Ruby on Rails Exchange
Well, right at the last minute I managed to get a seat at the Ruby on Rails at Skills Matter. Overall I found it quite enjoyable and glad I managed to take a day out of my mad schedule to attend.
Talks of note for me were Chad Fowlers talk on Quick and clean Rails, Tom Locke's Hobo demonstration and Ben Griffith's talk on testing.
Of particular note was Chad Fowler describing how Ruby is designed/best used by smart programmers who know what they're doing. He continued to explain that if put into the wrong hands Ruby gives a bad programmer enough rope to hang himself with. And this is something I have to totally agree with, as over the past two and a half years I've either audited or rewritten some very crazily written Ruby on Rails projects. These were coded by either people trying to write large commercial applications after reading the Agile Web development with Rails book, or written by people who didn't have a good grounding in Ruby and/or web application architecture. There's nothing wrong with this if it's a simple site with a small number of users, but not when it's a high usage site that people expect to be available around the clock.
After everyones talks were over Skills Matter were nice enough to take everyone down to Fluid for some drinks, with the first one hundred being on the house. Overall a very nice end to an interesting day.