RailsConf Europe 2006

Marcel and DHH were very surprized to know that I had flown in from India for the RailsConf.

I enjoyed most of the sessions that I attended. With four tracks going on in parallel definitely I missed out on some very good ones.

• DHH’s session on ActiveResource was great. He demoed what he had talked about at Chicago RailsConf. I have also moved one of my projects to the edge to start playing with simply_restful.
• Marcel’s session on making RJS DRYer was also good. simply_helpful is a good way of doing this. It applies the same philosophy to the View side of things, that simply_restful applies to the controller. Using the simply_helpful plugin, the application can use a lot of meaningful default, hence making the views and helpers a lot more dry-er.
• Jamis just released a new version of capistrano and he demoed the cool new features. The slickest of them was the cap shell. It is a great tool to monitor multiple serves in a cluster from a single console, with the ability to run commands against only particular machines in the cluster identified by roles that the machines play in the cluster.
• Jim Weirich’s plenary session was great. He demonstrated a lot of common mistakes that programmers make, because of Ruby’s open classes. A lot of his talk featured around being good to other’s code.
• Dave Thomas and Kathy Siera were outstanding, entertaining and passionate as usual!