Railsconf 2006 Day One
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.
