Jake Scruggs

While checking out at the hotel I ran into Coby from confreaks.com They are recording the conference so you'll be able to see the talks online sometime soon. They're not cheap, but their videos are very good (they capture the output of the presenters computer and display it side by side with video of the presentation -- you seriously need to check out their site), and they offer a discount if the conference is willing to CreativeCommons license the talks. Starting off the morning was "Ruby: A Year of Innovation" with Gregg Pollack & Jason Seifer. They had a lot to cover so it went pretty fast. I tried to keep up as best I could. Jason Seifer was up first: HPricot - awesome for scraping websites Juggernaut - server push with rails -- keeps a connection open Ambition - write your SQL statements in Ruby Prawn - Ruby based PDF generation Capistrano Ruby VMs roo - spreadsheets Excel, google docs Dtrace and Ruby -- memory stack live Skynet - map reduce for Ruby Data...

(or the second day if you count the tutorials) To start things off Jim Freeze got up and announced that there are 282 attendees and seats for 280 -- So make friends. The the first talk of the day was "The Next Ruby" by Bruce Williams and he (of course) discussed the difference between Ruby 1.8.6 and 1.9 Bruce recommended a good test suite if you're planning to move to 1.9 and I have to agree. Tests are good for lots of reasons (including design) but they pay for themselves 100 times over when you need to do a big tech migration. Because of changes to string, anything string heavy (such as parsers) is gonna need some love. On the plus side: "ruby"[0] => 114 in Ruby 1.8.6 "ruby"[0] => "r" in Ruby 1.9 Yep, I've been burned by that and I'm glad to see sanity carry the day. In other news: Hash.select now returns a hash Hashes will maintain order :this === "this" #true Because of Multinationalization Strings now have each...

First, I'd to extend a big thanks to Joe and Jim for giving me a ride to the conference today. The two tutorials I decided to attend today were: "The Advanced ActiveRecord Workshop" with Gregg Pollack & Jason Seifer (the Rails Envy Guys) and "The Ins and Outs of Ruby I/O" with James Edward Gray II and Gregory Brown. Both of which were excellent. The Advanced ActiveRecord Workshop covered: Loading large data sets (the 'ar-extensions' gem helps lots). A gentle reminder to properly index your freakin' database. How Rails optimizes multiple :includes in finds and how that goes to hell if you combine lots of :includes with :conditions The super awesome Named Scopes (which you need to look up right now, if you haven't already because it's not just about defining custom finders -- it's about defining custom finders that you can chain together and get optimized queries) Polymorphic Associations, Single Table Inheritance, Dirty Fields, Associ...

Word on the street is that Lone Star Ruby Conf was one of the best regional conferences last year, so I'm pretty excited to be presenting at the 2008 edition. It's happening Sept 4-6th in Austin, TX and speakers include: Matz, Evan Phoenix, Jim Weirich, The Rails Envy Guys, and too many other luminaries to name. I'll be giving a talk entitled " Using Metrics to Take a Hard Look at Your Code " which is a distilation of my thinking over the past year about how to use numbers not as a hammer with which to beat people, but as a tool to improve your code. Registration just opened up today, but space is limited so go sign up soon.