the Mr. Henry blog-o-sphere

As we love Ruby On Rails, it was a pleasure to hear that there was an international conference in Helsinki. The main topics on Frozen Rails were Github, document oriented databases like MongoDB & CouchDB, mobile apps with Rails, testing with Cucumber and of course a talk about Rails 3.

The opening talk was by one of the Github founders, Chris Wanstrath. He is the living evidence that developers can be rockstars. The tattooed, long haired geek explained how Github handles the awesomeness behind the scenes and the collaboration with Rails. A lot of plugin and Rubygem names past the revenue. It was a great talk, well brought, excellent vibe and if you don’t have a Github account yet, now’s the time to get one goddammit!

Next was José Valim, who gave us an excellent overview of the plugins and gems he uses to make his life a lot easier (or as José calls it: the plataforma way). Some names that caught my attention were Devise, Simple Form, Responders &Capybara (apparently the biggest rat in the world, even bigger than Webrat ^^).

The talks about document oriented databases by the guys from MongoDB & CouchDB were also mentionable. Mike Dirolf from MongoDB did an excellent explanation on what NoSql databases is all about. Although it’s hard to make the switch in the head, but with document oriented databases, we can let go difficult joins or other complex transactions. Jonathan Weiss quoted that this kind of databases are written for the web. JSON will be your main guide to transfer data around, and that is just music in the ears of a lot of developers! Although these technologies are relatively new, you don’t see it that often in production, but they’re definitely something to keep an eye on and sure worth playing around with!

Yehuda Katz was the man behind the mobile Rails apps topic. He talked about the pro and cons of current mobile devices and our possibilities as developers. The biggest concern most developers have is that the mobile story is going to be a struggle, a lot of browsers, a lot of differences on CSS & javascript support. Katz reassured that we’re not heading forward to another IE6 equivalent, because the mobile browsers are moving way faster than there computer variants. Mobile applications are also a big reason for everyone to pick up HTML 5 as soon as possible. A lot of problems can be solved easily and almost every browser is able to use the most of this technology or can deal with it and degrade it gracefully.

Carl Lerche brought us a roundup of what things we can expect from Rails 3. While he knew, he would be talking to a Rails loving audience, his talk scraped the surface and I think a lot of people were expecting some more underground insights. Also, they didn’t mentioned a release date, but we can’t blame these guys, if you see what Rails 3 is going to bring us, it will be worth waiting!

And the last talk, was by Jarkko Laine and was actually a great speech about perfectionism. We all know the problem that we start working an a great idea, but somewhere at the near end, we just can’t get it ready to launch. Jarkko’s advice: drop the details, and ship it! The only way your application can evolve is letting people use it, listen to feedback, and feed it on the road. It was nice to see, that everyone in the room was nodding along, and by the end of this talk, you really had the feeling of just releasing some beta projects of your own.

Overall a great meet up with like minded people from all over the world in a beautiful city.

We’ll definitely be at the next edition!