Fear And Loathing At RailsConf 2009

We were around Barstow on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold... wait, that was someone else's story. OK, restart.

We were around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the excitement began to take hold... we were on our way to RailsConf 2009! No screaming bats, just loud pumping techno music to power the PT Cruiser. My designer, who was not old enough to be pouring beer on his chest, nor interested in facilitating the tanning process, said "What the hell are you yelling about?". I aimed the Cruiser toward the horizon without slowing down, "I need an In-n-Out milkshake."

Las Vegas... what a place. Putting RailsConf there is the sort of idea that makes sense on paper, but could turn a previously mild-mannered group of Ruby programmers into a mob of raging lunatics. Come to think of it, a group of Ruby programmers IS a mob of raging lunatics. Case in point? Video slot machines... the worst odds in vegas, but the best graphics. How will a group of perpetually partially attentive people be able to resist the siren call of millions of sensory distractions each designed to exert psychological pressure to LOOK AT ME? Seems like an interesting Milgram-like experiment.

The back of the PT Cruiser was full of musical gear for the RailsConf music jam. With a small but effective PA and a few spare guitars, this session should be the best one yet. Could we play Vegas? Without offending the locals, or running afoul of some Musician's Union enforcers, that is.

I had meant to keep meticulous notes, and post a flurry of blog entries as I have done as RailsConf's past. But the dull fog of Vegas combined with the mad dog sentiments already awakened in the Rails community at GoGaRuCo, left me with the sure knowledge that no matter how hard I might try to offend the insiders, no one would even notice with the continuous drunken flame wars that RailsConf Vegas would become quickly known for throughout the Twitterverse.

The madness had taken hold long before we hit Vegas, and adding alcohol and neon fueled hyperstimulation only had the effect of pushing us into a raging frenzy. "Tim Ferris? How DARE he tell ME to exercise. Bob Martin? How dare he accuse me of not testing? Everyone else? How dare they dare to dare, or else how dare they not dare to dare! Forgeddaboutit!"

Just then my already tenuous sanity began teetering, and I started yelling that the White Rabbit and I had been pair programming together for years. The wild-eyed activist within me leaped into action, and I practically elbowed people out of my way to get to the mic, to ask Uncle Bob the burning question on my mind: "What happened to the social revolution you started with Kent Beck and Ward Cunningham?"

From the look in his eyes, I know the question haunted him, just as it still haunts me. If this is the utopia, why are we all fighting so much? "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked..." and still Twittering away trying to validate justify, explain, strengthen, while simultaneously eroding it, tearing it away.

I had to escape, find a place to hide and collect my shattered illusions. Fortunately, the safety zone of CabooseConf greeted me. The comfort and sanity of watching my programming buddies hacking together an LLVM implementation for AVR was like slipping under a warm, soft blanket, after the frenzy that had started while I was sitting in the Reptile Room, watching some giant lizards get ready to feast on fresh ideas.

Days had passed, but in the strange netherworld between Vegas's clockless existence, and the constant Twitter flow of new input, I had lost all sense of temporality. It was a surprise that we had already come to the final keynote aka Q&A session. It was an odd demonstration of our shared exhaustion and sensory overload, that pretty much no one wanted to ask any questions.

"Time to get out of here!" I said to my designer. We piled the PT Cruiser full of our gear, plying the staff with dollar bills like we were mythical high-rollers. I drove like the wind, but it was not quickly enough. Leaving behind a cloud of gritty, baked dust, we fled from a man-made 24-hour spectacle that even Dante could have never imagined, even if he had taken all the drugs available to an Italian in the 14th century at the same time.

With apologies to, and in memory of HST, we need his free spirit now more than ever

Prepare For The RailsConf 2009 Jam Session

I will be running the music BOF at RailsConf 2009 in Las Vegas. What does that mean? We're gonna get down. All styles will be represented, so if you have an instrument or a voice, bring it.

We have a Google group started here.

RailsConf 2008 - Day 2

Day 2 of RailsConf 2008 began with a keynote from Jeremy Kemper, uber-committer and now main man behind Ruby on Rails. According to the brief introduction by DHH, Jeremy did around one third of the Rails 1.0 release himself, cares deeply about the "whole thing", and has been busy helping get RoR running on Ruby 1.9 and other platforms.

That must explain why Jeremy kept yawning incessantly during his presentation... he is the reason DHH is able to get more sleep! There was some speculation that Jeremy was actually suffering from a hangover... I have no idea, I was asleep the night before.

Anyhow, Jeremy gave an overview of going from Rails 1.0 to the new 2.1 release. Basically, in his opinion 1.2 was "out for a while and got stale". In 2.0, we got all these foxy and sexy things, plus shed a lot of fat and gained speed. But the real story was the growth of the movement behind Rails from a fairly small group of core people, to a massive community of interested contributors. Here are some amazing stats:

From the 2.0 release in Dec 2007 to the 2.1 release in June 2008

> 1400 contributors (Trac, Lighthouse, and Github users combined... obviously a bunch are duplicates, but even 450+ is a large number!)
> 1600 patches
> 9000 comments

I cannot imagine the chaos of having THAT MANY people harassing me over getting their pet patches into the Rails trunk. No wonder they seem a little preoccupied... they are actually thinking about how many patches that will have to reviewed by later tonight! Much respect to the team just for dealing with that many crazed developers. This is to a large extent the key benefit of moving RoR on to Github: the much easier process of managing all these people's contributions.

Here are a few brief highlights of the new 2.1 features:

* New merged migrations - helps deal with keeping migrations synched throughout the development team. It does this by a new naming system, and now making sure that all unapplied migrations have been handled, instead of the old simple schema_info table, RoR now keeps track of all migrations, and makes sure that all migrations have been applied

* Time zone support - there were several plugins for time zone support. RoR has now included a fairly simple way of handling this with some baked in logic that extends both the Time class as well as some new ActiveSupport hotness.

* Ruby gem dependencies - now you can specify exactly which gems and versions are needed for your Rails app, instead of playing "one of these gems is not like the others" when trying to install or deploy a Rails app.

* Memcache - support for the ultra powerful memcache is now baked in, making fragment caching work nicely... made memcache a first class member of framework, and the memcache client is now bundled with the code distribution.

* ActiveRecord Dirty - now a way of track what has changed in a AR instance. This improves performance slightly by eliminating unnecessary database writes, but even more importantly results in much cleaner log files.

* Smarter :include - avoids combinatorial explosion with out of control includes, that result in too many left outer joins on every DB access. Instead, will just perform two queries to DB, with resulting database performance improvements. For example:

Msg.find(:all, :include => :user) # two queries
Msg.find(:all, :include => :user, :order_by => 'users.created_at) # uses outer join

* Named scopes - with complex models, you will have repeated convenience associations. For example:

user.recent_messages

You would prefer:

user.messages.recent

especially if you can pick it up "for free". Here is a tiny example:

class User
 has_many :messages
 ...
end

class Messages
 named_scope :recent, :order => 'created_by DESC'
 ...http://www2.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif
end

An Embarrassment Of Riches In Ruby VM-land
Rails is now running in (milestone achieved just before the conference, thanks to heroic efforts by John Lam, and the rest of what is a very under-appreciated team within the Ruby community at-large). Rails has been running in JRuby for months. Also, RoR has been running in Rubinius since about two weeks before RailsConf.

And adding to the fun, Ruby 1.87 is now released, which includes a bunch of performance related backports from the once and future Ruby 1.9 release.

Just to show all of this multi-platform hotness, Jeremy did a little Rails 2.1 demo, showing the a minimal Rails app running on JRuby, Rubinius, and Ruby 1.9. That was amazing really, that we are actually here. Sure, Rubinius was kinda slow at starting up, but it worked, that is what counts.

Ruby 1.9 on Rails
Yes, you can actually run Rails on Ruby 1.9, at least somewhat. ruby-1.9 script/server

In Ruby 1.9, string encoding is huge change. According to Jeremy, 1.9 looks really fast... despite no formal benchmarks. He sees modest performance improvements on typical pages, and really notices it on bigger ERB pages. The typical page is about 20% faster. He says all rails tests are running on ruby 1.9.

Despite all of the yawning, I was not put to sleep at all by seeing some cool new Rails features, and even more importantly a few huge milestones in the Ruby VM race.

"Getting Git" - Scott Chacon
The keynote was good, but it had only whetted my appetite for even more substance. After a tip from a friend, I went to check out Scott Chacon's presentation on git. If you knew nothing about git, this was not the place for you. Scott really got into the internals of git, which many of us found captivating.

The room was pretty packed, and the crowd was held in rapt attention. Several of us remarked afterwards that it was the most organized presentation we had ever seen. It somewhat mimicked the format used during Dick Hardt's presentation on "Identity 2.0" at OSCON 2005, if you have seen that one. Each section of the presentation was precisely timed, and amount of material covered was massive. I took copious notes, but there was no way to try to capture that much info. Check it out online here, if you want to dive deeply into the glory that is git.


"Advanced RESTful Rails" - Ben Scofield

Next, I went to Ben Scofield's presentation on REST. Surprisingly a lot of people are not yet using REST. Or if they are, there appears to be some confusion over exactly how to implement things correctly. It was a decent presentation, but "Intermediate" would have been slightly more accurate. I mean, where was the discussion about polymorphic RESTful controllers? Now THAT would have been advanced.

It was still a good, if not great presentation. Ben knows what he is talking about, I would just suggest raising the bar as far as use of the word "advanced". That suggestion applies across the board to all RailsConf presentations.

"StoryRunner" - David Chemlisky

David Chelimsky is the closest thing we have to a test guru in the Ruby community. Here I am using the word guru in a precise way, "any person who counsels or advises; mentor". No single person has had as much impact on introducing best test practices like behavior-driven development to the Ruby community. Even the way that plain old test-driven development is done, is heavily influenced by RSpec. Not to mention the clones like Test::Spec and shoulda. All of the cooler projects I work on have test specs, and not just unit tests. The projects that I work on that are not as precisely thought out, turn out to not have test specs, but only unit tests.

Coincidence? I think not. The reason for going through the process of really defining what is to be done is to provide a common understanding between the people in the project. But if that was the whole story, BDUF might work. The problem is you need to apply test-driven development principals to the specifications themselves in your project, not just the code. And you need to be doing this as the project goes on, not just once in the beginning.

Behavior-driven development is about closing the gap between the "customer" (the system/site/application user, if you work in something other than a consulting firm) and the "developer" (that would be you). And that is where StoryRunner comes in.

StoryRunner makes it easy to create a kind of simple parser for a very english language oriented, simple text based way to write specs, requiring far less structure that the current RSpec format. It is really like a DSL that customers can use themselves to define their needs. As David put it, "Ruby code is very readable, but you will not be getting customers to send you emails with new requirements in the form of Ruby code."

So BDD is about helping the customer/user formalize their thoughts about exactly what solution they need. Can you imaging a future, where an initial RFP is put out in the form of test specs? That might provide a lot better basis for estimating, than the pages and pages of static docs that seem to still be getting cranked out inside large development organizations.

Have the requirements been changing? Just do a diff on the specs. There are so many advantages to this approach, that once you get the customer "spec-obsessed", just like developers who become "test-obsessed" the game is totally changed. You can't go back, at least willingly.

David talked about a couple of other tools that fit nicely in the RSpec stack. One very cool way to use it for full-stack integration testing is using Webrat. Another is doing true browser testing using Selenium-RC. David showed a demo of this, and remarked on how happy it made customers to be able to actually see their web site being tested, not just get the results back.

Note that RSpec is for use with Ruby, not just Rails, so if you are using Merb or Sinatra, or whatever, you can still write test specs using RSpec and StoryRunner.

Keynote - Kent Beck
During Chad Fowler's introduction, Chad said he was "like one of the superdelegates, getting to cast his vote about what we would get for presentations regardless of what we thought we wanted." All I can say is, Chad, keep it up. Some of these people might not get it, but if they continue to stay in this game long enough, they will.

At last, the moment I had been waiting for, and the biggest attraction for me personally in the RailsConf 2008 schedule: Kent Beck, one of the extremes, the Saturday night keynote.

Kent's presentation on the surface appeared highly informal, just a bunch of stories. It actually consisted of a serious of overlapping arcs on three topics that he knows a little about, because he helped create them: test-driven development, design patterns, and Extreme Programming. These stories took place over a 20 year timeline, stretching back to the origins of the work that the whole Rails community indirectly rides on today. This was before a bunch of RailsConf attendees were born, or at best were still in diapers.

I was pretty immersed in Kent's storytelling. I was too young to have been part of that original movement, but I'm old enough to want to learn all I can from the great masters, before they are all retired or just inaccessible. Amazing to have access to a couple of the extremes, like Ward Cunningham who was just hanging out on Day 1, at a fairly small conference like RailsConf, where most of the people do not even know who they are. For me, it is like a dream come true. If a bunch of other people are passing up the equivalent of intellectual caviar to stuff themselves with potato chips, well, good for them.

Enough ranting, back to Kent's "Tales to His Grandson". The unifying theme that emerged to me was that Kent is a true 60's radical who chose software as his weapon of choice to use in order to achieve social change. Like many great thinkers, Kent is a reader of books. Yes, those old things. Here are a few that he specifically mentioned that were instrumental in the development of his philosophies:

Christopher Alexander - "The Timeless Way Of Building"

Robert Mankoff - "The Naked Cartoonist: A New Way to Enhance Your Creativity"

Dr. Frank Luntz - "WORDS THAT WORK: IT'S NOT WHAT YOU SAY, IT'S WHAT PEOPLE HEAR"

The last question in the Q&A was really telling. When asked "do you think that you accomplished the political changes you set out to?" he responded that "No, he had not. And that he really did not fully understand why". Oh, those idealistic baby boomers! Kent, you may not have achieved all you set out to do directly, but the forces you set in motion are still going. Even though many of the attendees at RailsConf do not know you, they have grown up in a world where they expect more freedom and openness, and that is in part thanks to you, and fighting the good fight back then. Thanks, Kent, for staying true to the movement.

RailsConf - The Jam Session
After that very high level of intellectual brilliance, what could possibly top it off? How about a fantastic musical jam session. Chad had arranged the Musical BoF, and somehow Jim Weirich had talked a very generous and cool local music store into loaning him a perfectly playable acoustic guitar. Chad had his ukulele, Andrea Wright a recorder, and Dan Tripp, a portable folding guitar. I had brought a couple of my harmonicas with me, though not enough, of course. There were a bunch of other fun musical things, like a flute, and an impromptu Brazilian song or two from actual Brazilians. Not to mention a very creative approach toward an impromptu percussion setup by Forrest Chang.

Anyhow, great fun was had by all! We are already planning the RubyConf 2008 Jam, so it you will be coming, bring your ax! I will commit right now to the Dead Programmer Society helping sponsor having some instruments and/or PA system... plus some beer!

As I headed back to my room, I felt the smug contentment that comes from having had a really good time. Thanks everyone, for having made RailsConf 2008 "worth it" by the end of Day 2. Day 3 was still coming, and would have a few surprises of its own...

RailsConf 2008 - Day 1

As RailsConf 2008 - Day 1 began, there was no avoiding a sense of just how large the community was growing. With over 2000 attendees, the physical presence was bigger than ever. But, unlike the first two conferences, the growth of the community had triggered inexorable changes. Unbeknownst to most attendees at RailsConf 2008, a rebel alliance had formed itself. The caboo.se crew, longtime Ruby on Rails committers, had decided to stick it to the MAN. Or as Courteney put it:

In May, if you don't want to cough up almost a thousand dollars to go learn things you already know, but want to come to Portland to network with skilled Rails coders from all over the world, instead of hanging out in the lobby at the Lloyd Center like I did last year, come to Caboose Conf.

The spawning impulse must have been too great for the cool kids. They were heavily conflicted when O'Reilly took over for RailsConf 2007. Not being one of them, I can only surmise how they felt. But no one likes to pay for something that once was free. And it is unpleasant to have a bunch of strangers running around what was once their private garden. But this was deeper, a sense that something had shifted, and would never return.

You can take the caboose out of the ghetto, but you cannot take the ghetto out of the caboose. Many people at RailsConf felt your absence, comrades, if any of you are reading this! As I mentioned earlier, the vast majority of attendees, including repeat ones, were totally unaware of the specifics. But they sensed something missing, some crucial element lacking.

At the same time, the community is now larger. And there are tremendous advantages to the incursions of the money people into the private reserve. The people who were saying to each other in 2006, "I wish I could program in Rails full-time, and quit programming in Java/C#/WTFLang" were now saying "I wish recruiters would stop harassing me!"

That all said, the Rails community needs the caboose crew, like we need our gall bladders. It is just a little organ compared to the overall size of the body, but without it, you will not survive long, and if you do, you will be feeling so well.

It would appear that the rebels had struck their first blow. But more about that would be revealed on Day 3.

Chad Fowler still had the his job leading off the proceedings in the new, more corporate RailsConf. As such, the ukelele would be banished from the main stage, along with any other musical instruments during presentations. Joey, we miss your accordion, too.

Chad mentioned that there were over ten times more proposals for RailsConf 2008, than attendees at RailsConf 2006. That certainly explains why my proposal was not accepted... of course, the title being "Pedal To The Metal: Alternatives To Rails" might also have had something to do with it.

Anyhow, Chad was almost apologetic as he explained how people were pissed off about RailsConf 2006 because it had sold out so quickly, and now that they had increased the size enough, people complained that the conference was "losing it's luster." You can't win, dude! But I still support what you're doing.

At that point, he introduced Joel Spolsky. Now, when I had read that Joel would be the opening keynote for RailsConf 2008, I had been fairly surprised. Although the penchant of the Ruby/Ruby on Rails community IS to reach out to others for ideas and technology, with the well-publicized spat between Joel and DHH, the choice seemed a curious one.

Joel was funny, and entertaining. He had slides, and seemed like he was leading up to some big point. But after the dog and pony show was over, I felt like I had drunk an extra-large zero calorie soda: a feeling of fullness, but no actual nutritional value to it. I was not exactly disappointed, but I was far from impressed.

Next, I headed into the Entrepreneurs on Rails session by Dan Benjamin. The presentation was probably worthwhile if you have never formed a business before, but my attention wandered, which is why I will not be writing anything else about it here.

So far, I was zero for two on my personal "RailsConf 2008 was worth it" scale. Hmmm.

I got a bit more enthused at Micah Martin's session "10 Things I Hate About Web Development", where I finally got to see the long awaited demo of Limelight, which Micah had been dropping hints about at RubyConf last year. I have a separate posting I will put up with info on that session.

After that, with my energy picking up, I went to "Rubinius: Under The Hood and Behind the Curtain" presented by Evan Phoenix, Brian Ford, & Wilson Bilkovich. This was a fun and informative session about the current state of Rubinius, although if you have been following the various blogs/IRC/github you already knew what he was talking about. Still, it was nice to see the core Rubinius team in person, and to get the sense of the crowd's excitement about Rubinius. I will be posting separately about this session.

There was a great moment that is really representative of what I get out of RailsConf. Walking between sessions, I ran into Ward Cunningham. Not only did I get to introduce myself, and take another fanboy picture with one of the extremes, but we also stood around for a few moments and chatted about his experiences migrating MediaWiki to Rails.

Afterwards, I hung out doing a little pairing with programming buddy/collaborator Ari Lerner trying to help out with pool-party before his upcoming BoF about it later that night. I know you have not yet heard about pool-party, which is an auto-scaling solution for Amazon's EC2 service, since the first version was put up on github there at RailsConf. What makes pool-party unique is that it is a pure Ruby and open source solution to the cloud computing thing. Plus it is cool.

By the time we were done, we had already missed any chance of eating dinner, and also most of Charles Nutter's talk. I walking in to see a slide "You Are The Enterprise" from his presentation. That sounded silly to me, but without any context, I probably do not know what I am talking about here.

Next were the RailsEnvy guys presenting the "Ruby Heroes Awards". I have to say, those guys from RailsEnvy are pretty funny... and brilliant self-promoters. Plenty of people have already blogged about this, so no need to go on and on about it here, except to say they made some pretty good choices with the winners:
Evan Weaver, Tom Copeland, James Edward Gray II, Ilya Grigorik, Yehuda Katz, and Ryan Bates.

Good job, guys!

Then it was time for the big David Heinemeier Hansson keynote. After my tepid enthusiasm for the opening keynote in the morning, I hoped DHH would do something exciting. Well, that was not exactly what happened... but thought provoking, nonetheless.

His speech was entitled "The Great Surplus". The salient point seemed to be that the highly leveraged productivity that Ruby on Rails gives the community (and the unreal demand) will not last forever, or perhaps for even that much longer.

His prediction is that one of three things will happen:
1. The mainstream copies Rails with something else
2. Some other dramatic alternative arrives (new paradigm) that provides massive improvement
3. Rails itself becomes mainstream

So what to do about this? Invest in yourself. Regardless what happens with Ruby on Rails, if you better yourself it will last to next wave. And do something else beside programming! You need to train more than 1 muscle... same with non programming activities.. need to engage other parts of brain. And sleep more.

It is well known that tired people take longer to do work, and that the output is not as good as a result. More importantly, it takes a toll on that individual that leads to a longer term reduction of output. So why do we consistently see investors/executives pushing their technology teams this way. And why do we allow it, when we already know better?

I had seen a friend earlier in the day during the conference, who I had not seen since last year. His startup had become involved with a well-known incubator. But far from looking energized, my friend looked worn down. "I need a month with no electricity," he croaked. And this is where many, many people in the RoR community are actually hoping and praying to get to. This is what DHH was warning about.

After DHH finished his keynote, I ran over to the BoF for pool-party. The turnout was actually pretty good! Ari did a great job with his presentation, and at the end a guy from Amazon came up and chatted us up for quite a while. I look forward to switching over my AWS application to the pool-party as soon as it is ready!

My day complete, I crawled off to bed to take DHH's advice and rest up for RailsConf 2008 - Day 2.

RailsConf 2008 Better Be Good

RailsConf 2008 is later this week, as if you all did not know that. Interestingly, this year it has not sold out like it did for 1.0 and 2.0. Increased capacity by O'Reilly? Or perhaps something else at work here...

If you are not aware for the cost of transport, you have been living on another planet. Just the massive increase in time required to make the pilgrimage has been substantial. Many of us have been working at home or within other time-flexible, location-unimportant arrangements for some time now. But we still gathered together unhesitatingly no matter the distance.

Two recent blog postings stood out to me. The first, from Seth Godin said it nicely:

If oil is $130 a barrel and if security adds two or three hours to a trip and if people are doing more and more business with those far afield...

and if we need to bring together more people from more places when we get together...

and if the alternatives, like video conferencing or threaded online conversations continue to get better and better, then...

I think the standard for a great meeting or a terrific conference has changed.

In other words, "I flew all the way here for this?" is going to be far more common than it used to be.

The second was simply an link from from Rails community spokesmodel Obie Fernandez to an article in the Washington Post:

But the truth is that no combination of solar, wind and nuclear power, ethanol, biodiesel, tar sands and used French-fry oil will allow us to power Wal-Mart, Disney World and the interstate highway system -- or even a fraction of these things -- in the future. We have to make other arrangements.

The public, and especially the mainstream media, misunderstands the "peak oil" story. It's not about running out of oil. It's about the instabilities that will shake the complex systems of daily life as soon as the global demand for oil exceeds the global supply.

Already, I was a little bummed out about not being able to eat a delicious Pacific salmon dinner this year. But these two postings really got me to thinking. It would be easy to expect the conference organizers to do all the work. But it is really up to us as attendees to put our hearts into it. Whether it be code drives, or Werewolf sessions, that does not really matter to me personally, although I will be attending the former.

So, all I can say is, this better be good people. We better go up there and really make this thing count, to justify the time, expense, and environmental impact. The times they are a changing, and we need to do something special.

As for me, I will be taking public transport to and from the conference... which is not easy to achieve from down here in L.A.

RailsConf 2008 Registration Is Open

Get ready, get set, go!! The annual frenzy of registration for RailsConf 2008 has begun.

Yes, I have already received my registration confirmation. No, I have not received my speaker confirmation...yet? Oh well, looks like RejectConf again!

See you all there... ahem, not all of you, unless you register right now!

Ruby/Microsoft?

Martin Fowler just posted on his bliki a little piece entitled RubyMicrosoft. As I read it, I felt a strange chill run down my spine. Perhaps a few words of explanation are needed...

At RailsConf recently I stood at the Thoughtworks booth for a moment chatting up Fowler, and embarrassing myself by asking for a photo with him (he doesn't pose for photos with people). Luckily, I was rescued by the arrival of Oli Bini, and an ensuing short discussion about JRuby. I expressed my admiration about how they had been "cleaning Microsoft's clock" as far as their much faster progress with a runtime for the Ruby language then Microsoft's efforts with the DLR.

Much to my surprise, Martin was actually paying attention to what we were saying (I mean to what I was saying, after all he knows and speaks with Ola), and chimed in about how Thoughtworks was working with Microsoft on language compatibility for IronRuby. I expressed a poorly articulated skepticism at the prospects.

Lo and behold, the RubyMicrosoft blog posting sums up rather well the half-formed mumblings I was trying to stammer out. Well, this is why he is a keynote speaker, and I am a dead programmer. However, impressed as I am at his intellect, I am not sure I share his optimism about Microsoft.

I certainly don't know if I am an "alpha geek" or anything like that. I'd rather be a jazz programmer than a rock star. But given my long history working with Microsoft technology, and then the seemingly contradictory fact that I was at both RailsConfs, I must really identify with the movement. Chalk it up as just one more developer who Microsoft is losing to the rebellion.

RailsConf 2007 - Day 3

By the time we got to RailsConf Day 3, only the most hard core remained. In other words, almost everyone. And we were glad to have stuck around, because some of the best content of the entire conference was yet to come. David Black, introduced two integral members of the Ruby on Rails team, Jamis Buck and Michael "Koz" Koziarski, the co-authors of the seminal "Rails Way" blog.

The Rails Way
Jamis and Koz and both written and read a lot of Ruby on Rails code. The Rails Way is not just what could be done, but what should be; the best way to build a Rails application. Their knowledge of best practices is second to no one, and they shared a whole bunch of great information. I can't really do their tag team code review justice, but here are the highlights:


Fat controller is anti-pattern
*hard to test
*break apart into a model object

A model is anything that encapsulates data and logic, not just an object that talks to a database.
*one benefit of this encapsulation is testing
*another advantage is the form_for handle can easily use a model

When to use with_scope
*move the logic to the parent class, so as to freely get the scoping with no extra work
*do not go crazy with DRY

ActiveSupport has helpers to make some code self-documenting for dates/times

Asociations
*People make associations, but then fail to use them throughout the rest of the application
*this helps keep code from breaking in the case where database keys change, for example

Cargo culting
*He hates !! (not-not) idiom.
*Ternary operator...likes it sometimes
*Explain exactly why you need boolean returned, again?

Model helpers
*use associations in views instead of instance variables

Routing
*simplifying non restful routes - map.with_options

Override to_param to make nice looking URL

Returning method

 returning new do |booking|
  booking.some_thing
  booking.some_other_thing
 end

The session was really great. Pretty much everyone in the room, no matter how advanced their level, got something good out of it. We could have stayed there all day, with different people bringing up pieces of code for these guys to refactor. If you can, hire them.

Javascript - Fu
Dan Webb is the author of the LowPro extensions to the Prototype JavaScript library. He had a really nice tight Takahashi style presentation. He was also extremely funny, and the information incredibly useful. Once again, the last day of RailsConf really had a lot of good stuff!

JavaScript is the language we all love to hate. A peasant language, meaning that "lower-level" programmer have to work on the JavaScript code while "higher-level" ones get to work on the "architecture".

JavaScript - fu is not easy to master. Developers are forced into refuge by using frameworks and libraries.

The Ancient Manuals of JavaScript-Fu
* The Tao Of The Event Handler (Events)
* Five Method of DOM Fist (DOM)
* Lightning Script Style (Optimization)
* Iron AJAX Technique (Progressive enhancement)

There are big differences in browser implementation of JavaScript.

Two main techniques: inline vs. scripted event handlers

Inline - applied as soon as browser loads

What happen when more than a little bit of inline code

Scripted event handlers
*problem in they attach after the element is loaded

LowPro library is an extension library for Prototype, but Prototype library trunk now has a similar thing.

// Prototype 1.5+ and LowPro
Event.onReady(function() {
  $('item').observe('click', function() {...});
});

// Prototype trunk
Event.observe(window, 'DOMContentLoaded', function() {
  $('item').observe('click', function() {...});
});

// Basic onload
Event.observe(window, 'load', function() {
  $('item').observe('click', function() {...});
});

Attach handler from script to each object you want, in order to stay DRY

Separate your JavaScript out of your pages, just like you separate CSS

Large number of event handlers can choke browser performance

How:
* use script based by default
* in bug page try event delegation
* if all else fails use inline

Event delegation - yahoo tehnique
* event bubbling

Better inline handlers
*a tag needs an actual HREF
*do as little as possible, for example:

 return view(this);
 function delete(elemtn)
 {
  new Ajax.Request(element.href), {
   method: 'delete'
  });

  return false ;
 }

5 methods of DOM fist
*3 oficial W3C methods to modify the DOM
- appendChild
- insertBefore
- replaceChild
*1 non-standard (from IE)
- innerHTML

DOM methods insert with precision - have to create nodes first
InnerHTML shifts large bulk amounts of HTML, but with little control

Really easy to use innerhtml from Rails with Ajax

The bastard son - unholy marriage of DOM methods and HTML

Element.fromHTML = function(html) {
  var root = document.createElement('div');
  root.innerHTML = html;
  return root.firstChild;
}

var node = Element.fromHTML('<div>');
element.insertBefore(thing, node);

Lightning Script Style
* making things as fast as possible
* do not use javascript_include_tag :defaults cause it downloads 5 big files
* browsers take time both to download AND evaluate a script
* the less JS the better
* mooeffects smaller than scriptaculous, but less powerful
* browsers can only load 2 resource at once
* combine js files
* Use gzip instead of JS based minification.

Make sure everything is cacheable

Faster loops

 for(var i - 0, enemy;
  enemy = enemies[i]; i++) {
 defend(enemy);
  }

Be careful with selectors
$$('.anything'); slower
$$('span.anything'); slow
$$('#item .anything'); // css xpath selector

Iron Ajax Technique
* rule #1: browsers suck
* main browsers are getting better quickly
* but what about the others?
* Corporate security blocks Javascript at firewall
* the traditional rails opin: f* you!
* but why turn away users if you don't have to

Progressive Enhancement
1. start with plain HTML
2. test if necessary brwt features are there (XMLHTTPreq, canvas, etc)
3. If present, then apply xtra JS features

Tt's easy to apply to ajax
* HTML
* JS
* RJS

Try progressinve enhancement first

Lastly, Dan recommended a few books on Javascript he said are better than all the others:
* Professional JavaScript Techniques
* Bulletproof Ajax
* DTHML Utopia: Modern Web Design Using Javascript and DOM

Dan's session was full of good stuff. Even the people who thought they knew it all were scribbling down a couple things before the end. And thank you, Dan, for making it really fun as well as informative.

Dave Thomas
Dave's speech was unconventional, in that he doesn't say what people expect him to. I consider that a good thing. Many people in the crowd were perplexed for long moments as he spoke. For those people who need a simple explanation of Dave's speech, the two recurring themes for RailsConf were "give", and "don't get stuck".

"Just to set the record straight, the first RubyConf was 3 people and a dog, and the speaking was in between sips of beer"

Orthodoxy - do what is expected
Orthopraxy - do the "right thing"

It's called Object oriented programming, not class oriented programming. Challenge: write next next program with objects instead of classes

What Are Your Cargo Cults?

Dave is a real thinker, and I hope that our community can rise to the challenge and keep progressing. Embrace Orthopraxy!

Packing For RailsConf 2007

I am packing my stuff for RailsConf 2007, and I am pretty excited. Last year's conference was the best event I had been to in years! The growth in the momentum and enthusiasm in the Rails community has only accelerated in the last year, and I am giddy at the prospect of more fun brain candy!

I will be blogging from the conference, but not moment to moment like some quicker multitaskers. No, I prefer a more Christian Science Monitor approach, giving a complete picture of relevance sometime after events have taken place. Well, I will try to stay focused, but relevant or not here I come.

I was going to post my planned schedule for events I will be attending, but so is everyone else right now, and Dr. Nic's MyConfPlan is down at the moment.. Also, I will at Ezra'a Merb hackfest, and any parties I get invited to. Hint hint, all you companies hoping to sell me things, or sell me about things...feel free to try to influence me by buying me a beer.

RailsConf 2007 Is Sold Out

My dear friends, if you don't have your ticket for RailsConf 2007, you have missed the boat. All 1200 passes have now been sold out!

I suspect that most conferences have a short peak of sales right when the passes first go on sale, then sell the bulk of their registrations in the last few days before the start of the conference, if conferences are anything like concerts. Since most conference don't have the draw of a big musical headliner, conferences sell discounted registrations for a short period of time, to encourage early registrations and guarantee that the conference sells the minimum number of attendees to break-even. If this is true, and given that RailsConf 2007 is still 3 months away, this is pretty amazing. They never even got to the end of the discounted registration period before they sold out.

If you have your position secured, then see you at RailsConf on Beer. Otherwise, well, guess I won't see you unless you somehow get thru the waiting list.

This is going to be fun...

RailsConf 2007 Will Have Good Beer

Portland has good beer. There, now I've said it. One of the key benefits of holding the RailsConf 2007 conference in Portland has to be easily obtaining really good beer.

The McMenamins on Broadway is the closest place to the convention center to go where "Classics such as raspberry-tinged Ruby, medium-bodied Hammerhead and dark, strong Terminator Stout are always available."

In between the fun of learning all about Rails 2.0, Capistrano 2.0, scalability, more scalability, still more scalability, let us not forget to take the time to drink a really good beer together! Or more than one, perhaps...

Update: It's official...here is the link for RailsConf on Beer

I Will Be At RailsConf 2007

I just checked my email, and saw that registration has just opened for RailsConf 2007. I went to last year's conference, and it was the most interesting and exciting event in the software industry I had been to in years!

If you are interested in going, I suggest that you register immediately. Last year's event sold out in a couple days. When they added 100 additional spots last year, those sold out in hours!

This year's is looking to be even more amazing...be there, or spend all your time reading blogs to figure out what happened!