The ELC Community Blog

A knowledge exchange on Ruby on Rails and Agile Development

RailsConf day 2 - Presentations galore

by Ryan Garver on September 19, 2007

And so day 2 of RailsConf Europe begins. Unlike Monday, which was mainly tutorial, today started the real meat of the conference: the sessions.

The day started out with a Keynote by DHH. The majority of his presentation was focused around the new features that will be appearing in Rails 2.0. He went back to the original Rails screencast from about two and a half years ago and then recreated it using the new tools and features in Rails Edge. This was very entertaining to see because my introduction to Rails came from that screencast.

I gave my presentation during the second session of the day. The talk was on remote 3rd party integration. Things went well and I got a ton of great questions. The audience was pretty small (less than 10), so I had pretty much everyone contributing after my presentation. I blame Dr. Nic for the lack of people because of his wildly popular talk that overlapped with mine ;)

Britt Selvitelle from Twitter gave a good talk on some of the scaling challenges that he and his colleagues have faced and how they approached finding solutions. I strongly agree with one of the comments that he made about premature scaling. Spending too much time scaling for demand before you need it will keep you from releasing your full feature set. That is much worse than not being scaled in time for your first spike. You still need to finish the thing.

The day was finished off with the keynotes. ELC Technologies own Jonathan Siegel led off with a short and well received talk which covered some of his recent market research which validated Rails readiness for the enterprise. He only had 15 minutes for his talk, but it went well. This was shortly followed by a presentation by Roy Fielding. This was a very interesting talk about the origins of REST (you'll recognize the name as the author of the PhD thesis that defined REST), and put it in context of the evolution of the web and the surrounding standards like HTTP and URL, which he was directly involved in.

After the keynotes, we headed down to the lobby where the hotel lounge was packed with Railsers. ThoughtWorks opened up the bar for the conference attendees until the BoF sessions later that evening. Let's just say that this evening was a bit more relaxing than the last few nights while I was preparing for my talk.