RailsConf 2010 Wrap-Up
Posted by Larry Karnowski Fri, 11 Jun 2010 21:36:00 GMT
My RailsConf experience this year was much better than last year's, despite not being a speaker this year. Baltimore felt like a better fit for us than Vegas. Plenty to do right near the conference center, but nothing so distracting that the conf felt empty or sparse.
The range of talks was interesting -- a bit heavy on the back-end talks, but that's typical of a technical conference. People like crunch.
Interesting new bits of culture:
- DHH usually gives the high-level motivational keynote, and Yehuda gives the deep-dive tech overviews, but this year they traded roles. It didn't really work for either, with both having only mediocre keynotes. (I'm all for experimenting, and I'm glad they did. Next year, though, let's get back to normal.)
- Lots more live music at the conference, especially before/after keynotes. I really enjoyed this.
- A certain person showed his butt on-stage (figuratively, thankfully) by defaming a business competitor. No need to mention names here and increase their Google-ability, but you know who I'm talking about. Very childish.
- Lastly, the conf, while still hip & fun, is definitely showing it's maturation. Several keynotes, most notably the Engine Yard talk show, which was fun, still felt like a commercial. Worse, instead of a fun "MVC"-style video by Greg Pollack, we had an actual commercial for his new Rails 3 screencasts. Not terrible in either case, just new.
My big take-aways from this year:
- Chris Wanstrath's ideas of what a good open source maintainer should be feel true: be transparent and ubiquitous; have lots of redundant information sources (blogs, email, getting started guide); and have a philosophy and communicate it, for example, Resque's is "zero features, only plugins".
- Agile software is real engineering for software, not what folks call "software engineering" in schools. (Thanks to Glenn Vanderburg for a great, great talk.)
- Multi-core is incredibly important -- Event Machine and especially Clojure. Very cool to see the Clojure-love (or at least, interest) at RailsConf this year.
- Rails is still fun, but it "arrived" a long time ago and is now a toolset rather than a lifestyle. I expect RailsConf to be officially boring in 2012.
Lastly, a take-away for my own personal life: writing is more effective (for me) than speaking. I will try hard to remember that.
All in all, RailsConf 2010 was fun, educational, and inspiring. It always feels good to go back to the well.