Sean Mountcastle

By the final day of the conference my head was about to explode with the amount of new information crammed into it. There were some great tips and tricks on the final day, but overall, I think the conference peaked on day two. Here’s a run down of the sessions for day three:

• Buried Treasure: Hidden Rails Tips by Dave Thomas
• The Streamlined Framework by Justin Gehtland
• Rinda and DRb by Justin Gehtland
• Amazon’s S3 Web Services by Marcel Molina, Jr.
• Rake: Building Up Ruby by Jim Wierich
• Rails Production Tips and Tricks by James Duncan Davidson

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The second day of the conference was even better than the first, in my opinion. There were several more talks which I was eager to hear. Here’s an overview of the second day’s presentations:

• Creating Rails Plugins by Chad Fowler and Bruce Williams
• The Presenter Pattern by Marcel Molina, Jr.
• The Deployment Golden Path by James Duncan Davidson
• Testing Rails Apps by Stu Halloway
• Red, Green, Refactor by Jim Weirich
• Building View Frameworks by Bruce Williams
• Lightning Talks

Read on for my notes. Read the rest of this entry »

Recently, I attended The Rails Edge conference run by The Pragmatic Studio. It was a single track event with some of the best and brightest folks in the Rails and Ruby community. The speaker line-up was as follows:

• Dave Thomas
• Mike Clark
• James Duncan Davidson
• Chad Fowler
• Justin Gehtland
• Stuart Halloway
• Marcel Molina, Jr.
• Jim Weirich
• Bruce Williams

Read on for a description of the first day’s sessions.
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I’ve been looking for a good introductory book on Erlang for quite awhile now. Unfortunately, the Concurrent Programming in Erlang book just doesn’t do it for me (plus only the first part is available online). Thankfully, it looks like the Pragmatic Programmers have come through with Programming Erlang.

Unfortunately I was on vacation when the last NoVA RUG was held in January. Thankfully Luis has taken the time to place his notes online. For the February meeting we’ll have Chad Fowler as guest speaker.

Last night we had excellent turn-out at the Northern VA Ruby Users Group. Rich Kilmer gave an enlightening talk on Domain Specific Languages and Devin Mullins delivered an interesting performance piece on Rails plugins where he wrote code while singing about it (ensuring that the code matched his meter and rhyme).
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