My Must Read Summary of RailsConf 2007

Ok, so it’s not a must read but I was hoping that headline would at least catch your eye a bit. I’m sitting in PDX right now with Jerry and just reflecting a bit on the few days (which are a blur they went so fast). Below are my hopefully cryptic notes on railsconf and all the fricken laser beams I encountered.

Thursday

Thursday my hotel (the infamous Jupiter) greeted me with earplugs and a condom on the night stand. Also, I was asked upon check-in if it was ok that I was on the “loud” side. That said, the hotel was sweet and I slept right through the supposed noise. My only complaint was the wifi was horrible for me. Granted, I don’t have the pimped out Macbook wireless vacuum as I reside on a lowly powerbook. I swear they are programmed to steal all the wireless from lesser computers.

Friday

Friday was great. The conference kicked off with a DHH keynote and ended with the amazingly funny and relevant Ze Frank.

Also, there were some great sessions:

• Community driven apps
• Going off the grid
• Standing on the shoulders of giants
• Mapping rails to legacy systems

Friday I was a bit shy. I mostly soaked it all in and took good notes.

Saturday

Saturday was the day of sessions. Not file based or memcached but rather several rocking speakers in a row.

• Memcaching rails by Chris Wanstrath (who had the best slide of the conference)
• Virtual Clustering by Bradley Taylor
• Xen and the art of deployment by Ezra Zygmuntowicz (anyone know how to pronounce that last name?)

Tim Bray was a keynote and he did ok but he pissed me off when he called the twitter guys idiotic. Why you gotta be a hater Tim? Overall, he was very pro ruby and pro rails which is nice to see from someone at a company such as Sun.

Saturday was sweet because I got to meet all the people that I chat online with or whose blogs I read. I discovered that Jesse Newland is my twin. Well, not from the same mother but I’ve never met anyone else who loves foolin with web services as much as I do.

Railsmachine Party

Also, Saturday was the night of the Railsmachine party, which really rocked. It was way more fun than a boring booth in the vendor area (free t-shirts, fun, food and drinks).

If you missed it, then you didn’t get to see Joey sing about his big balls. See below and don’t ask me why I rotated the camera after a few seconds because I have no idea. :)

And you also missed Bradley Taylor with his pimp cup.

Sunday

Sunday was great. By this time, I had met several people and was really enjoying myself. The best session of the day I went to was JRuby. It was very interesting and the guys did a great job presenting. I was sad to miss Twitter’s scaling chat and Dan Webb’s JS talk but JRuby was a must.

I ended up only getting 4 hours of sleep between Saturday 7AM and Monday 4PM as I took the red-eye back to Indiana Sunday night but it was all worth it. I had a great time, learned a lot and met some very cool people. To anyone I didn’t get to meet, I’m sorry. I would have enjoyed it but the conference was too big. :)

I leave you with me a photo taken by my wife of me recovering from RailsConf with squishy cow.

If you have a summary on your blog, link it up in the comments below as I’d love to read other’s reactions.