30
Sep
2006
RailsConf Europe 2006

Marcel and DHH were very surprized to know that I had flown in from India for the RailsConf.
I enjoyed most of the sessions that I attended. With four tracks going on in parallel definitely I missed out on some very good ones.
- DHH’s session on ActiveResource was great. He demoed what he had talked about at Chicago RailsConf. I have also moved one of my projects to the edge to start playing with simply_restful.
- Marcel’s session on making RJS DRYer was also good. simply_helpful is a good way of doing this. It applies the same philosophy to the View side of things, that simply_restful applies to the controller. Using the simply_helpful plugin, the application can use a lot of meaningful default, hence making the views and helpers a lot more dry-er.
- Jamis just released a new version of capistrano and he demoed the cool new features. The slickest of them was the cap shell. It is a great tool to monitor multiple serves in a cluster from a single console, with the ability to run commands against only particular machines in the cluster identified by roles that the machines play in the cluster.
- Jim Weirich’s plenary session was great. He demonstrated a lot of common mistakes that programmers make, because of Ruby’s open classes. A lot of his talk featured around being good to other’s code.
- Dave Thomas and Kathy Siera were outstanding, entertaining and passionate as usual!


Working with Vinsol has been one of the most rewarding and productive collaborations I've ever had in the technology industry. Manik is an intelligent and honest engineer with a great faculty for open and clear communication, and his team include some of the swiftest and keenest developers I've ever had the pleasure to work with. They're great value for money, excellent people who are a joy to know and interact with, and above all they really know their stuff