Lonely Lion

I missed a pretty buzz-worthy presentation on a Django-like admin interface at Railsconf last week.  It’s called Streamlined and appears to be pretty awesome.  It’s slated to go public after OSCON.  If the screenshots are any indication, it looks like it has a lot of potential.

Secondly, Nat Torkington provided a good write up of the Chicago Confs on the O’Reilly Radar.  I like his take on the two communities.  I think he’s pretty much right on.

Phew. The back to back conferences are done.

YAPC was a lot of fun. Going in, I was a wee bit hesitant, as I don’t write Perl day to day anymore, and was worried I’d just sort of be bored. Perl 6 shot that theory full of holes. Perl 6, PUGS, and Audrey Tang were all over the place. Clearly I haven’t been paying attention, as the Perl community is alive and kicking, and right on the verge of doing some really great stuff…like, make Ruby and Python look sad and old type stuff.

Perl 6 has become a sort of joke, the vaporware promise of the fresh Perl. Parrot, big on ideas but short on implementation held up the party for quite a long time. Without it, how could anyone start playing with P6? Along comes Audrey, who implements the moving P6 target in Haskell, calls it PUGS, and releases it. Boom. Now we can write Perl 6. It’s slow, hard to compile, but so full of promise that I’ve been all a-flutter for two days.

I’m in the process of compiling / installing the latest and greatest version of PUGS on my laptop so I can jump into it. I’m sure I’ll write more here over time. For now though, if I had to pick one advertised Perl 6 feature that really gets my blood going, it’s “all arrays and hashes are multi-dimensional.”

My last post on the topic implied that I’d be checking in every day…it didn’t work out that way. Lots of odd committments meant that my Railsconf excursion ended around 2pm Saturday. I still feel like I got my money’s worth. That first day was pretty fantastic.

Saturday’s sessions were great. If I had to pick a theme for the talks I went to, it would be “here’s a story about how I used Rails at my work.” Obie Fernandez talked about sneaking Rails into the Thoughtworks stack, Scott Raymond described his experiences using Rails in a design heavy environment, and Matt Biddulph talked about building out the BBC catalog(ue) online.  A good round of talks.  Scott and Matt were allowed to choose their own tools, Obie has had to be a language advocate as well as a developer.  One big thing I took away from the Obie / Thoughtworks talk was to take any opportunity to teach Ruby / Rails to people.  Several of his stories followed a “I told this guy about Rails, and then he rewrote this app in Rails, then the company started to use Rails.”  It’s an infectious lesson, and worth the investment.

Wow, what a day. I got up at 5:30, and am just now getting home. This will be a relatively quick wrap up.

Sessions

My two favorites were the Intro to Capistrano and Rails Optimization. Capistrano is pretty impressive. I needed someone to demo it for me to finally convince me that I should spend time learning it. I’m pretty excited at the potential for a handful of projects that I work on. It’s also great to see that it’s framework agnostic, so I can use it just as easily for Django apps as Rails. Good stuff. The Rails Optimization session was great. It solidifies my long held belief that if you’re going to have an optimization talk, try and get a German to do it. There’s something about benchmarking that begs to be explained in a German accent. Stefan Kaes runs http://railsexpress.de, and is clearly into benchmarking and streamlining software. I have three pages of notes from his talk. Stefan was very critical (in a good way) of Rails, and is clearly committed to making big performance improvements. I was particularly interested in a project he’s working on to pre-compile templates into native Ruby. It reminded me of Cheetah. According to tests, the compiled templates increase the speed of rendering by a factor of 3.

Keynotes

As good as the sessions were, the keynotes were out of this world. Dave Thomas, Martin Fowler, Paul Graham, and _why? Terrific. Really Terrific.

I have a few notes on each talk, but mostly just listened. Each of them were inspiring in their own way; Dave Thomas had some strong suggestions for Rails improvements, Martin Fowler distilled some basic ideas about what makes Rails so good, Paul Graham made us feel good to be in the margins, and _why just did some _why stuff. All in all, the most impressive single day of speakers I’ve yet seen at any single conference.

Chicago is the center of the nerd universe this coming week, with back to back Railsconf and YAPC. I’m getting my schedule together this afternoon, figuring out which talks to attend. There’s still some not-sures, but I have big chunks of it figured out.

Friday (Railsconf)

Friday morning is a slam dunk for me, the afternoon is pretty much up in the air. I’m really looking forward to the keynotes, especially Paul Graham. The _why thing should be pretty fun too.

• Dave Thomas Keynote 9:15
• Introduction to Capistrano 10:45: It’s been on my radar for ages now, but I still haven’t spent the time figuring out how to use it. This is one I’m really looking forward to.

Saturday (Railsconf)

Not entirely sure what I’ll be up ot Saturday. I have to skip out on the keynotes, as I have a BBQ to attend.

• Ajax on Rails 9:00: My Ajax usage has been pretty canned, I’d like to expand it out a bit. I’m also interested in having RJS spelled out to me.
• Putting the BBC’s Programme Catalogue on Rails 11:30: The site is really impressive. It’s also one of the few talks scheduled in the “success story” category that doesn’t have a price tag attached to it. As in, the BBC did it for the joy of doing it, not the profit. At least, that’s my take on that particular track.

Sunday (Railsconf)

I’m looking forward to the lightning talks. They’re always my favorite part of any conference. Otherwise, I’m planning on attending the morning session of Agile Databases with Migrations. I’m using Migrations pretty frequently now, but am interested to see how others use them.

Monday (YAPC)

I’m going to miss most of Monday, we’re closing on our condo (hurray!  home ownership!  Way to be an adult!)

Tuesday (YAPC)

I’m planning on attending the full day of Perl 6 talks.  I’m pretty excited to see the vaporish Perl 6 project get a full day all to its own.  Exciting stuff.  Plus, Tuesday night is the big Dave and Busters auction night, which is rumored to be lots of fun.

Wednesday (YAPC)

Another full day plan.  Mark Jason Dominus is doing a half day on Higher Order Perl.  It’ll probably be a crowded session, but great.  I’ve heard nothing but good things about him as a speaker.  His book is great.  The afternoon is all lightning talks.  Go lightning talks!

All in all, it’s going to be a great few days.  I’ll try and write up stuff as it happens.

Go Chicago!

I just switched back to wordpress from typo.  In the process, I managed to spam planetpython.org with 500+ posts from 2002 onwards.  Sorry everyone.  None of the gigantic list have shown up on http://planet.python.org/ yet, hopefully they won’t.

Andy Lester on how cool ad-hoc lightning talks are

Very true. LT’s are by far my favorite topic for user group meetings.