Railsconf Europe 2006 part 1

18 Sep 2006 7:44 - (0) comments

When I arrived at the conference hall the conference had already started. I missed the opening and entered when DHH was talking about the new Simply* stuff. He showed how the SimplyRestful resources_scaffold works and how SimplyHelpful removes the remaining duplication from the views. It's hard to see the views getting any simpler. He ended with a cliffhanger that would have to wait till the core discussion later that day.

Having never read anything by Kathy Sierra I was pleasantly suprised by her very interesting talk about engaging users and how you should keep them in the learning flow and so they can pass the suck threshold. The Flow book she recommended is definetly on my reading list.

As an interface designer/Java+Ruby programmer with a Mac, I seemed more at home than at a Java conference. with what felt like were more like-minded people: dedicated hackers who are also bloggers/musicans/photographers. And of course there were lots of Macs. I even talked to one guy who decided to switch on day one and bought a Mac Book that same evening.

Another thing I noticed was the broad range of topics. From inspirational talks about engaging users to usability and optimizing mysql for rails. Does this mean that Rails programmers are very allround? Well, when 1 Rails programmer can do what 4 Java programmers do, you'll come into contact with more parts of an application as a Rails programmer.