The Rails conference was a blast last weekend. Here are a few quick notes:
- The people - The people at the conference were clearly high caliber passionate and friendly.
- Hall way conversations - I really got the opportunity to meet and talk with lots of great people. Thanks for the intros Glen.
- Very informal. This was great. However, most everyone seemed to think that this may change in future conferences. Hope they are wrong.
- Fowler's talk emphasizing communication in software development was a great reminder that development is all about communication in all forms. Also talked about the idea of shoot and aim (rapid feedback).
- DHH's talk on future Rails emphasizing even more on CRUD and http restfulness was intriguing.
- Dave Thomas had a nice talk about things that the community needed to work on to support Rails.
- James Duncan Davidson's talk on deployment was full of practical honesty. Mongrel sounds great - got to check it out. Also, said he has not used Ant (that he developed plane flight) in 3 years - this might be a wake up call to all those Ant users.
- Stuart Holloway's talk on meta-rails was very good. Others had great talks too, but Stuart had both great style and content.
- DSL''s got plenty of attention. I think the investigation of DSLs will really impact the way we think of software development.
- I am sure Paul Graham's keynote was good, but we were out eating some of Chicago's finest Pizza and missed it.
And this was just the tip of the iceberg.
Even though (or because) it was very informal, it was one of the best conferences I have been too.
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