Today wrapped up RailsConf 2014 in Chicago, Illinois and I have to say that it was quite a good time. This was my first RailsConf and it definitely lived up to its reputation. From DHH trolling that TDD is nonsense in his Keynote speech to Tenderlove making a live merge of the “AdequateRecord” branch into Rails master it was never a dull moment.
This year RailsConf was a tracked conference so I didn’t get a chance to see every talk although I look forward to catching the recordings on Ruby Central as soon as they are released. Some of my favorite talks included:
- All the Little Things by: Sandi Metz
- The “Rails of JavaScript” won’t be a Framework by: Justin Searls
- Cognitive Shortcuts: Models, Visualizations, Metaphors, and Other Lies by: Sam Livingston-Gray
- Debugger Driven Development with Pry by: Joel Turnbull
- Eliminating Inconsistent Test Failures by: Austin Putman
- An Ode to 17 Databases in 33 minutes by: Toby Hede
- Secrets of a World Memory Champion by: Chris Hunt
- Middleman: The missing front end of the Rails API stack by: Brad Gessler
These talks were all very informative and some of them quite humorous and entertaining. “Baratunde Thurston’s”:http://baratunde.com/#baratunde keynote speech on day 3 had me in tears. In one part of his talk he described how he had created “the_swine_flu”:https://twitter.com/the_swine_flu on Twitter and then would follow people on Twitter who were talking about the actual swine flu so that they would get messages that “the_swine_flu” was now following them! Lol. His talk was full of interesting examples about how technology and humor could be combined to create beautiful things.
I had read Sandi Metz’s Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby and couldn’t wait to hear her speak in person. Finally getting the opportunity was a real treat. Sandi used The Gilded Rose kata to illustrate how she would approach refactoring a chunk of nasty legacy code guided by what tests where written. It was very impressive to hear her talk through her process as she took a mess of conditional statements and turned the code into loosely coupled happiness.
I can’t wait until next year to do it all over again in Atlanta, GA 2015. Thanks RailsConf / RubyCentral for a great and memorable experience!
