Ground Kontrol is located at 511 NW Couch St. (here are directions from the convention center), and will be open until 2:30 a.m. on Friday and Saturday night. Anyone interested in checking this place out?
I’m spending today, the optional “tutorial sessions: day at RailsConf, in Dave Thomas’ and Mike Clark’s all-day Rails Guidebook tutorial, a whirlwind tour of both Ruby and Rails. This sesssion is normally worth hundreds of dollars, but Dave and Mike charged only US$75 per attendee, with all the proceeds going to charity (they’ve raised a total of over US$12,000 today).
Dave gave the funny line of the morning early in the session: “XML…the language of the Devil!”
Mike Clark and Dave Thomas at their “Rails Guidebook” tutorial.
Most of the morning was devoted to the Ruby programming language itself, with about an hour of the basics of Rails. We’re now in the afternoon half, which is devoted to a more in-depth look at what goes into a Rails app and what Rails gives you, the developer. “for free”.
Dave also gave the funny line of the afternoon: “If we sound bitter, it’s because we have customers.”
Mike Clark and Dave Thomas at their “Rails Guidebook” tutorial.
The third installment of the RailsEnvy guys’ series of “I’m a Mac”-style ads (see this earlier article for more) features Rails vs. PHP once again, this time on file organization:
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.
