All about Rails

• It was the first tech conference that I've attended
• My first trip to the west coast. Well, to be truthful, my first trip anywhere west of Sarnia! I need to travel more ....

Highlights

• David Heinemeier Hansson's keynote on friday. Rails 2.0 won't be a revolution as much as an evolution, but it's shaping up to be another fantastic release
• Jim Weirich's presentation "Spam I Have Known". Jim is an excellent speaker, and he explained the issues involved in eliminating wiki spam in an entertaining fashion.
• The Open Mic sessions. They were a fair bit shorter than the ones given at Demo Camp (5 minutes rather than 15) which worked quite well. Statisfy.net was cool, if gimicky.
• The Rails Way talk/Q & A with Jamis Buck and Michael Koziarski. They were a real life version of their fantastic blog, The Rails Way, and they also held a Q & A session, with questions posted via IRC. They pointed out the proper way to use 'map' in routing which prompted me to overhaul all my routes utilizing 'map.with_options'.
• "Choose Your Battles and LetIt::REST" by Hampton Catlin and Jeff Hardy. Their idea of making controllers 'resourceful' looks REALLY promising. I can't wait until it's released
• Dave Thomas's closing keynote. He challenged the Rails community to innovate, comparing the way that we deliver web applications now to the mainframes that served applications in the 1970's.

Lowlights

• The presenter for "Rails Security: Theory and Practice" was a no show. Maybe he thought that his former roommate (who was in attendance) was going to try to shake him down for being a deadbeat ex-housemate