Cinco de Rails
By Steph Skardal
May 6, 2009
Today was my first day of sessions at @railsconf. In fact, it was my first time at a technical conference and RailsConf. And because I am a relatively new to Rails development, I took away a plethora of information. I wrote down some notes on things I want to read, investigate, and research more about after the conference.
1) History of Rails Critics
David Heinemeier Hansson’s keynote touched on how it’s interesting to look back at some of the initial and ongoing rails critiques, such as “Ruby/Rails isn’t scalable”, “Rails isn’t enterprise-ready”, etc. and how arguments in support of Rails have grown stronger over time with the maturity of the platform. I’d like to spend some more time looking into some of these comments to be more aware of these issues.
2) Rails 3 Release
Anticipation builds in the Rails community for the announcement of Rails 3. I just recently joined the Rails development community in January and hadn’t heard of the Rails vs. Merb debate until recently. I am interested in learning more about Merb and the background of the Rails/Merb merge.
3) PostRank
Appealing to my search engine optimization background, “social media measuring” offered at PostRank essentially applies the PageRank algorithm to the social web medium. These articles bring users what they measure to be the most credible measured by engagement. The Google: High Performance chat was presented by the PostRank founder. As social engagement becomes an increasingly important area on the web, this is an interesting company / business model I’d like to watch.
4) Yehuda Katz
I’ve heard many mentions of Yehuda Katz. He’s very involved in the Rails space and someone to keep up to date with.
5) railstips.org
One of the recipients of this year’s Ruby heroes award runs railstips.org, a great site for tutorials and development information. Adaptability and learning new things is a necessity as a consultant, and I’m always interested in finding new ways to learn more Rails.
6) Compass / Sass
With the release of Spree 0.8.0 (yesterday) came the integration of compass and sass. I went to the Birds of a Feather session on Compass and Sass integration and came away wanting to learn more about what distinguishes CSS from Sass and about how we can make use of the great functionality offered by Sass to benefit the Spree project. I’m going to check out this Sass screencast and hope to spend some time improving Spree’s implementation of Sass.
7) Google Page Rank
I heard great things about the talk about Google: High Performance Computing in Rails, but did not attend. This talk was summarized by a coworker as a “few lines of ruby to implement the google Page Rank algorithm”. Even though I missed it, I’m excited to check out the slides here.
8) Active Scaffold
I had a short discussion from an employee of PostRank who works in blog development. We briefly discussed the functionality/troubles around integrating a CMS into Spree. He recommended looking into Active Scaffold.
9) Advanced Git Techniques
One of my coworkers attended a presentation on advanced Git techniques and walked away happy. He mentioned it was a lot of information, and the notes are posted here. End Point’s open source projects on GitHub—I’m always open to learning more tips to help me keep my Git repositories clean.
- Rails Envy
Gregg Pollack is putting up videos from RailsConf at RailsEnvy. I want to make sure I catch these, whether it’s during the conference or later on.
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