Scottish Ruby Conference 2010

Post date: Mar 27, 2010 10:34:51 AM

The Scottish Ruby Conference is over and to quote a few tweets, that was *AWESOME* !

Here are my organic notes from the conf: mostly people keywords and links I want to remember :-)

Links

http://scottishrubyconference.com/

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23scotruby

http://www.flickr.com/groups/scotruby2010/

http://groups.google.com/group/scottishrubyconference

People

    • Dave Frey,

    • Matt Wyne

    • Joseph Wilk,

    • Sebastian and Mauro from xing

    • a few Belgium dude , http://twitter.com/2dc

    • Jonas, capybara's author

    • Ian White, pickle's author

    • Some hashrocket big fan who will probably create a real fan club ;-) It was fun to see how many bees were around Obie

Tech Conferences are about socializing and networking. Sadly, the French conferences Paris on Rails 2007 & 2008 completely missed some social time and I hope the French speaking ruby community (who's up for it?) will organize a ruby conf in 2010 or 2011 in a big café or in a venue where people can chat.

Personal conclusions from this conference

  • open source

I should, I have to, I must contribute more to the open source projects and create some. The ruby eco-system will adapt to any change and I have to be part of it

    • more english speaking conf ! In 2011, I want to do a presentation at an english speaking conference. First, I need to work on open source!

I finally understood the point of twitter :-) It took me a while! At the conference use the #scotruby tag to gather, chat, recommend stuff, make some live jokes ... socialize!

  • ecology

Tim Bray mentioned the impact of mobile phones in low carbon footprint countries (africa especially). Very innovative people have created an ecosystem based on SMS Apps.

Later, he explained why mobile phones with internet access will encourage people to drop their "heavy metal box with 4 wheels to transport 1 person which make a lot of noise, eat lots of public space and pavements and pollute the air with nasty particulate matters" in favor of public transports. OK maybe he used the word "car" instead of metal boxes ....

His point was: why spending 1 hour in a car doing nothing when you can work / read yr emails in the train or bus? When peak oil arises, people who live in area with no public transports will have to move anyway so you'd better anticipate on that one :-)

Therefore, I have decided to go my green "coming out", I will declare publicly for who I want to work, focussing on social and ecological impacts.

  • free internet

I have started writing this blog post in the train from Edinburgh en route to London. There is indeed an excellent free WIFI connection and electricity plugs for every seat! KUDOs to EastCoast for that. For once, I wish the French National Railways follow the example of the British :-) I have finished it in a café inside King Cross International train station, again with free internet!!! Apart from Mulhouse train station, I don't know any other train station with free WIFI :-(

I am definitely impressed by the public service internet provided by the British.

First Day:

Jim Weirich's keynote: an interesting design idea about using 3 different levels of abstractions: a first level with private primitives and then public methods which use these primitives

Rocket fuelled cucumbers: Joseph Wilk

cucover, still active Matt?

Ragel will improve parsing time a lot : gem install gherkin

Jo is working on a new Testjour which will work on EC2

pairwise gem

test js with harmony

cucumber --format usage, The slowest step definitions (with duration) are listed first

Mocks: just an introduction but with real people playing the mocks: quite fun! Shame I did not go to the BoF session about Mocks to describe the use cases I find totally inappropriate for mocking design development.

RSpec: require 'spec_helper'

Rack middleware

To make sure you don't blow up yr app server running rake tasks or scripts; use:

nice -19

Lightning talks

http://github.com/jnicklas/capybara by Jonas Nicklas. webrat is dead, viva Capybara!

http://redcareditor.com/ by Daniel Lucraft, an IDE based on Eclipse / jruby with very little core and many plugins. Driven by Cucumber and RSpec: wow!

Second Day:

Tim Bray Key note

http://twitter.com/timbray Key Note was the most inspiring talk for me at this conference. I had to chance to chat with him at the party on Saturday night and I really enjoy it. He divided his talk into 3 parts:

    1. concurrency: erlang or Closure sounds like a partial solution

    2. enterprise: ruby won't make it soon. first "they" have to share our Agile values ... Stop Waterfall, stop writing piles of (crap) requirements, sack the Change Control Office :-)

    3. mobile phone. The reason why he joined google is because of android. He will push ruby to android.

He also mentioned http://1978th.net/tokyocabinet/

Oh S***: How to bring a big Rails website down (and how not to)

http://www.scribd.com/doc/27168812/Oh-Shit-How-to-Break-a-Large-Website-and-how-not-to-PDF-version

Scribd.com is one of the largest Rails sites on the Internet, and at that scale, even innocuous new features or fixes can bring the website down. I'll walk through some of my mistakes and tell you what I've learned about writing code for giant Rails sites.

Tim Morgan

    • SQL: use explain, test with populated DB, indexes

    • batches: find_in_batches does not work w/ composite PK => write

    • validates_uniqueness_of does not with case insensitive

USe Postgres with a functional index

Use WHERE login = BINARY 'mylogin' for case insensitive

    • delete & destroy: move before_destroy hooks before associations declaration has_many :dependent => destroy

    • use delete_all

    • memoize: separation of concerns, support nil object. Watch out memoize_all, will build the tree if u keep the freeze

    • Pb w/ indexes: ACHTUNG acts_as_paranoid will try to use 2 indexes. Solution: add an index on user_id and deleted_at

Write Bad Code

How to leverage speed-coding and technical debt for business success.

Gwyn Morfey

where is the Train which will hit you? Don't skip Planning

Start with a Question; How done is done done?

Plugin should work out of the box (copy / paste),

satisfing. timebox 30 min

cheat : sacrifice performance

http://github.com/newbamboo

auto_migrations

Dragonfly, heroku

Javascripts for rubyists

1995: Ruby & js were born

functions are objects,

Functions as args aka callbacks

this with apply ...

OOP js

protoype got it wrong

link_to_remote : NOOOOOOOOOOOO bad SoC

You're Doing it Wrong

Tammer Sal

git_remote_branch

test rake tasks

Rails will see defaults set in DB

Talks I think I should have gone:

Gittin Down to the Plumbing

Genetic Algorithms with Ruby