Coding is like gardening...

Hot on the heels of Aimee’s lovely overview earlier, here’s my take on the conference from a technical lead/business owner/recruitment manager angle (my team keep telling me I need an array of hats so they know which of my 14 roles I’m currently operating from, but enough about that).

I thought it was an excellent conference. It was a little smaller and more intimate than last year, but that suited me as it wasn’t quite so crammed and I had more time to talk to people. It was definitely worthwhile taking the whole team; everybody learnt an enormous amount, and we got a lot of team chat in, which is always good. From a business standpoint, there was plenty of old-fashioned hand-shaking, and a few people who might just find the time to come along and work for us – we’re always looking for talented programmers. The message boards they have at these conferences are always good for this.

My conference highlight was the fresh take on legacy code from David Heinemeier Hansson.  Looking back on previous code you’ve written should make you cringe to some extent; how else do you know that you’re improving as a programmer? A good lesson in confidence for programmers everywhere; it was great to hear the message from someone so high-profile.

Not sure we’ll go in such numbers next year, but it’s great that we managed to get there this time. There’s a chance that RailsConf Europe 09 might be a bit closer to home, which will be nice. I’m also planning to head to Future of Web Apps in London next month (at least for the expo) – drop me a line if you’re going.

-Chris

RailsConf Europe is a 3-day conference focusing on the web application framework Ruby on Rails. This year it was hosted in Berlin and all five of us attended. We had a great time, learnt a lot, met some inspiring people and experienced some of the culture of Berlin whilst we were there.

As a company, most of the web applications we build for our clients are written in Ruby on Rails. Ruby is an interpreted, object-oriented programming language created by Japanese programmer Yukihiro Matsumoto, often known as ‘Matz’.

Rails is a framework written in Ruby which allows easy access to a database and supports our rapid development cycle. It is so-called ‘opinionated software’ in that it gently guides us to use standards that have been proven to work well, and it encourages the current best practices for web development. Rails was created by Danish programmer David Heinemeier Hansson, often known as ‘DHH’ or just ‘David’.

For me personally the most useful part of the conference was the half-day tutorial on Unobtrusive JavaScript. Many web sites these days are full of clever effects such as drag and drop, fading text, expand and collapse. These effects are made possible thanks to ingenious use of JavaScript. The trouble is, not all browsers support JavaScript. As web programmers it is our responsibility to make our sites accessible to all users. The tutorial taught me some useful new concepts, and the hands-on practice was beneficial.

Other highlights were the seminars about advanced RESTful techniques, globalisation and internationalisation, presentation caching, and enabling offline access to a website using Gears. We also heard a fantastic keynote from DHH concerning ‘legacy’ code. As time goes on we become better programmers and we may begin to dislike the code we wrote in the past. Since joining I am definitely having this experience, because i have learnt such a lot! David’s message was to celebrate legacy code – it shows how far we have come. We saw how tidying up just a small part of the code can have a big impact in feeling better about it.

It wasn’t all hard work at the conference. We sampled some of the bars and restaurants and visited the Brandenburg Gate. I got to meet some people i’ve known on the Internet for a while, and also made some new friends. It was a very worthwhile trip.