RailsConf 2015 for the non-Attendee
By Steph Skardal
April 28, 2015
This blog post is really for myself. Because I had the unique experience of bringing a baby to a conference, I made an extra effort to talk to other attendees about what sessions shouldn’t be missed. Here are the top takeaways from the conference that I recommend (in no particular order):
- Watch DHH’s Keynote
- … and Aaron Patterson Keynote
- Watch Kent Beck’s Keynote
- Amelia Bedelia Learns to Code, by Kylie Stradley, was a popular talk from day 1. Video link forthcoming.
- Watch Shipping Ruby Apps with Docker by Bryan Helmkamp. This video was strongly recommended before jumping into Docker, which was a trendy topic in dev-ops talks.
- Watch Justin Searls’ talk Sometimes a Controller is Just a Controller.
- Watch Sandi Metz’s talk Nothing is Something.
- Read this book by Don Norman if you care about UX. Joe Mastey recommended it in his talk, Bringing UX to Your Code.
- Yehuda Katz & Tom Dale’s talk, How Rust Helped us Write Better Ruby was standing room only. Video link forthcoming. Also check out their fireside chat on Ember.js.
- Riding Rails for 10 Years by John Duff gives a great history of the evolution of Rails in the Shopify codebase.
Right now, the videos are all unedited from the Confreaks live stream of the keynote/main room, and I’ll update as the remaining videos become available.
A Message From the Sponsors
My husband: My conferences never have giveaways that cool.
Me: That’s because you work in academia.
You can read the full list of sponsors here, but I wanted to comment further:
Hired was the diamond sponsor this year and they ran a ping pong tournament. The winner received $2000, and runners up received $1000, $500, $250. The final match was heavily attended and competitive! Practice up for next year?
Engine Yard also put on a really fun scavenger hunt using Scavify. Since I couldn’t attend the multiple parties going on at night, this was a really fun way to participate and socialize.
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