Rails Conference '07 is a wrap

by Loren Johnson on Tuesday, May 29, 2007

I had the privelege of attending this year’s Rail’s Conference in my home town of Portland, OR. It’s been a while since I’ve taken the time to show-up to a tech conference of this scale, but I’m sure glad I did.

There were an astonishing 1600 people in attendance this year compared to the 500 last year, clearly attesting to the rapidly increasing popularity of the Rails framework. Though the keynotes and sessions I attended were all top notch, I want to send out props in particular to Dan Benjamin and Dan Webb, both I felt put on exceptionally good talks.

Dan Webb managed to pack into his entertaining hour long “Javascript Fu” talk more content than any other presenter I saw and without ever seeming like too much. It was a fantastic refresher on some basics but carried with it the undeniable clarity of a (king fu) master. As if to say, “it’s simple grasshopper,” and suddenly it was. However, I’m still trying to figure-out the purpose of the “bastard son” .fromHTML method of his own creating. It seems to be a way of forcing DOM to consume a set of innerHTML objects and add them to the tree without all that verbose proper DOM stuff. Maybe someone can fill me in here, did I get that right?

Dan Benjamin’s walk through the evolution of Cork’d was riveting despite or maybe even because of Dan’s mild manner. He made it seem that him and Dan Cederholm (yes, all these Dans) had sort of just materialized Cork’d out of some spare time and good luck. Every developer’s dream, not only to launch a successful startup, but to do it in off hours without investors or much marketing. How many users in the first week? 200. That’s pretty good in my book and largely all because they had a seed database of wines and reviews which got them top spots in very specific Google searches for specific wines reminding us all once again that the only real SEO is to have real content.

However, it was mostly the people I met that made it a great conference. The energy and cooperative spirit in this community is not being diluted by the increased entry, it’s maturing. That was the feeling I got. DHH’s announcements of the less than groundbreaking, but nicely refined, features of the to be released Rails 2.0 set this tone from the start.

Another very interesting thing, perhaps the most exciting for us here at Venado, was that most everybody I meet is freelancing and most of those had more Rails work than they knew what to do with. I knew that things had accelerated in the community within the last year, but I hadn’t assumed that this was happening on both the supply and the demand sides. Turns out it is and, for now the demand seems to be accumulating faster than the supply.

Also on the people front I got to spend some quality time with the Radiant CMS crew who I’d been working with off and on via the mailing list and iChat. Great to see real faces and hear real voices and eat real pizza. I look forward to working more with the team going forward as I join forces with them in core development of Radiant.

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