RailsConf - Day 2
My intention was to write one blog post per day chronicling my experiences but that turned out to be very difficult - sessions ran into late evenings (some BoF sessions ran as late as 10pm, but were really worthwhile), plus the casual chatters and the happy hours.. recovering from jetlag from Asia didn’t help either.. so didn’t get to write on it until today.
But here it goes:
Day 2:
@dhh gave the keynote in the morning to unveil Rails 3.1 RC - asset pipeline, jQuery default, native CoffeeScript + Sass support and all. No big architectural changes but solid steps to make Rails more organized. He also hinted that pjax and backbone.js could be there in Rails 3.2 (presentation layer MVC is a recurring topic this year).
Jeff Casimir / @j3 gave a very nice session on “Fat Models aren’t enough”, where he talked about better organization of code in the models, the presenter pattern (don’t just pass a bunch of instance variables into the view, pack them up in a presenter class), scopes (or the no need of ) with lots of code snippets. Presentation here.
Another session that I found really good is “Confident Code” by Avdi Grimm / @avdi. Presentation here. He talked about the Nil objects being over used in Ruby is so true. The idea of killing all nil in the code is refreshing (therefore eliminating all the checking). I’ll certainly incorporate that in my code.
Eric Ries, the godfather of the “lean startup” movement gave the evening keynote. I’ve seen him speak before, but it makes me think every time. If you are into building a software product start up, his work is a must read. Video is here.
