pcrawfor

Wow, another railsconf has come and gone and I’m back home in Victoria.

I’ll be posting some detailed info on some of the most interesting stuff I saw while I was there but I wanted to do a quick summary post of my overall impressions.

First things first, the keynotes where great I think that for me they were worth the effort of coming down for the conference alone.

Joel Spolsky

I had been really looking forward to this keynote, being a big fan of JoelOnSoftware and was very curious what Joel would have to say to the rails community. Joel hasn’t been a big advocate of rails although he has a couple of times admitted that he considers rails itself to be a great “hack” (in the good sense of the word). Joel’s talk was entertaining and funny although it did have a bit of a strange message to it in the end. His main points were to focus on making people happy, having great aesthetics and being aware of the culture code in regards to creating software. Overall he gave some useful and often hilarious examples for each :)

His last slide left me and a couple of the other VicRuby guys wondering if he had made a subtle reference to the over-hype that has seemed to have exploded around rails over the last couple of years.

Kent Beck

Kent Beck’s keynote started off a bit slow for me but ended really well, he went over some stories from his time working on and creating Extreme Programming, Test driven development and Design Patterns and where each of them started and evolved. The best part of his talk to my mind was his thoughts for the rails community and the questions and answers after the talk which they let run for quite a long time. He had some great insights to consider.

DHH

The best keynote for me personally was DHH’s because it had really nothing to do with ruby or rails and for the first time I saw him speak at a railsconf where he wasn’t just updating on features or plans but rather dug into a deeper topic.

David addressed the need for all of us as developers and professionals to both work on our own personal development and also to not worry so much about what technology we are using. Even more importantly he emphasized the importance of not coding and having other interests, other passions and expanding our horizons.

I 100% agree with him, and it left me feeling energized in a new way. The most telling thing for me was that he intentionally said not to worry about whether rails is or will be the best thing to use, but to focus on developing great general skills.

Ok I’m done for now, but more to come on some interesting topics that came out the conference.