RubyEnRails 2007
Last Thursday was the second RubyOnRails conference in the Netherlands. Conveniently, it was four minutes walking from my apartment in Amsterdam. RubyEnRails was organized and sponsored by recruitment companies that have RubyOnRails fever. The main sponsor was Adnexus the company by Brett Dawkins, a very active Dutch RoR scener.
Conference day
The conference was opened by Dr Nic Williams who gave two nice lectures that day. I knew Dr Nic because he has a nice blog and made nice comments about my Shuriken script. It appears Dr Nic is very fond of extending the syntax of Ruby by using 'magic' tricks like methodmissing or constmissing.
There were about 200 people at the conference. There was a mixed audience of PHP developers, Java developers and Sysop gothics. Also there was a fair percentage of recruiters, some of them with no clue. What really surprised me was the low amount of people that had actual production experience with rails. I suspect there weren't more than 20. During the lunch break, Dr Nic even admitted that he codes Java for a living.
Interesting cases
There were two interesting real-life cases nonetheless:
- Wakoopa.com, a 'what software do you use' social networking site by Robert Gaal (blueace.nl)
- Nedap's MovesOnRails, a health-care planning application by the Dutch Devices Factory Corp (Nederlandse Apparatenfabriek).
Also, I had a fruitful conversation with the director of Nedforce, someone who really does have a clue.
Noted techniques
These are some things that I heard and are more or less new to me:
- BackgrounDRB a distrubuted ruby job scheduler for rails
- Asset Packager a rails plugin that compresses your CSS/JavaScript
- multi-page (MovesOnRails) They invented this thing that allows you to navigate your layouts like a book. Still waiting for some code though.
Noted tools
- monit server monitoring tool
- munin server monitoring tool
- pingdom.com server monitoring tool 2.0, with SMS notification which is nice for in Europe
- mailroom a webapp that facilitates mail interaction with team and customers (not quite sure what it is yet, but people like it)
