The final day of RailsConf! I have to admit, it was fun, but at the end, you just really want to get home.

The first talk I went to was Neal Ford’s Ruby design patterns, which was good. It introduced me to a few Ruby modules I’ve never heard of before. Mixology and the Interface switcher. I also liked the way he did a simple demonstration of DSLs.

After that, I went to Ezra’s scaling Ruby talk. Ezra introduced Vertebra, which is an XMPP based way of managing multiple servers, or potentially doing other sorts of distributed operations. I enjoyed listening to Ezra’s talk, although if I knew it was about XMPP and server maintenance, I probably would have went to something else.

I went to the talk about Dtrace, because DTrace interests me as a way of monitor Rails applications in ways that does not involve gdb or switching to JRuby. Not that there aren’t other ways, but you know. My primary development environment is also a Mac, which means I have access to Dtrace locally.

After that, it was Chad Pytel of Thoughtbot’s talk, and I really wanted to record his talk and just show it to the developers I work with. It was a great explanation of how to do the right thing with your models and controllers, and gave some really good real-world advice on cleaning up code and being more DRY. It really summed up what makes Rails a great framework, and the Rails community a good community.

The conference concluded with a panel by the four main core developers, and I was surprised that no one asked them what the roadmap was to making Rails thread-safe. There was also a conversation about ActionWebService, which is something the company I work for uses on a daily basis. A lot of other interesting questions about things like ActiveResource and other things.

I had a good time at the conference and met a lot of people in person for the first time. I heard rumor that next year’s conference will be in Las Vegas, so I can get married next year and do a bit of Rails at the same time. Now that’s efficient!