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

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 I’m looking forward to attending next year!