The Rails Sessions.

I am currently sitting in the foyer of the Jasper Hotel, sipping a cup of tea, thinking about the two sessions I have just had and the one I am waiting for. The sessions got kicked off by Obie Fernandez about the evolution of Rails 3. My first assumptions on listening were that I do not know why I want to know how Merb and Rails merged and who was involved and what was said to whom. But I was clearly in a minority. I put this down to the fact that I have not been as involved with the rails community as much as the majority of the people in the room.

Towards the latter half of the session, Obie began showing the new features in Rails 3 and I have to say that they do look very promising. I have not yet used Rails 3 myself (I began installing it in a separate gemset during the talk) but things like routing(in routes.rb), deploying(using rack), persistence handling and querying (using ActiveRecord etc have been made very very and easy to understand. I particularly like the lazy execution of DB queries and the subsequent chaining. I am told that upgrading from 2.X to 3 is a bit of a pain, but I guess I will find out.

The second session was delivered by Neal Ford about how he was involved a 3 year (and possibly ongoing) long project using Rails that is very enterprisey[sp?] in nature. It was interesting about the philosophy of tests should do but a lot of talk was bout the tools used. (A lot of them happened to be ThoughtWork tools 😉 )

One interesting point that did come up was that they had 15 pairs sometimes having one stand up and that the stand up was still quick! I would have loved to see how that was enforced, as I know that from first hand experience that that is not easy. They created things to make software development easy and they made life of people as easy as possible so that people could concentrate as much as they could on their core task.

But what I liked most of all is that they had 4 work day weeks. 🙂 10 hours a day, sure, but small price to pay for a 3 day long weekend.

I am currently waiting for the next session, which is titled “Why NoSQL” and I am really looking forward to it considering I am thinking of moving my personal projects over to Mongoid