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by Daniel Berger.
Original Post: Final RailsConf 2007 Notes
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Best talks/speakers of the RailsConf 2007 that I saw, in no particular order:
Clean Code - Robert Martin (aka Uncle Bob)
Spam I Have Known - Jim Weirich
Memcaching Rails - Chris Wanstrath
The rest of the talks I went to ranged from so-so to bad, including one no-show (oof). In one case, the talk was good but was aimed at beginners. I don't know why they didn't tag the talks this year so that we would know what the level of the talks would be. I suggested it last year (both in person and on the RailsConf suggestion site) after RailsConf 2006. Rich seemed to think it was a good idea. Audrey Eschright echoes the same sentiment:
One of the things that seemed to trigger at least some of the complaints was content at a lower skill level (or higher-level summary) than the attendees expected. O’Reilly could do a lot to help participants find the content they want, by asking speakers to grade the target level for their talk, then including that information in the schedule.
There's also a lot of talk about the general nonsense going on in the #railsconf irc channel during the talks. Again, from Audrey's journal:
There’s a key rule at open space events like BarCamp, called the Law of Two Feet. If you aren’t getting any value from the presentation or discussion you’re in, then you need to go elsewhere and find something that is of more interest.
Gosh, sound familiar? Put your damn laptops away during talks.
But, all that nonsense aside, I can say I had a good time at the conference. That being said, I probably won't be back next year because my Rails days are coming to a close at $WORK (which I didn't know until after I had already signed up). I'll still be doing Ruby, and maybe I'll write a Rails based replacement for the RAA someday, but my MVC days are over for now.
I'm not that sad about it really. It's not that I don't like Rails - I do - it's that I'm burned out on web development in general. In my particular case I was the only member working on the project. That meant I had to deal with all the UI issues, which just isn't fun. I'm not a web designer, nor do I have any aspirations to be one. Being forced into that role eventually sucked the fun out of web development altogether.
That being said, I'm considering submitting a talk next year on optimizing ActiveRecord for Oracle. :)
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