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

The last day of RailsConf was a sad one as well as an amazing one.

The Rails Way

Jamis Buck and Michael Koziarski of the rails core team presented a rundown of some of the more common questions they get asked on the Rails Way website.

They sorta tackled the thing from a tag-team perspective, each taking it in turns to walk through a page of code and give lots of great advice.

There was an irc channel you could post questions to whilst the talk was going on, these were answered at the end.

The thing I found really valuable was with_options stuff for routing, I’m totally gonna be re-writing some killer route files.

Take this for example:

 map.create_message "/msg/create/:id", :controller => "message", :action => "create"
 map.create_message "/msg/edit/:id", :controller => "message", :action => "edit"
 map.create_message "/msg/delete/:id", :controller => "message", :action => "delete"

And turn it into this:

 map.with_options :controller => "message" do |msg|
   msg.create_message "/msg/create/:id", :action => "create"
   msg.delete_message "/msg/edit/:id", :action => "edit"
   msg.delete_message "/msg/delete/:id", :action => "delete"
 end

I think it’s much clearer, and way more descriptive.

Choose Your Battles and LetIt::REST

This was Hampton’s talk about REST (there was lots of REST talk at RailsConf) this one was more about implementation than theory, or practice. Which was good. It also took from the perspective of the current REST code in EDGE (unlike Vonage). Again refreshing.

The focus was on a new plugin they had developed (ham an the guys at unspace) originally called letItRest, now renamed make_resourceful. The plugin addresses the amount of duplication necessary to implement a RESTful interface, it seems to be a bit like a scaffold/code-generator type thing, which is cool, and although we’re promised it’s very easy to still get your edge-cases/exceptions in there, I can’t help but wonder how it “feels”. I’m definitely going to give it a go though.

The talk it’s self seemed over quite quickly, there were some funny slides, which helped break up the code slides, the pace was good and Hampton is a great talker.

Rubber, Meet Road

Amy Hoy’s talk focused on finding the comfortable place between designer and developer to let communication flourish, as well as touching on the two mindsets, how they work together, how they fight and why.

Amy (like myself) is a programmer with a designer background. This was really useful for me to help identify the thought patterns in my mind that are clearly designer and those that fit squarely in the dev head box. It also helped to reveal how far work (as in my 9-5, not just work in general) has yet to go to be truly productive.

The talk itself was very fun, lots of funny slides, some jokes and healthy dose of sarcasm. Great fun.

Dave Thomas’s Keynote

Dave Thomas’s ending keynote was good, i’d like to say I was paying him 100% attention but me and ant were buying domains for an upcoming project I’m going to be collaborating with him on.

From what I can gather the keynote was about community, charity and cargo-cult mentality. It ended with Dave asking us all to have fun. Which is cool.

After the final keynote was a meet and greet in the reception area, me, ant dan and jeremy ditched in favor of mexican and beer. Awesome.