RubyRescue

So far the highlight has been Chad Fowler’s address. Particularly, what does it mean to be a Ruby/Rails developer in a bad economy?

• Market yourself. Be remarkable. From the book Purple Cow – “remarkable means something that is remarked on”
• You have a moral imperative to market yourself. If you are 5 times better at programming and you’re doing tech support because you don’t market yourself, you’re robbing from your company.
• Java’s competitive advantage is the number of developers. In a bad economy, this takes away Java’s main competitive advantage, because the number of available programmers goes up. In a sense, this means it’s a great time to promote the benefits of Rails to your organization. There are more developers available, and Rails is more efficient at accomplishing the same task.
• Used the example of Charlie Parker, the jazz musician. He was both critical and criticized, which means
  • doing something sufficiently interesting that people were talking about him, and
  • doing something interesting and important enough that he scared people

I’ll add other notes as I have time later today.

We’re 1/2 of a day into the conference. So far i can’t say it’s been live blogging but from here on out i’ll post every hour or so.

DHH spoke via skype as he is in Sweden, and took questions. He covered some of the questions that seem to always come up when he speaks, like not having a roadmap, why open source projects shouldn’t promise release dates, etc.  But he had a few good answers to some audience questions. For smaller applications, he recommended Phusion Passenger, which he noted was just simple and took away a lot of the burden of deployment. For larger applications he recommnds taking the approach they took with Basecamp, where they use apache, HAproxy, and mongrel. (I could be wrong on the apache part)

He also said the Rails community needs some sort of site that allows for the review, listing, and ranking of plugins. I do believe there are a few sites that try to do this, but no one mentioned them.

Chad Fowler had a great talk, i’ll cover that in the next post.

I’ll be live-blogging the conference as it progresses today. Most of the speakers are in English and they have simultaneous translation into English, Spanish and Portuguese as appropriate.