I’ll write more on this later, but just wanted to drop a quick note on MountainWest RubyConf 2009, which I went to last weekend in Salt Lake City. I really loved the conference, and hope it continues to grow. I like that they don’t pack the conference with alot of expensive frills, and just basically focus on providing content. Here’s my quick takeaways:
- Wow…lots of Macs. I feel like an endangered species here with my Windows laptop.
- James Edward Gray II: we should be reading more code than we write. No one would think much of a writer who didn’t read much.
- Sequel looks really cool. Jeremy Evans, who is the creator, gave this presentation. I have been just using DBI and sending SQL queries “natively”, but I really like the way Sequel Rubifies database access.
- Jeremy McAnally was hilarious – and I learned some things too, but need to re-look at my notes to remember what those things were.
- Ben Mabey gave an interesting talk on Cucumber…I’m still a little fuzzy on how it differs from RSpec, or what domain it occupies vs. RSpec…but I’ll definitely look into it further. The RSpec book covers Cucumber as well, so I’m sure I’ll delve deeper. Besides, any framework named after vegetation can’t be all bad.
- Philippe Hanrigou spoke about learning lessons from Smalltalk…in a greater sense, he spoke of learning from the masters, which I think is a cool topic. I think we can learn from everyone who comes before us, and learning about DaVinci can make us better Ruby coders. Weird, huh.
All in all, a great experience. Some of it went over my head, and some was Rails-specific. But much of the conference was really useful, and I look forward to going back next year. Maybe I’ll see you there.
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