Arrrrcamp

Went to arrrrcamp last friday (Arrrr as in _R_uby, _R_ails, _R_adiant and, of course, _R_hum!). It was the third edition of this unique ruby-on-rails event, and the third time i visited it ;) So i am a regular :) The first year i was just starting ruby and my then-collegue and me learned a lot. The second time i took some new collegues along hoping to get them infected with the ruby virus. This year i went alone (so you can guess how well the infection spread :), but one advantage of being alone in a croud is that it is way easier to mingle. There's even a picture to prove it :) I saw some very interesting talks:

• Something Something Mongo: I alrready had read about Mongo, and was interested. This speech interested me more than Radiant. Just another NoSQL database. Some things were not entirely clear, like how you can query stuff if all things are in the same "database". But it seems like something i should investigate more. I think there are a lot of possible applications, and the presenter showed a very good example, where the database is entirely configurable by the end-user, which is dead-easy in Mongo and MongoMapper, because there is no schema! Ha! :) Opens up possibilities indeed ;)
• jQuery on Rails: at the same time there was a talk about the new things in Rails3. So this was a hard choice. But i am already using jQuery, in combination with Prototype, and was hoping to get some tips to do it better. The talk was very quick, but also very informative. The presenter did a very cool job, where he showed the same site in Prototype (using helpers) and jQuery (using unobtrusive javascript). Very nice. I still write most of my javascript inline, and am gradually switching over. I am still struggling with one problem. In most of unobtrusive javascript examples, i always see that all code is placed in the application.js. But that is not good enough for me. I want a js file per erb-file. I found a blogpost by Yehuda Katz, where he does something even smarter: only include the js-files which include the selectors from the current page. But unfortunately it is so old, the source is nowhere to be found anymore. when i asked the presenter, after the session, he pointed me to this article about Jzip, but on second look it is not quite what i am looking for.
• Railties: what, why & how?: a very interesting talk, but i must admit, since Rails 3 territory is still very unknown to me (and a lot has changed apparently) a lot of it was unclear. In short: the old way to create rails plugins is replaced by Railties. Plugins and engines are supported, dependencies are more explicit. Something i still need to look into, to convert the plugin we use at work.
• Something something Rack: actually i did not want to see this one, but rather the 12 hours to rate a rails website by Elise Huard, but because @Atog was late those two talks had switched. She confided, however, that i would get a second change at RailsConf :) The something-something-rack talk was very basic, but also enlightning. Rack provides a minimal interface between webservers supporting Ruby and Ruby frameworks. Rack applications can be stacked. Since Rails is a Rack application, it is now very easy to put Rack-apps in front of Rails, for instance to redirect to different sites or pages if the visitor uses a mobile device (Rack::MobileDetect), add google analytics to your pages automatically (Rack::GoogleAnalytics), or to block unallowed access (Rack::Warden). Very interesting. Also allows for a clean seperation of concerns. One last Rack middleware I really want to mention: Rack::ChromeFrame! This middleware will make sure the Google Chrome frame is automatically enabled. Cool :)
• Learning to smile at your code: a talk by two german guys, who both work at Xing, about refactoring and to learn to actually enjoy it. Xing is a very big website, coded for the largest part in Rails. They have 22 developers working in Rails. Sebastian and Tim, the presenters, had to add features to the job-postings page/code and encountered a lot of problems doing so. I really liked this talk because i found it very recognisable and also because it was a talk focusing on the programming of an application as a whole. They used a lot of humour to convey their message, with success. Really-really compressed their message was: 1) seeing a lot of old, incomprehensible code can be demotivating; 2) breathe and relax; 3) starting to refactor it anyway, despite the obvious unwillingness at first, will make you smile because you can create something beautiful. They gave some examples which i guess barely even scratched the surface of the complexity they had to deal with. Nice :) After that the lightning talks came (short talks of about 10 minutes). I will highlight a few:
• failtale: a notification framework/website by the guys from Mr. Henry. Impressive, because not only does it capture ruby/rails exceptions, but also ActionScript (flash) and Javascript soon. I am going to try that out! :) I am currently using Exception Notifier myself, curious how it compares.
• The guys from 10-forward did three talks. First a demo of their application, which was incredibly impressive. Wow! Blew me away. A lot of javascript and ajax to make the website feel like a real application. Very powerful. Then they discussed a gem of theirs, and rspec and cucumber.
• wallsome: Sebastian and Tim from Xing, who also did the Learning to smile talk, here presented their pet-project, using Rails 3 and jQuery: a wall to arrange your tasks from Basecamp like in Scrum or Kanban. I am looking forward to the next edition on the 29th of october! :)

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