Life is grand

The European Ruby on Rails conference 2006 has come and gone. Day 2 felt like the conference was just starting to get going from a bit of a slow day 1 starter. Either I picked better on day 2 or the quality really was up from the first day. Do I recommend the conference? I do. It is the only Rails conference out there and you do learn a good deal. I do think it could be improved though. Better vetting of talkers and their presentations without loosing some of the wild and free nature (seriously, how many times do you have a talker at a conference drinking Stella and swearing like a sailor?) I think O’Reilly will do this for next year, bringing some needed professionalism to the conference without killing it.

Here is a list of notes from various blogs on each talk:

• Katy Sierra and David Hansson get it all going (anyone got a good write-up? I was a bit late)
• Unobtrusive Ajax with Rails by Dann Webb (code and slides)
• Rails Speaks C by David Goodland*** (slides)
• Integrating Asterisk and Rails by Evan Henshaw-Plath***
• Revolutionizing the Airline Industry with Rails by Soren Burkhart
• Managing a High Performance Rails App by James Cox
• Capistrano by Jamis Buck***
• Building accessible web interfaces with Rails***
• All you ever wanted to know about Routing by Luca Mearell***
• Securing Rails by Alex Payne***
• Going off the Rails with Ruby by Eleanor McHugh***
• Real application development with Radrails by Katt Kent
• Database engineering and Rails by David A. Black***
• Polymorphism as a design pattern for social software by Gavin Bell***
• A systems view of Ruby on Rails applications by Jason Hoffman (slides)
• Cross-pollination from Django by Simon Willison***
• Localisation of Rails Apps by Till Vollmer***
• Delivering the answers to 82ASK by Paul Butcher***
• Adventures in JavaScript Testing by Thomas Fuchs (slides)
• Ruby for Java programmers by Ugo Cei***
• Panel discussion and David’s rant***
• Safe Ruby by Jim Weirich
• Splat and Why
• nouvelobs.com ecommerce and search with Rails by Gwendal Rou (slides)
• How I turned my Bank job into a Rails playground by Rany Keddo***
• Database optimization by Hussein Worsy***
• RoR against the Machine by Sean O’Halpin***
• Optimising MySQL for Rails by Jan Kneschke***
• HAML by Hampton Catlin
• A cheeky Wiki on Rails by David Anderson***
• Janitors on Rails by Lauri Jutila***
• Rails and unicode by Dominic Mitchel
• JRuby on Rails by Charles Nutter***
• Final talk by James Duncan Davidson and Dave Thomas.

*** means I haven’t found a decent post on that talk. If you know of one please email it to me and I will put it in. Speakers are also welcome to send me their presentations and I’ll host it here.

There will also be videos up of the main talks from the organisers in the coming weeks.

Next year the conference will be 17th, 18th and 19th of September in Berlin, Germany. See you there.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 16th, 2006 at 1:23 am and is filed under Ruby on Rails, Event, Conference, AAA, Rails, railsconf, railsconf europe, 2006. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.