James Duncan Davidson wrote a little piece on how to get from the airport to downtown Portland cheaply — by taking the MAX, the light rail system. It’s only fitting that you travel to RailsConf by rail!
RailsConf Online Notices
You can also find out what’s happening online in a few places:
One of the first things I noticed at last year’s RailsConf conference was that Mac laptops far outnumbered PC laptops. Outside of Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (and possible FOO and BarCamp), you normally don’t see this sort of Mac-PC ratio.
I took the snapshot below last year. It of a group of attendees hanging out between sessions. Note that every laptop in the shot, including that of conference organizer Chad Fowler (4th from left) and presenter Adam Keys (5th from right) — is a Mac:
Here’s a closer look — a video of a sea of Macs on developers’ laps:
Fearless Leader Uses a Mac
While most Rails projects are eventually deployed as production apps on Linux-based servers, OS X is the preferred development environment for Rails geeks. That’s no surprise, considering that Rails creator/figurehead/supermodel David Heinemeier Hansson is himself a Mac guy, as he writes in this article on his blog, Loud Thinking:
“All the best hackers I know are gradually switching to Macs… The reason, of course, is OS X. Powerbooks are beautifully designed and run FreeBSD. What more do you need to know? I got a Powerbook at the end of last year. When my IBM Thinkpad’s hard disk died soon after, it became my only laptop.”
It’s great to see that over the past few years it has become the norm, not the exception, that good programmers are wielding Macs. There’s the odd exception of Linux here and there, but the writing’s on the wall: OS X offers the best personal computing experience available today.
While I can certainly understand the reasons why some people go with Linux, I have run all but dry of understanding for programmers that willfully pick Windows as their platform of choice. I know a few that are still stuck in the rut for various reasons — none of them desire.
I would have a hard time imagining hiring a programmer who was still on Windows for 37signals. If you don’t care enough about your tools to get the best, your burden of proof just got a lot heavier.
Seeing they were in the minority, RailsConf 2006 attendee Christian Metts handed out “Certificates of Nonconformity” to people sporting non-Macintosh laptops and took their photos. These RailsConf nonconformists were also photographed for posterity, and the photos have been collected in this Flickr set.
The most famous of the nonconformists was none other than the enigmatic Rubyist known only as why the lucky stiff, who posed in classic “why” fashion with his certificate:
Click the photo to see it on its original Flickr page.
Faster processors, with 2.0GHz now being the slowpoke of the bunch
Bigger hard drives, with 80 gigs being the minimum (That’s just okay —
I’ve always felt that Apple was stingy with drive space)
More beaseline RAM — 1 gig — which really should’ve been the bare
minimum in the first place. OS X can be a hungry beast.
Apple does list the specs in their news release, but I’ve rearranged them into a nice matrix to make comparison shopping easier for you. You can’t say we at Global Nerdy ain’t never done nuthin’ for ya!
These might be the first of the MacBooks to feature Intel’s Santa Rosa chipset.
The Santa Rosa chipset can be configured with the Core 2 Duo processors to run at 1.8, 2.0, 2.2 and 2.4 GHz — they expect that the MacBooks will run at the lower speeds in this range while the MacBook Pros will run at the higher speeds.
The MacBooks may incorporate the Intel GMA 3000 graphics processor, which should yield faster graphics performance.
They say ”
The MacBook will not employ newer LED backlight displays; that upgrade will need to wait until the next revision.”
The second annual RailsConf — the premier conference for Ruby on Rails developers — starts this Thursday, May 17th, with a full day devoted to tutorial sessions; the main conference starts on Friday, May 18th and runs to Sunday, May 20th and features three days of keynotes, sessions and gatherings of all sorts (here are the Friday, Saturday and Sunday schedules).
I will be among the 1,200 people attending this year’s conference (that’s three times the number of people who attended last year’s, which took place in Chicago), and I’ll be taking copious notes, photos, videos and podcast recordings as well as entertaining and/or annoying conferencers with the accordion. Watch this blog all this week for Rails and RailsConf-related posts!
