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Tomi
Laine

29 / 11 / 2011

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Frozen Rails 2011

In September we had a week of conferences. Leonidas sponsored Tampere Goes Agile here in our hometown, while Edvard and Janne traveled to Strange Loop in St. Louis, and Sami visited the ICFP conference in Tokyo. Meanwhile, Toni and I went to Frozen Rails in Helsinki to hear the latest buzz from those in the Ruby on Rails world. We decided to look back on our Frozen Rails experience.

One of the sessions we most looked forward to was Jeff Casimir’s talk entitled “Blow Up Your Views.”  He called for a better separation of views and business logic. We had already been going in that direction in our projects: minimizing data transfer to a plain template and JSON while letting the browser do the rendering. Jeff’s presentation entertained us quite a bit and merged well with our view of how web software should work.

Are developers also designers? Developers should have at least a basic knowledge of design to avoid pitfalls because software is valuable only if it is usable. Jarkko Laine’s talk entitled “Full Frontal for the Backend Pack” was a reminder of the importance of interaction design in web apps. One of the things he talked about was using HTML5’s History API to maintain linearity in browsing, which is exactly what we have been doing when moving a rendering to the client side.

We were excited to hear Zach Holman talking about maintaining flow at GitHub. They avoid metawork, work asynchronously via Git, and use a simple branching strategy similar to ours. But above all, they love great software and creating it, as do we. We don’t go as far as communicating with pull requests to avoid interruptions, but we do have the ticking of a Pomodoro timer to indicate flow. Some parts of the GitHub method probably work well only when you are developing something like GitHub though.

The guys at GitHub presented another session towards the end of the conference, and Aman Gupta gave the most information-packed talk of the conference about debugging performance issues in Ruby. In a little less than an hour, he introduced us to a dozen tools, providing brief explanations and use cases. Obviously, we didn’t have enough time to learn everything there is to know about the topic, but he gave us a good idea of what tools will be handy and where to look for them.

It was nice to note the feeling of connection and unity within the Rails and Open Source community. The atmosphere felt very casual, and it was easy to strike up a conversation with just about anyone. We returned to Tampere feeling invigorated and excited.