Jun 26 2006
Railsconf 2006 Wrap Up
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.
