RailsConf is over now. It ended on a strong, though short, day. For me, it began with Obie Fernandez of HashRocket (and author of The Rails Way) showing us all the “worst rails code you’ve ever seen.” I was worried that I wouldn’t follow the talk because I’m not yet as far along on some planned Rails projects as I had expected, but the examples were clear, he explained the issues simply, and showed the proper approaches.
Rick Bradley of OG Consulting talked about “waxing ballroom floors on the Titanic,” stories about the challenges of doing Rails work “in the enterprise.” The best part for me? The “Can’t Chart” that shows all the organizational impediments to actually achieving your goals.
Adam Keys of Five Runs gave a very personal talk about failures, and how he’s learned from them and changed as a result. An interesting talk about the examples and maturation in general.
And my final session at the conference was Chris Selmer of Intridea, and Josh Owens of the Web 2.0 Show, telling us about Rails Rumble, a contest where teams of up to four people had 48 hours to build and deploy an application. It sounded like a lot of fun, if you don’t need sleep.
The official conference closing was a keynote panel of the core Rails developers. It was low key, but interesting to hear them all together.
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