RailsConf '06 Wrapup

RailsConf 06 just finished a few hours ago, and overall it was a great conference. Here are the day by day highlights:

- Intro to Capistrano: This session had people sitting out the door trying to listen. I hadn't seen cap in action at all til the conference, and I was really really impressed. We're seriously considering switching to cap instead of our current NUnit-based deployment and build cycle for Openomy.

- Rails Optimization: This talk started out a little slow, but then was amazingly impressive. Stefan Kaes demonstrated how to optimize your Rails app- what types of things to avoid, etc. He developed a view compiler which does some automatic optimizations on you views (such as pre-computing url_for calls, inlining some helpers, etc) which cause almost a 5x performance increase on complex pages!

- Demos & Lightning talks: Lots of really cool stuff was shown off. I was really impressed with Tunecore, a service that allows artists to submit albums to a variety of music services. Rightcart was also a really cool way to embed a shopping cart to arbitrary webpages.

- Keynotes: All of them were fantastic. Martin Fowler was an excellent speaker, and Paul Graham presented a great essay as usual. I already blogged about DHH's great talk last night. Dave Thomas' opening keynote a Hilbert-style "3 big problems for Rails adoption," which was a good call to action to kick everything off. Interestingly enough, by the time the conference was over, a few people had announced solutions to a few of these.

- Metaprogramming: There were 4 pretty good talks on the use of DSLs, metaprogramming, and other advanced Ruby. The best was Scott Halloway's "MetaRails" talk, which explored how a few of the more interesting features of Rails are implemented (ex, class reloading).

Overall, the conference was phenomenal-- you can never beat the excitement and energy of a "first conference." RailsConf '07 will be co-sponsored by O'Reilly, so it promises to be a much bigger show. I'll definitely try to make it out to that.