RailsConf closed up last Sunday afternoon and after three-hour drive back and day of work to contemplate, here's what I've boiled it down to:
The Good:
I met a ton of people this year. Last year I went with a co-worker and we pretty much stuck together. This year I was on my own and made a concerted effort to just meet folks. By the end of the conference I couldn't go more than about fifteen minutes without running into someone I had previously met. I ordered a fresh batch of Moo cards before I left and I was hell-bent to hand as many out as I could. Just meeting people turned out to be my favorite part of the conference.
The Kent Beck address was fantastic. I've had the fortune earlier in my career to work at a company that had Kent come out and run XP workshops with us. Those experiences left a last impression on me (much like Chad Fowler expressed in the introduction) and so I was eager to hear his talk after seeing him on the roster. While his main content probably dragged for a bit, the Q & A ended with a bang. The answer he gave to the final question expressing a mixture of hope and concern brought the crowd to its feet. Go on, Kent.
There were a couple of presentations I went to that I though really knocked it out of the park. In some cases the material alone saved the day (in spite of the presenters) and in a few other cases the two came together nicely. I thought some of these presentations were particularly good:
- "Facebook Development and Performance with Rails" – Mike Mangino
- "The Launch: Do's and Don'ts of Real-life Deploys" – Chris Wanstrath
- "Assembling Pages Last: Edge Caching, ESI & Rails" – Aaron Batalion
- "Skynet: A Ruby Map/Reduce Framework" – Adam Pisoni
- "Vertebra" – Ezra Zygmuntowicz
- "Advanced ActiveRecord Techniques: Best Practice Refactoring" – Chad Pytel
The Bad:
Sadly, a number of the presentations were pretty lacking. Now I think presenting is just plain hard and very few people are good at it. Keynote helps a bit, but really it's a crutch for people who don't have good public speaking skills (which I'm not necessarily claiming I have). Really exceptional content can help overcome the stylistic short-comings of a particular speaker, but I think that's rare. I think it's pretty easy to lose an audience quickly if your material can't shine in the way you present it.
Since I have another year of Ruby and Rails experience under my belt, many more of the talks just really didn't do anything for me. That's why I'm psyched that the RailsConf team has decided to incorporate Caboose Conf as the "hallway track" in next year's meeting. I think that's the track I'll be taking next year. I did a lot of ingesting this year, next year I'd really like to produce more.
The Style Report:
Apparently the black t-shirt is king in the Rails community. Something like 99% of all attendees had black t-shirts on. Of the free t-shifts to be had, the GitHub tees were the only ones that weren't black. All of the others were red on black. So apparently the new black is, well, black. I'm hoping that nuclear orange makes a comeback next year. All-black is just a little too Depeche Mode for me.
Portland:
Portland deserves special mention because I just flat-out love that city. Besides Seattle, it's probably the only other city I would choose to live in. One of the highlights of experiencing the local flair was getting involved in the 1000-person "doughnut march" held by Portland's beloved Voodoo Doughnuts. Somehow they convinced officials to get a parade permit and police escort as they crossed from their Pearl District digs to their new shop in East PDX. It was a very "Portland" experience with a whole crowd of folks letting their freak-flags fly high.
The big treat at the end was the bacon maple-bar. I'm not kidding folks, this is real and it's freakin' brilliant. So hear this Chad Fowler and the rest of the RailsConf committee, please don't move this to Vegas! Besides, can you imagine putting a bunch of hygienically-challenged nerds in 100-degree heat in a desert? That is simply not a good idea.