metal&gin | (a weblog by craig t mackenzie)

Saturday was a slightly shorter day here at RailsConf and went like this

Bring Ruby to the Enterprise. Not the Other Way ‘Round

Cyndi Mitchell’s opening keynote was very good, although the community may not like It (in certain circles) there Is a need to educate and support enterprising companies about the virtues of rails/ruby.

Cyndi’s talk was very well paced and touched on some humorous comparisons between pop culture and tech-industry, some of her slides were awesome too. A good start to the day.

Tim Bray

Tim bray’s keynote was again on rails / enterprise, sun’s position on It, his passion for It. To be honest a lot of went over my head, I was really tired. That guy seems awesome though.

Custom Rails Helpers: Keeping Your Views DRY

The first session of the day focused on DRYing up your views with custom helpers, this was cool, not from a “i’m learning something new” perspective, more from a “I do this already, I’m so glad I’m doing right”

Although the session taught me nothing new, It did validate a lot of the work of been doing on helpers, so It felt kinda cool. was very busy.

Memcaching Rails

Chris Wanstrath, of err the blog fame (that’s where I heard of him anyway) presented this talk.

It focused on the probleming of caching, and his solution cache_fu. It was a really Insightful session with some wicked slides, and chris himself Is super animated, which Is always good.

It left me with enough knowledge to know where to start with caching, that Is when I need It.

The Dark Art of Developing Plugins

This session was really cool, It walked through making a simple plugin and was themed like a horror flick. wicked.

The really Insightful stuff was about ruby, extending and overwriting and all that jazz, was way cool. that class_eval method Is some crazy ass ninja kung fu.

Makes me wanna wrap up some common stuff Into plugins now.

Data Warehouses with ActiveWarehouse

This was way more high brow than I was expecting, and although I was following along alright top begin with, as soon as the concept of cubes and dimensional data aggregation started I had to walk.

But If the need every came along to churn through piles of data and make It relevant, this would be my starting post.

The day ended In a chinese restaurant, with my sipping beer from a tea cup.