Millarian

When I came back from RailsConf I realized how poor my local participation has been. I’ve been in Phoenix for almost a year and I haven’t been to a single local group meeting. Shame on me :(.

But that all changed on Tuesday when I attended the Refresh Phoenix meeting at Inza Coffee in Scottsdale. The Refresh group is trying to create a “strong community of designers and developers.” Cool!

I was surprised by the turn out (in a good way) – there were about 50 people there. Of the people I talked with, most were designers. They had about six demos from various groups on applications and ideas they were working on. My favorite was probably JumpBox because they demoed an app they created to help with setting up SVN and Trac in one fell swoop. In fact, they did it live during the demo. They have some other ones you can check out on their applications page.

It was a pretty good gathering of folks, but people just split afterwards. I wanted to meet more locals and start forming a network, but was only able to talk with a few people. Rumor has it that some people hit Rock Bottom after the meeting maybe next time.

I’m also going to attend the Phoenix Ruby User Group and AZ on Rails events this month. I’m really interested in meeting people in the Phoenix area, so look me up if you go to either of those.

Part of the reason I attended RailsConf this year was for the community. When I first started learning Rails, I was alone. Literally, I would sit by myself at home for 12 hours a day trying to learn. Don’t get me wrong, I think I learned a lot and that was great for keeping my focus, but I think I missed a certain aspect of what Rails is about – namely, the community.

After spending several months learning from home, I decided to find a job using my new found skills. Actually, I was broke and needed to get back on my feet, but anyway… It was an exciting time for me because I was really looking forward to meeting other people who were passionate about Rails. Phoenix is not the greatest market for Ruby on Rails developers, but I decided to hold out until I found a contract position doing just that. A short two weeks later, things were looking up. I had a job that paid well and I was using Ruby on Rails, what more could I ask for?

Well… a lot actually. What I found was that only one other person at this company was as passionate about Ruby on Rails as me. Seriously, I am thankful every day that I work with him; it would be a nightmare if he were to leave. Working with another Ruby on Rails geek has pushed my appreciation for the language to a new level. Well, not only the language itself, but the culture that it inspires. Is this an intended or unintended effect of using Ruby on Rails? I think there is a reason why one of the most popular learning aides for Rails is Agile Web Development with Rails. It not only leads you through developing your first Ruby on Rails application, but it also starts to plant the seeds of Agile development. The language features allow you to rapidly develop based on feedback, sometimes even when the user/customer is right there next to you.

So back to RailsConf. I wanted to meet the other people in the community. I already subscribe to many blogs covering Ruby and/or Ruby on Rails, but I wanted the personal interaction. I needed to know that other people like me existed… for real. And I found some. Of course, I couldn’t meet everyone there, but in each session, I turned to the person next to me and asked them some questions. Sometimes that led to a more lengthy conversation or business card and sometimes not, but you can’t say I didn’t try.

I attended the conference with my friend Josh and two other co-workers, Ramesh and Clif. Clif is more of a higher up (non-developer) and he seemed to be attending RailsConf to recruit. Ramesh is a developer that we are working on, ever so slowly, to get him to become more passionate and opinionated.

One of the first people I met was Chardy, a Rails developer from Singapore. I talked with him a little about what he is working on, how he started using Rails, etc. He was very nice and it was interesting to see that people traveled a long way to attend the conference.

On Friday, I had a blind meetup with, Mike, a friend-of-a-friend. Very cool guy. We ended up spending a lot of time hanging out over food and beers during the conference. He is still in school, but I was extremely impressed by the breadth and depth of his knowledge. We had some really good conversations and I hope that we can keep in touch. He said he might go up to San Francisco this summer for a job between semesters. I wish him the best of luck!

Also on Friday, I noticed someone on the Portland light rail that had a badge reading Integrum Technologies. I knew that company from reading several of their blogs. They are also located in Chandler, AZ which is very close to where I work. Turns out they are a very cool group of people. The first person I met was their Algorithmagician, Jay. He’s a nice guy and we attended several of the same sessions throughout the conference. He then introduced me to Lindsay, Chris, and Jade. They seem like they have a great group of people working for them. If you are interested in working for them, I just saw a job posting for an experienced web developer at their company.

Celebrity sighting! Lol… I met Gregg Pollack and Jason Seifer of Rails Envy fame. Yes, the guys who brought you the Mac vs. PC style Ruby ads. My personal favorite was #1, so enjoy it below. they both seemed to be really great guys – down-to-earth, funny, and of course knowledgeable.

At a party Saturday night I also had the chance to meet several women attending the conference. The first, was Tina, a photographer, entrepreneur, and web usability expert. She is working with a group at Amazon researching Ruby on Rails as a possible web development framework. I remember when I was completing my MS project using the OpenLaszlo framework, Amazon was looking at that as well. Cool to see Amazon exploring other technologies (even though I’m still not thrilled about the whole Amazon vs Alexaholic/Statsaholic debacle).

Tina in turn introduced me to Desi, a member of the ThoughtWorks team. Desi and I had a great, long conversation about women in technology and their lack of attendance at conferences. She is currently the principal contact for DevChix, a group encouraging a more diverse technological workforce. I will probably expand on this conversation in a later post. Desi also introduced me to Cyndi Mitchell, vice-president of strategy for ThoughtWorks. Wow, there were a lot of ThoughtWorks people around… We only talked for a short time because they all decided to go to Dante’s to see the Extra-Action Marching Band live. Incidentally, the marching band made a guest appearance at the conference…

There were a lot more people that I met, but I wanted to call out a few specific ones that I really enjoyed meeting. So, bottom line is there are people out there with as much, and in some cases more, passion for Ruby on Rails. Finally, I feel like I have started to connect with the community. However, I see this as a first step in the right direction. Now I need to get involved with making Ruby on Rails and the community successful.

This is the first article in a series about my experiences at RailsConf 2007. Specifically it will talk about the tutorials and sessions I attended from a technology perspective. They are taking a while to come out because I have been swamped with work after taking the whole week off for the conference.

There were really only a couple of main categories of sessions available: Rails, JavaScript, and Design. I attended a few from each and came away with some great information.

On the JavaScript side I attended a tutorial on Thursday by Thomas Fuchs, the creator of the Script.aculo.us JavaScript library. Script.aculo.us is an add-on to the Prototype JavaScript library and gives you some cool user interface functionality. Graeme Mathieson has a pretty good writeup on what was covered. I wasn’t entirely pleased with this tutorial. I think the title Is JavaScript Overrated? Or: How I Stopped Worrying and Put Prototype and script.aculo.us to Full Use was a little misleading because I expected to leave the session feeling more comfortable with the prototype and script.aculo.us libraries. Instead, it seemed like the session was simply a plug for the upcoming prototype 1.5.1 and script.aculo.us 1.7.1 releases and not much of a tutorial on using those libraries.

I attended two other good sessions dealing with JavaScript, Nick Merwin’s Script.aculo.us Inside Out and Dan Webb’s Javascript-fu. Both were practical and entertaining. These were the type of sessions I was looking for, great job guys! Of particular interest to me was the discussion of the before and after events (including internals), scoping of events to create a timeline of effects, and the demo of how to create your own combo effect. Dan also talked about event delegation, a means of propagating events up to the parent element. For example, you could add an event handler at the document level so that all elements on the page now have the event handler. I believe that the Ext JavaScript library does this type of event delegation.

Within the design track, I only attended one really good session. It was called Practical Design for Developers by David Verba. Main take away was that (obviously) design is not just about visual design. Most people think visual design when someone talks about design. However, it also encompass interaction design issues. “Design is not just cosmetic. Design is also cosmetic.” He gave some references that he thought might be helpful for developers who either need to do some design themselves, or who are working with a designer.

1. The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web by Jesse James Garrett
2. Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner’s Guide to User Research by Mike Kuniavsky
3. Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites by Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville
4. The Non-Designer’s Design Book by Robin Williams

Even simple improvements can make a huge difference because the average user takes only 1/20th of a second to make a judgment about the site they are visiting! Kind of in the design area, I attended Dan Benjamin’s talk on Building Community-Focused Apps with Rails. He had some really great examples from his site Cork’d as well as from A List Apart. It was great to have a session that talked about what we are building and who we are building it for. Most of the other sessions focused strictly on the how of building web applications.

Then we come to Rails specific sessions. It has been a year since DHH’s keynote where he described the Rails approach to RESTful design and there were a lot of sessions focused on REST (I went to several). I think this is because most developers out there still just don’t get it (including me?). Well, maybe it’s not that we don’t get it, conceptually, but we are finding it hard to swallow programatically. I think it will take a significant shift in thinking to expect that your controllers will only have seven actions. Before, we had free reign over the controllers and now they want to take that away?!? Haha, just kidding, it really does make sense in the majority of cases and there are ways to extend the RESTful controller with additional actions (see Railscasts). I won’t get into this topic too much right now because I am still learning it, but I am starting to see more information floating around out there to explain Rails REST. If you haven’t already heard about it, go search around and see what it’s all about.

There were also quite a few sessions on cleaning up your code. I think this is good because, personally, I need this kind of direction. This goes beyond the glossed over Fat Model, Skinny Controller approach. Most of the sessions seemed concerned with overly complex view code and how to keep it DRY using helpers and other techniques. Overall, I thought these sessions were extremely beneficial and I hope that more like this appear next year. Makes me want to go back and re-write all my view code…

I attended Jamis Buck’s Harnessing Capistrano tutorial as well. I knew next to nothing about Capistrano when I went into this tutorial. He had some good demos of certain features of Capistrano. It seems to me that it is an extremely useful tool for more than just deploying your Ruby on Rails application to various machines. Capistrano is definitely something I need to become more familiar with. What was said in the presentation won’t really sink in until I get hands on. Find the presentation here.

One session I thought was incredibly cool was Eric Hatcher’s session on Solr and what he is doing with it for the University of Virginia.

Solr is an open source enterprise search server based on the Lucene Java search library, with XML/HTTP and JSON APIs, hit highlighting, faceted search, caching, replication, and a web administration interface.

Wow! And I thought acts_as_ferret was cool. His demonstration of Solr was very exciting.

Friday morning was DHH’s keynote. I think his main point was we (the rails community) have a lot of catching up to do before more major changes are introduced. Whew! I wholeheartedly agree. In the meantime, Rails 2.0 will basically be putting the polish on what is there already.

Well, not exactly a live blog of the conference, but hopefully this gives you an idea of the content and some links to follow-up on some of the things that were discussed. If you didn’t make it to Portland this year, then I hope to meet you next year. I still have a few RailsConf posts planned that will talk about some of the non-technical things I got out of the conference, so keep an eye out for those soon.

Not sure if the Pragmatic Programmers are still accepting RailsConf donations, but please help out if you can!

During RailsConf 2007, the organizers encouraged the community to donate money for good causes. I just read that the total so far is $33,000. That is a great showing from the Ruby on Rails community. Great job!

They may still be accepting donations, so please help out.

I returned home late last night from an extended trip to Portland for RailsConf 2007. My wife, Kelly, and I decided to go early and check out Portland since neither of us had been there before. Portland is a great city. They have a vibrant downtown area, great public transportation system, and all the outdoors activities you could want. The city is fairly close to the coast and is also close to skiing destinations.

For this trip we decided to stay in the heart of downtown Portland at the Hotel Monaco, a boutique hotel owned by Kimpton hotels. The hotel itself is close to the MAX light rail system and is only blocks from the Portland streetcar. Both are free within a certain area of the city called Fareless Square.

The hotel staff were great. Since we were also there celebrating our anniversary, the front desk staff sent up a hand written card, chocolates from Moonstruck Chocolates, and a bottle of Domaine Ste. Michelle. The Hotel Monaco also offers a complimentary wine and beer sampling every night from 5pm – 6pm. I couldn’t be more pleased with our choice of hotels and would highly recommend the Hotel Monaco to anyone traveling to Portland.

Chinatown was a lot smaller than I thought it would be, but has a great classical Chinese garden that I could have spent many more hours exploring. We also had some great Dim Sum for lunch, but I can’t remember the name of the place (I think it was on 3rd and Couch St. near the Hung Far Low building and was painted blue).

The best food we had in Portland was in the Pearl District. Two places were particularly good. For dinner Monday night we ate at Oba! where I had roasted butternut squash enchiladas and Kelly had prime rib coyotas (like flautas). We also had the queso fundido appetizer that was oh so scrumptious. On Tuesday morning we had breakfast at the Everett Street Bistro. It was awesome! I had the Grand Marnier French Toast and Kelly had the Dutch Baby (German style pancakes with caramelized apples, topped with powdered sugar). If you’re in the mood for a little coffee, try Stumptown Coffee. We had so much great food in Portland that I can’t do it justice. My advice to anyone is stay away from chain restaurants and sample all the local places. Portland is overflowing with great local restaurants.

On Tuesday, we took the MAX light rail to Washington Park. This is also the home to the Oregon Zoo, Hoyt Arboretum, Japanese garden, and International Rose Test Garden. We hiked through Washington Park from the MAX light rail station to the Japanese Garden. On the way we got some good pictures of Mt. St. Helens and of the surrounding forest and vegetation. By far the best picture Kelly took was in the Japanese Garden… wow!

Portland is an amazing city – both Kelly and I would love to return. Hopefully we’ll get the chance next year as the conference organizers indicated RailsConf 2008 will be in Portland again!

I plan on posting a few articles on my thought about the content from RailsConf 2007. Stay tuned…