This year’s WindyCityRails was the best one yet. Ray Hightower and the rest of the conference organizers hit on a successful formula last year, and kept it going this year with only minor tweaks — lightning talks, and they also provided soft drinks during lunch.
WindyCityRails is mostly a single-track conference, with a couple of smaller tutorials and a coding Dojo to round out the day. In a single track structure, the quality of the speakers is critical — the attendees have no place else to go. I can only speak to the morning (I couldn’t see the afternoon speakers because I was running the afternoon tutorial), but the morning speakers were great.
Jake Scruggs had a nice presentation about Metric_fu, even if you’ve used Metric_fu before and heard Jake present about, there were some new details there. For instance, I learned how to pronounce “Saikuro”, and learned Jake’s new word “rehactoring”.
I think everybody in the room learned something from John McCaffrey’s talk on Rails performance. I especially appreciated his focus on the parts of your app stack that are not rails — static assets, database indexes, and so on. There are huge benefits to be won there, but a lot of times its easy for a Rails team to focus only on the Rails parts.
I don’t think I can go without mentioning the Coding Dojo, sponsored by Obtiva, that Ryan Briones and Tyler Jennings ran. Over the course of the day, the conference attendees worked on a chat server that continued to run over conference WiFi for everybody to use. By the end of the day, the community had built up a really nice app — check out the GitHub link to take a look.
I missed out on the afternoon talks because of my session, but I caught a lot of buzz surrounding Ryan Singer’s design talk, and Nick Gauthier’s talk on improving test suite performance. From Nick’s slides, it’s clear he gave an insanely detailed set of ways to speed up a slow CI server.
Yehuda Katz gave the last talk, focusing on new features of Rails 3, and also incoming features of Rails 3.1. Most of 3.1 is going to be focused on performance, not just of the Rails framework itself, but also giving app developers better tools to improve the performance of the entire stack. So, we’ll be getting improved caching tools, suitable for use in a read-only environment like Hiroku, and tools for speeding rendering to the browser, and static asset management. Sounds great.
It’s been amazing to see WindyCityRails grow over the past few years, and I love being a part of the Chicago Ruby/Rails community. As always, the most interesting conversations take place during lunch (which remains the best conference food I’ve ever had), in the hallway, or at the afterparty (which I actually went to this year for a bit, despite a splitting end-of-conference headache…). It was also extremely encouraging how many of the participating companies were publicly hiring. I’m already looking forward to WindyCityRails 2011.
