RailsConf Day 0 Report
Thursday was somewhat the start of RailsConf 2007 - a day of tutorial sessions, for which one had to pay extra, so there were only a few hundred attendees (plus of course speakers, staff, and exhibitors) in the place. Since I'm attending for two reasons (to learn and to network), I sprung for the tutorials.
The day started off with a pastries-and-coffee conference style breakfast, that I'd rate about a 3 on a scale of 1 to 10. Oh well, I don't go to these things for the food. I chatted through breakfast with a Portland native whose name I forget (I am, as you will no doubt see over coming days, terrible with names) about the prepress business and about being an older retread in an IT business. It's a young crowd here this week; the average age is certainly under 30, putting me dangerously close to the "get off my lawn" part of the demographic. I heard someone claim 10% female attendees, but I wouldn't put it that high from looking around; perhaps 5%.
For the morning, I attended "Is JavaScript Overrated? Or: How I Stopped Worrying and Put Prototype and script.aculo.us to Full Use" led by Thomas Fuchs. As Thomas is the author of the script.aculo.us library, it's hardly surprising that his answer to the title question was "no". I did learn quite a lot in this one, both about how to use the libraries in question and about how to work more effectively with FireBug. It was also nice to see the new features of the edge version demonstrated. Twitter-contact Sean O'Steen and I also tracked each other down during this session via Twitter messages and chatted a bit in the break.
Lunchtime was spent at a table with the one and only Scott Hanselman, who had a machine sent down by Microsoft's John Lam with some of the latest DLR bits. Scott showed off crazy multiple dynamic language interop scenarios and we otherwise shot the breeze about random nonsense in the programming world.
In the afternoon, I started off in David Black's session "Rails Routing Roundup." This one, alas, proved to be far too basic for me - by the break he hadn't even covered as much as I'd sussed out in my one and only article on the subject. Scott Hanselman was next to me and we bailed out at breaktime to troll the convention hall in search of interesting conversation. This led to some time listening to Ward Cunningham worry about upcoming issues in decimal rounding, as well as various Rails stuff.
After a while Scott headed out to beat the traffic and I took off back for the hotel. I ran into someone who tipped me to the existence of the Joyent party and spent an hour or so in their suite chatting with random folks, until the beer ran out and the party evaporated; consider this a failure of functional test for party planning. And that was the end of RailsConf stuff for the day for me.
The day started off with a pastries-and-coffee conference style breakfast, that I'd rate about a 3 on a scale of 1 to 10. Oh well, I don't go to these things for the food. I chatted through breakfast with a Portland native whose name I forget (I am, as you will no doubt see over coming days, terrible with names) about the prepress business and about being an older retread in an IT business. It's a young crowd here this week; the average age is certainly under 30, putting me dangerously close to the "get off my lawn" part of the demographic. I heard someone claim 10% female attendees, but I wouldn't put it that high from looking around; perhaps 5%.
For the morning, I attended "Is JavaScript Overrated? Or: How I Stopped Worrying and Put Prototype and script.aculo.us to Full Use" led by Thomas Fuchs. As Thomas is the author of the script.aculo.us library, it's hardly surprising that his answer to the title question was "no". I did learn quite a lot in this one, both about how to use the libraries in question and about how to work more effectively with FireBug. It was also nice to see the new features of the edge version demonstrated. Twitter-contact Sean O'Steen and I also tracked each other down during this session via Twitter messages and chatted a bit in the break.
Lunchtime was spent at a table with the one and only Scott Hanselman, who had a machine sent down by Microsoft's John Lam with some of the latest DLR bits. Scott showed off crazy multiple dynamic language interop scenarios and we otherwise shot the breeze about random nonsense in the programming world.
In the afternoon, I started off in David Black's session "Rails Routing Roundup." This one, alas, proved to be far too basic for me - by the break he hadn't even covered as much as I'd sussed out in my one and only article on the subject. Scott Hanselman was next to me and we bailed out at breaktime to troll the convention hall in search of interesting conversation. This led to some time listening to Ward Cunningham worry about upcoming issues in decimal rounding, as well as various Rails stuff.
After a while Scott headed out to beat the traffic and I took off back for the hotel. I ran into someone who tipped me to the existence of the Joyent party and spent an hour or so in their suite chatting with random folks, until the beer ran out and the party evaporated; consider this a failure of functional test for party planning. And that was the end of RailsConf stuff for the day for me.