Rails Camp, the Third
June 25th, 2008
Here we are, a few days after the Third Rails Camp in Australia.
This was my first true rails camp, I attended a day of the first one but due to having a 2 week old baby 4 days/ 3 nights was out of the question. When the 2nd one in Melbourne was on, I was in Fiji with my family, I can’t complain too loudly.
Rails Camp was just awesome. The vibe was electric. It was great putting names to faces with the guys from the #roro IRC channel that I spend alot of time in. We asked people to blog about Rails Camp so we could get the word out, here is what I hacked on:
Twetter
Whilst shivering my arse off in bed on Friday night it hit me – how hard would it be to make tiwtter.com resolve to my laptop and watch the logs for the URLs? The answer was, not hard at all. So first thing on Saturday morning I had twitteriffic running locally. It took 50 lines of code in a rails 2.1 app. Lachie had an example of the XML that the API returned and with a little help from Max M and his internet enabled CrackBerry we were able to read the twitter API docs and get the other bits and pieces. Once Lincoln woke up I had twitter.com resolving to a shiny new VM on Bigguns (the awesome server) and twitter was alive! There was no friending, everyone got the same stream. I did implement replies but left out direct messages. I think it was a hit.
Merb Caching
I met Dan Neighman for the first time in real life. We speak alot on IRC and hang our in #geekdads. He was working on a new caching mechanism for Merb and came to seek me out as the resident Caching Guru. I was flattered. We spent a good few hours over the weekend fleshing out the solutions to problems that I currently have solved in rails in a hacky, need to use cron kind of way. The outcome was background-tasks. Dan wrote it up here. This is Uber exciting and I really want to start Merb Hacking.
Managing Expectations
I decided to give a talk on Managing Expectations. In a previous life this was what our software did but in reality we all have to do it each day. I pegged it as a discussion rather than a talk and that was exactly how it panned out. I reckon there might have been 20 guys all sitting around relating stories about their experiences and how they dealt with them. I think it’s safe to say that the conclusion was, politics aside, that being open and transparent is the safest way forward, especially if you’re a one-man-band or a small shop. Clients/Bosses are generally more willing to co-operate if you play it straight. The talk was actually interrupted by lunch but quite a large proportion actually kept talking whilst eating. I think this was a great outcome for a non-tech talk at a very geeky weekend.
So, to all you guys that read this and went, blog it up people! Get it out there. Let’s start a * Camp movement.
—Matta
2 Responses to “Rails Camp, the Third”
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June 25th, 2008 at 10:30 AM What an unreal weekend. It was great to see everyone. Definitely looking forward to the next railscamps. Food was unreal. I certainly suck at Guitar Hero, but (I hope) I'll survive...
June 25th, 2008 at 01:44 PM The twetter idea is fantastic - especially making it work directly with twitter clients. *So* looking forward to the next one.