I originally started a post about the conference but it got too old and Blog City deleted it. Never mind. Have another go.
The conference was fantastic and I enjoyed every minute of it. The presentations are here.
I went to the charity tutorial on testing, which was hard core but really good. If you want to see what it was like have a look at Ruby Hoedown and click through to the testing tutorial. I’ve watched all of the content from this conference – very good.
By far the worst talk of the whole show was the one by the inventor of REST Roy T. Fielding, Chief Scientist, Day Software, who just read his very dull powerpoint to us and did’t say anything new or useful in language I could understand. This was annoying because the ideas are really good – just expressed in a very closed, boring and inarticulate way.
The talk from Cyndi Mitchell of Thought Works was by far the most interesting visually, she presented using hand-drawn diagrams rather than the usual bullet point bullshit, and what she had to say was interesting and well thought out.
I was most moved by the Rails in Africa talk, and resolved to try and help them. Of course, one month or so later I’ve done nothing about it because I’ve been running around like a headless chicken.
I met up with some of the guys from the North West Ruby User group, and also eventually got pointed to geekup (another North West England thing). I can recommend Sushi and German beer.
Need to post more on Geekup, the Manchester Ponto de Cultura , learning to use RSpec, paddling the Washburn, using SVNRepository for my own projects (only $4 a month for peace of mind – bargain) – just to name a few.
AND … getting into podcasts after being so sniffy about them. (list of good podcast sites to follow)
AND … Going to see my dharma teacher after several years (next week). But that’s pretty private.
Onward