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Day Two at RailsConf
by: eric | May 18th, 2007 |
Hello again from RailsConf. I’ve gone through five presentations. I don’t have any enormous revelations, and no good pictures yet, but I do have some observations. I’ll do this Larry King style.
…Uncle Bob and Jim Weirich are great public speakers. I’ve seen Uncle Bob do most of the CleanCode talk before, and I’ll go again at Agile 2007…Went for a run yesterday, Portland is quite pretty…Everyone I’ve met here has been unfailingly interesting, with nobody trying to ‘network’ just meet people like normal human beings…Spider Man 3 was mildly disappointing …If you get a chance to download the slides from Spam I Have Known, do so. Hugely entertaining…If you add videos to your presentation it’s fun, but not as much fun as genuine enthusiasm about your topic.
Okay I can’t do that for very long, how did Larry do it for 20 years? The highlights from today would have to be three things:
- Keynote. The tone here is very different from your typical stuffy conference, and it’s great. Chad Fowler playing the ukulele, DHH referring to ‘unicorns’, I doubt you see these at a Windows Vista conference. Well you probably do, but it’s forced and trite. There’s a genuine enthusiasm here, because what we have here are 1600 developers who are all passionate craftsman who would do this for free. To any potential customers: That last part was a joke. We like to be paid. Speaking of paying, Dave Thomas gave a talk (which Gilberto attended) on Rails for charity, and that charity is still open at:
http://pragmaticstudio.com/dontate
Charity good, give some.
Clean Code. Uncle Bob is a “friend of the program” as they say in college and rather closely related to my boss, so my opinion is biased admittedly, but his speech today was packed and as always well received. If you want to see what he talked about hold the apple or ctrl key and click http://www.objectmentor.com. That will open the site in a new window, so you don’t go away.
Spam I have known. The presentations I saw the rest of the day were up/and/down. Nothing was bad exactly, and I know these people put a lot of effort into them so I won’t name names, but there wasn’t much memorable. I was beginning to think I’d have to make up something to blog today, until seeing Jim Weirich’s presentation on spam. Ruse has a really nice algorithm for detecting spam which has quite a few features but it centers around an idea so obvious you’ll wish you’d thought of it, the Tarpit. Spammers routinely defeat sites with one thing - feedback! They attack a site trying different things until they figure out why they were rejected. A Tarpit takes spam and doesn’t give them an error message, it puts it in the Tarpit. They think that their spam was successful, so they don’t change the spam. I think I’m going to grab it and try it for my personal wiki, which has never been replaced since I left the evils of corporate America.