Late friday I returned from a week in Berlin, most of which took place at the proArte Maritim Hotel, venue for this years RailsConf Europe. It has been an exciting week with many new impressions and ideas, and a chance to meet fellow Rails geeks.
To me, the conference was a great success. I learned an awful lot and went home with a head buzzing of things to try out and new perspectives on old problems.
The talks varied a lot in content and quality, perhaps more than I had expected. Of the the talks I attended, the most memorable (in a good way) were
- David Heinemeier Hanssons keynote on “legacy” software (boy have I been there, done that)
- Jeremy Kemper’s keynote on performance
- The Renegade’s Guide to Hacking Rails Internals by Pradeep Elankumaran (Intridea, Inc), Michael Bleigh (Intridea Inc),
- Deploying and Monitoring Ruby on Rails by Jonathan Weiss (Peritor GmbH) and Mathias Meyer,
- Hacking the Mid-End: Unobtrusive Scripting and Advanced UI Techniques in Rails by Michael Bleigh (Intridea Inc) and Chris Selmer (Intridea, Inc.)
- Offline Rails Applications with Google Gears and Adobe AIR by Till Vollmer (MindMeister/Codemart GmbH)
- Security on Rails by Jonathan Weiss (Peritor GmbH)
- Small Things, Loosely Joined and Written Fast by Justin Gehtland (Relevance, Inc.)
Of these, Justin Gehtland’s star performance stand out as by far the most engaging and entertaining. Note to O’reilly: next year, give Justin two time slots.
On wednesday, many of the visiting danes gathered for a fun night out, starting with a nice dinner at Midtown Grill near Postdamer Platz. Check out the pictures on flickr.
