A note to the interested reader: These are the raw notes I jotted down at RailsConf Europe 2006. They are probably misleading, out-of-context and not particularly useful if you didn’t attend the sessions. Nevertheless, enjoy.
Jim Weirich: Playing it safe
- Are open classes a poor fit for large projects?
- The Chainsaw Infanticide Logger Maneuver
- Leeroy Jenkins
- “Guard against Murphy, not Machiavelli” —Damian Conway
- use namespaces
- 10 Node classes on his disk
- Choose project name carefully.
- Avoid toplevel functions and constants.
- lessons from Rake
- Avoid modifying existing classes.
- Prefer adding over modifying.
- When adding, use project-scoped namespace.
- When adding public methods, ask first.
- Chain into the next hook.
- Only handle your special cases.
- Limit the scope of your hook.
- Preserve the original behavior.
- Understand and respect contacts.
- Require no more—promise no less.
- Replaced behavior must be duck-type compatible.
- All in all:
- Be polite with global resources.
- Preserve essential behavior.
Why The Lucky Stiff
- Remove your moustaches
- Ilias, anywhere?
- sandbox demo
(unreproducible on index cards)
Hussein Morsy: Database Optimization Techniques
- 1.5 years Rails experience, PHP before
- works on a German Rails book
- overview of his workplace
- optimizing:
- Rails code
- Indices
- DBMS
- OS
- optimize:
- number of connections
- transmitted data
- DB itself
- read the AR source!
- AR strangeness (proxying)
- selecting only what you need
- preloading children
- preloading and selecting
- counting
- …
Dan Webb: Unobtrusive AJAX with Rails
- History
- Dark age of DHTML
- Fixed resolution
- Web standards arrived
- Benefits of Web standards
- Behaviour: View layer among CSS and XHTML
- enhancing a working app
- graceful degradation
- not the Rails way
- Don’t use
<a>withonclick=only - http://www.ujs4rails.com
- Links should not have side-effects
- use
button_to
- use
Form.serialize- Demo, sneakr.com
Hamton Catlin: HAML
- “My other computer is open source.”
- HTML Abstraction Markup Language
- templating sucks in Rails, compared to the other stuff.
- Principles
- Code should be beautiful
- XHTML is prone to errors when done manually
- XHTML structure matters
- Diet soda can help you lose weight.
- Common markup is good.
- DIVs are building blocks.
- Demo
- indentation matters (ugh?!)
- no control structures (use partials, arrays)
- partials are properly indented
- http://unspace.ca/discover/haml
James Duncan Davidson: The web is a pipe, and more
- Unexpected things tell us lessons.
- Cigarette smoke is useful for finding cracks in airplanes.
- didn’t expect that Ant will turn into a language
- In the early days, we used FastCGI to deploy.
- FastCGI turned out to be weak sauce.
- HTTP is the real thing, stick to it.
- You learn how stuff works best when you look how it breaks.
- the simpler, the better
- Flatten storage and memory
- Amazon
- S3, they use it themselves
- EC2
- Google: BigTable
- MobileFS
- CPU cycles *do* matter
- more power
- more energy
- help save the environment
Dave Thomas
- This conf had highest four-letter words concentration.
- thinking about terrorism
- not about killing, but leveraging fear, making people afraid
- overreaction
- fear is wasteful
- lessons
- assess risk
- FUD
- lately(?), FUD has started about Rails
- Java is dynamically typed too (e.g. Collections, casts before 1.5)
- “You can’t possibly use something before it’s being used.”
- “Every publisher has Ruby books coming out—they’re all copycats.”
- The opposite of risk is not safety—it’s stagnation.
NP: The Byrds—Glory, Glory