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

RailsConf 2007 is over, I’m back in the UK, thousands of miles away from the lovely Portland, back into the normal swing of things, back on the train, just back where I was. weird feeling.

Community

RailsConf rocked, so much more than I could have hoped for an so many levels, the content was brilliant the people were amazing, organizationally the thing was a stunning success and what was achieved by the community and what was achieved by many people on an individual basis was amazing.

The feeling was very community focused, the Rails community has grown exponentially over the past year, and this was definitely reflected in the mix of and volume of people. I spoke to at least hundred Java developers, as well as some .NET folk and a whole mix of people from other languages. All here to have a little look at this web app frame work written in this crazy Ruby language.

The numbers as well, this year there were over 1600 people in attendance, last year 500, the year before there was no conference. In one year Rails as a community has grown so quickly, many many people are getting wealthy off the back of it, and I think this was Chad’s point on the first day, if we were all to use that for good, we can show the rest of the IT tech, hell the world, we can show them that we can make a difference. Well I think we were all listening, last time I checked we had raised over $33,000 in donations.

The community, as well as the framework have grown and matured, and it’s good to see companies like Adobe, Sun, O’rielly and Amazon making their presence at this conference for a framework only 2 years old.

Enterprise

As larger companies start to pay more attention to us it’s important to make sure we are ready to deal with what the enterprise world wants, through projects like JRuby and others.

Although this is good, in a way, I hope Rails will maintain it’s Opinion as it is spun off in all sorts of directions. It’s a little bit over my head if truth be known. But interest from larger companies can only mean good right? Probably wrong? I don’t know.

Enterprise anxiety was definitely a strong theme running the conference.

REST

REST was covered heavily at RailsConf also, there were over 4 separate talks on the subject. This is important I guess, as we hurtle towards Rails 2, REST is going to become more and more central to what it is the core team are thinking.

Plugin’s like Hamilton’s make_resourceful have already started popping up all over the place and getting knowledge on it all know while it’s still all EDGE-centric, is going to prove really useful down the line. DHH’s keynote actually helped to clarify one of my biggest concerns, nested resources, or something. Either way I have a better understanding of it all now.

RailsConf was an amazing experience, something I wouldn’t have changed. The best thing to come out of the whole thing was meeting 3 wonderful human beings, Anthony Ramm, Dan Tripp and Jeremy Sydik. You three are amazing, Thank You for making the experience so welcoming and warm.

To summarize, I’ve met some amazingly talented, clever and inspirational people over the past 4 days. I’ve felt the power of the community to truly do something amazing and make a real difference, and above everything I’ve left with 3 brilliant friends.

Roll on RailsConf 2008.