Arun Gupta, Miles to go ...

Rails Conf 2009 Day 3 Trip Report

Attended a great talk by Michael Bleigh on Twitter on Rails. He has built a gem, TwitterAuth, that uses Twitter as authentication provider (OAuth or HTTP Basic) which allows to to quickly and easily create Twitter applications in Rails. In Michael's words "TwitterAuth makes Twitter Rails apps stupid simple".

The talk built Twistener - a Twitter application in Rails that shows how many tweepl are having a conversation about you. A hosted version of the application is available at twisteners.heroku.com. The slides and  end result of the code are always helpful.

In a post-talk conversation he mentioned that all the gems are pure Ruby. Any body willing to re-build the application and trying using JRuby and GlassFish ?

And then attended Rails 3: Stepping off of the Golden Path by a "morally loose, cheese eating surrender monkey", aka Matt Aimonetti :)

What are you going to get in Rails 3 ?

• Improved performance
• Increased modularity 
• Agnosticism (choose any JS framework)
• Public API
• Mountable Apps

• More flexible, Less opinionated
• Templating engines: HAML and ERB are the big ones.
• ORM: ActiveRecord, DataMapper
• Adapaters: RDBMS, File Ssytem, IMAP, YAML, REST APIs, Custom APIs
• Sequel: Prepared statement, Sharding, highly customization SQL
• Use Hibernate with either ActionORM, JRuby
• Ability to talk to Non RDBMS Systems; GAE, CouchDB, Redis, Tokyo Cabinet, etc

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Rails Conf 2009 Day 3 - Chris's Keynote

An informal survey this morning at Rails Conf 2009 keynote showed:

40% Rails developers in startup
30% Rails developers in consulting
30% Rails developers work in internal projects

Engine Yard got a sponsor keynote slot and announced Flex - a cloud computing platform on EC2 to host Rails applications. They also showed one-button self-healing clusters. One of the speakers was particularly scared (reminds me of my early days) and IRC#railsconf had a pool of $125 to hug him on the stage :) Anyway, read more details here.

The highlight of the morning was keynote by Chris Wanstrath (@defunkt). I took multiple notes during the keynote but the  transcript has all the details. The first part of the talk has good tips on how to create a successful blog such as blog personality, template, killer name and a sleek design, sparse side bar, consistency and structure, and many others.

There was a good bashing of SourceForge towards 60% in the talk. Chris gave a suggestion to SourceForge:

They should cut their registration process down to a single page, remove the 200 character "please host my project" plea, be more lenient on the categorization, suggest an open source license for you, then allow you to change any of these things after your project has been created.

And there are other interesting ones too. Read the full text and enjoy!

Here were some of the Q&As at the end of keynote ...

Q. What was your inspiration for github ?
A. Inspiration is coding, doing open source software all the time, downloading patches, relative paths were getitng in the way to coding. Source forge registration page is too long. github is very simple for anything code related that you want to put there.

Q. You develop these interesting pieces of software, have a job, play guitar, create pieces of music, drum music, how you do this in one lifetime ?
A. I outsource most of it. All of us do it, I post my music and code on the Internet, watch a lot of TV. I'm into sharing on github. Don't have a better work ethic, just talk a lot.

Q. What do you watch on the TV  ?
A. Legend of the secret

Q. Built a bunch of tools used by non-Rubyists, how can we promote Ruby there ?
A. RubyGems is one reason I fell in love with Ruby. Remove the friction and lower the barrier to entry.

Q. Focus github around the code/community, it helps around the people, opposite of Source Forge/Ruby Forge
A. Github is like facebook for code development.

Technorati: conf railsconf git github lasvegas rubyonrails

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