may use soon.
Making Rails More (Artificially) Intelligent
The speakers were in Spanish and their English was difficult to understand especially in a presentation context, but well done for giving it a go guys. Basically the talk introduced Bayesian graphs and probability tables, Bayesian classifiers and genetic algorithms and some Ruby libraries for using them. Unfortunately they didn’t make the Rails context at all. I think a talk on using these kind of algorithmic tools would be a winner with the right presentation context. But hard when it’s not your first language.
I learnt something and it’s worth checking the libraries if you ever feel you’ll need to solve an AI problem.
Meta-Magic in Rails: Become a Master Magician
Very entertaining and very popular, if the conference room had rafters people would be hanging from them. The room was packed. I would hate to go up against Dr Nic, the other rooms must have been empty.
I quit coding because I thought I hated it, turned out I just hated Java.
Dr Nic not only talked about fun little things with method_missing, const_missing and using the meta abilities of Ruby he used them as a weapon against other languages
Java is like… Keith Richards. not so cute anymore, can tell you stories about himself, can’t change his behavior
Great talk but Dr Nic was keen to point out that that in some cases the meta-magic is.
not useful but it is funny..
Really Scaling Rails
Was by a Twitter guy on scaling and had some bits of useful information but really didn’t engage. The really useful elements were a few tips such as how to encode the page peformance into every the response of every page. A shame.
Tabnav: Do We Really Need a Plugin for Tabbed Navigation?
A lovely talk by Italian speaker Paolo Dona who was engaging and funny. I expected the room to be near empty, after all who needs to hear about tabbed navigation. Instead Paolo packed the small room he was given, obviously they knew more than me.
Paolo’s main thing was that sure Ruby on Rails has meant he has had to write less code but he still spends the same amount of time writing HTML/CSS. In fact relatively he was spending much more time on HTML/CSS than coding.
where is DHH? I want to kill him. He has turned me into a designer.
So Paolo has widgets
ruby script/plugin install svn://svn.seesaw.it/widgets/trunk
Widgets for tabs, navigation, showhide, tablizer, tooltips, nubbins. To create user interface design patterns with less effort. It’s a fine idea and i’ll look to use them soon.
Not a bad spread for the food either…..
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