Edd Dumbill's Weblog: 'railsconf' articles

RailsConf, remotely

2008-06-02T12:41:36Z

I couldn't make it to RailsConf this year, but have been playing my part from afar. It gives me a small kick of pride to note that now RailsConf is run entirely out of Expectnation, which is of course Rails-based.

Here's a badge I clipped for my virtual scrapbook.

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Edd 10.5 release notes

2007-11-14T16:05:58Z

I’ve had my head down with lots of hard work and exciting developments, and alas too little time to blog here. However, I wanted to post a few updates as to what’s been going on.

Expectnation

Most of my time’s been spent working on Expectnation, the conference and event management application my company works on.

The highlight of this quarter is that we launched registration facilities, so now in addition to planning content, creating your event web site and managing speakers, you can take money and register folk for your conference.

We’re very excited about adding this, and it makes Expectnation the ideal “conference in a box” system.

It’s a complete buzz to see submissions coming in for RailsConf using our software—Rails-based, of course!

Conferences

I’m currently gearing up to open the call for participation for XTech 2008. We’ll be in Dublin, Ireland, in early May 2008. More soon on this front.

Additionally, I’m going to be co-chair with Allison Randal for O’Reilly’s OSCON 2008. I can’t really say I’m filling Nat Torkington’s shoes (more like ironing his shirts) but needless to say it’s a great privilege about which I’m thoroughly excited.

With being so busy, I’ve not had the time to travel as nearly as much as I’d like this year (the small matter of the baby twins has some bearing on this, too). I’m very sad to be missing XML 2007, as the XML crowd remains the most erudite, eclectic and friendly bunch of people I’ve ever had the pleasure to work with.

Writing

My sporadic attempts to attain literary posterity will again come to the fore over the next few months, as a new project starts with my old friend and co-conspirator Simon St.Laurent. All hush-hush for now, but I look forward to sharing the news and maybe some early-access content here.

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Illustrated Rails, smart folks and publication

2006-06-23T01:31:47Z

It's been a fun day today, the pre-conference warm up day for RailsConf.

Over breakfast with Surj Patel and Matt Biddulph, we got to talking about debuggers and poking around inside Rails applications. With Rails being so new, I was intrigued in what happens when you hand a Rails application over to somebody. Does all the Rails magic help or hinder their ability to understand what's going on?

What kind of ways are there, beyond documentation (which nobody writes), to communicate the workings of a Rails app? We thought that what might help would be some kind of graphical illustration of the flow of control, linked to a source viewer, that showed requests being processed. Rails is built in a convenient way for instrumentation and introspection, by virtue of the aggressive use of DSLs and Ruby's language features. Based on these, are there tools we can write to help people understand what a Rails application is doing?

I've not yet had enough experience of either handing off, or being handed, mature Rails apps to say for sure what's needed. But it's going to be a problem we all face when Rails sneaks further into the system. Java's redeeming quality in the enterprise is that it's damn hard to write anything one might consider idiomatic. As a consequence, there are predictable ways in which one can approach code written by somebody else, all other factors being equal. Will Rails idioms cause trouble for long-term maintainability?

Lunchtime included an interesting exchange with Rich Kilmer. Rich used to work for DARPA on RDF and OWL stuff, and has apparently written all manner of interesting Ruby code that processes RDF. It's a crime I'd not come across his work before, but it's all open sourced in the Semitar project. The project web page looks modest, but if Rich's description is anything to go by, it sounds a wonderfully appropriate way to approach programming for the semantic web.

Finally, I notice that, as the day finishes, IBM developerWorks have published my Introduction to Rails for DB2 developers.

RailsConf proper starts tomorrow.

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