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by Daniel Berger.
Original Post: RailsConf 2007 Stuff
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Yes, I'm back from Thailand. More on that later. Right now I'm at RailsConf 2007.
So far this conference has mostly been good, but I've quickly learned that I do not like large conferences. They're expensive, impersonal, and the food is invariably bad. This leads me to Dan's Rule of Conferences #1: The larger they are, the worse the food service is. Next time just deduct the cost of the food and I'll just go to Subway. It's cheaper and, frankly, better than the stuff they've been serving in the boxes here. By comparison the meals at the various (much smaller) Ruby conferences have been well catered affairs.
I've also learned, at this particular conference, to target the best speakers instead of aiming for content that might be useful for $WORK. I think Jim Weirich's "Spam I Have Known" talk was the best so far, despite having no practical application to Rails whatsoever.
Uncle Bob's talk on "Clean Code" was also pretty good. Bob presents lots of good principles as far as keeping your code clean. Unfortunately he falls into the typical trap that most Java (or ex-Java) programmers fall into, i.e. ivory tower construction. Note to Bob: creating wide class hierarchies is not the same thing as clean code. You're just moving the mess sideways. Especially when you're talking about something as straightforward as an option parser.
The keynotes Friday night were awesome. I had no idea who Ze Frank was before last night but I do now. I was actually chatting with him and another guy for a while. I only realized later who he was.
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