I attended RailsConf in Baltimore, MD this year. It was especially exciting as we had just relocated to Baltimore 2 days earlier after a long drive from Minneapolis. Apart from the great sessions, I was able to meet some great people from the Ruby community like Ryan Bates and John Nunemaker.

Sunday: Lightning talks, great.

8 Steps to open source software development with Dr. Nic.: this was my second time seeing Dr. Nic, after the lightning talk Karaoke round Sunday night. He had good tips. We worked on a project by forking it and adding some development instructions.

  • check GitHub issues
  • ruby toolbox
  • GitHub gem
  • fork queue (check this and merge some forks in)

John Nunemaker

  • just in time not just in case
  • extraction vs. prediction
  • Book recommendation: Refactoring, Ruby edition

Ilya Grigorik session

  • Drivers, Ruby VM, Network
  • ltrace, mysqlplus gem, Apache model, worker/forker model
  • Ruby 1.9 Fibers (lightweight threads)
  • Introduced his new high performance stack: Ruby 1.9 + Rails 3 + new stack

OAuth, OpenID, Google data APIs

  • Chrome Webstore
  • Google Apps marketplace (introduced March 2010)
  • Twilio API voice functionality
  • ClientLogin, AuthSub, OAuth

RVM session with Wayne Seguin

  • ruby version manager, rvm answer, rvm question

Redis, Resque, Unicorn, Chris Wanstrath

  • Set, SortedSet, Integer, List (commands operate on these data structures)
  • Persistent (writes to disk)
  • redis-cli
  • Unicorn
  • Resque

Semantic HTML, CSS, presenters session

  • Zen coding
  • alphabetize CSS properties
  • toupee
  • deadweight
  • jammit
  • startup (gem, alternative to scaffold, hat tip to nifty_generators)
  • Dust Me selectors
  • modernizr (plugin for IE compatibility)

Designers and developers working together session

  • Person, purpose, priority
  • Worksheets
    1. timeline
    2. why are you using it?
  • Tip: design for mobile first, forces you to emphasize the most important thing.
  • Squint test
  • software is for people
  • speakinterface.com

Lightning talks

  • jQuery client side validations, partido del internet (, ), RSpec 2, Surveyor (surveys in your rails app), @igrigorik rewriting SQL on the fly, Michael Hartl , how to publish online (polytexnic, coming soon), mentor programming in Africa opportunities <https://bit.ly/RwandaOnRails>

User recommendations session

  • social networking content, website analytics, predictive analysis
  • graphs: relationship between data just as interesting
  • Neo4J, neo4j.rb
  • SNA: social network analysis, common queries built in
  • Gremlin
  • Eigenvector centrality

User data tracking session

  • Google analytics, Garb, vanity (redis backed library for tracking)
  • clicktale (heat map)

I enjoyed my first RailsConf and am looking forward to attending next year!