Don’t forget to look at The Rails Way blog. Move logic into your model. This lets you break functionality into more granular components and makes testing easier. Keep your controllers skinny. Jamis blogged about this principle here. Use before filters to setup state before your controller runs. Use before_create in your models. ActiveSupport helps you…
Practical Design for Developers David Verba
Practical Design for Developers David Verba Another standing room only session. Perhaps the organizers will wise up and have at least on larger room next year for the sessions that are very popular. We are going over the basics of audience analysis – understand your users: Context Motivations Challenges Know your stakeholders – anyone that…
Bad Food
I have eaten a lot of bad food over the past few days which is too bad given that Portland has good restaurants. The main source of bad food is the Rails conference. A WORD TO CONFERENCE ORGANIZERS: Stale pastry and coffee do not count as breakfast. Lunch is not much better. It is so…
Taking Care of Rails Support Tasks Through Custom Daemons Tammer Saleh
Saleh is talking about using a Daemon to get rails to talk to LDAP. The code for the LDAP deamon and the code to make it look like a model live here. I will add a bit of code here and there, but hopefully the presenter will upload the slides so I don’t have to…
Building Community-focused Apps with Rails Dan Benjamin
Sitting in the community app presentation right now. I was torn between this and the clean code presentation, but since we are building community apps this presentation seemed to be the most appropriate. Here’s the first slide: Fast prototyping Prototype becomes product Help Developers and Designers work together. I am hoping it gets better and…
Rails Conf Intro from Chad Fowler and Some Stuff from the Mountain West Ruby Conference
Chad Fowler is talking right now. I think he works on giving keynotes that leave you scratching your head a bit. His keynote at the Mountain West Ruby conference had mixed reviews. We left wondering what his intent was, but we weren’t sure if it was just our perception. Last night we had a chance…
Two Revolutions Alan Francis
I tried to get into the REST talk but it is so full that they have guys guarding the doors to keep people out. I am instead sitting in an extreme programming session. I wouldn’t have come in here except I noticed that DHH walked in. I figure if he sees potential value in this…
Rails Conf Intro from Chad Fowler and Some Stuff from the Mountain West Ruby Conference
Chad Fowler is talking right now. I think he works on giving keynotes that leave you scratching your head a bit. His keynote at the Mountain West Ruby conference had mixed reviews. We left wondering what his intent was, but we weren’t sure if it was just our perception. Last night we had a chance…
OpenID and David Heinemeier Hansson
After the Two Revolutions session I had a few minutes to talk to DHH. First I must say he is just a very nice guy. Programmer envy over. I had a discussion about OpenID. It is going to be a critical component of the next rev of our apps. OpenID hasn’t reached a level where…
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants Adam Keys
This session is totally packed. We managed to sneak in. The door guys don’t like that much. If there is a fire we will all die. Adam Keys is funny and entertaining “If you want to learn from the masters you have to read their code.” Read code because “you’re surrounded by idiots.” When you…