Fri, 23 Jun 2006

RailsConf: Herds of Macs

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RailsConf Guidebook

I spent the day in Rails Nirvana ... which strangely enough is right near O'Hare ... and has really bad wireless access. But nonetheless, it was awesome. The Guidebook was just what I needed. The begining was ultra-basic Ruby ... but since Obtiva will soon be offering Rails on TDD training and coaching, it was an excellent opportunity to watch the leading Rails instructors in action to see how they introduced people to Ruby (so I could learn how to teach these ideas). And then it got good ... metaprogramming. I had poked around a bit in the guts of ActiveRecord and played with some DSLs, but it wasn't until I listened to Dave's walkthrough of metaprogramming that I could say I really grok'd the stuff. And wow, I'm a different programmer tonight than I was this morning.

The afternoon was spent on Rails. Lots of review, but again, I was looking at it from a trainer's perspective, stealing ideas from Mike and Dave. And I also picked up some new stuff that I hadn't looked into yet: I especially liked Named Routes because they are a more elegant solution than they way I had solved link_to duplication with helpers.

My talk will be on Sunday morning, hopefully a few people will be awake enough to stop by to get a few tips on acceptance testing Rails+Ajax apps.

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