What an amazing weekend. Being back at the ol’ .NET day job today is rather dull… but I needed some sleep. It was fast and frenzied, and a pretty intense experience trying to blog it all. We obviously couldn’t make it to all the sessions, and kinda pooped out near the end, but there are plenty of others out there to fill in the gaps.

1. Overarching themes

There are three things that were discussed (and overheard) more than any others, IMO.

• Deployment is still sucky. If you’re serious about your application (and its uptime), don’t deploy on a shared host. Get a VPS (Virtual Private Server). Understandably, Robby (of Planet Argon) is none too pleased by this sentiment. Of course, the downside of a VPS solution is that you have to pretty much know what you’re doing. So for the Linux web server noob, I would probably still recommend a shared hosting environment to start with; step up to a VPS when you get serious about uptime. For me, I’m headed to a Rails Machine soon.
• Testing. We all know it’s baked right in. As DHH says, those directories are staring you in the face as soon as you create the app. It’s there to make you feel guilty. But a lot of people still don’t do it. I’m certainly guilty of half-assing it at times. But you have to. It’s a must.
• Dave Thomas’ plea to the community to make Rails “configurable” and “appeal to the mainstream” touched a nerve with a lot of people, and I’d say the general opinion is split. I met plenty of people that (secretly) agree with Dave, arguing that Rails in the mainstream is only going to help them sell more business. Others disagree, saying that “convention over configuration”, not being all things to all people, and not “living in the real world” is exactly what makes Rails special.

1. Highlights

Pretty much all of the presentations and demos throughout the three days were outstanding. A few blew my mind.

• Martin Fowler’s keynote
• Paul Graham’s keynote
• DHH introduced ActiveResource during his keynote on Saturday. In summary, work with external objects (web services) as easily as you work with your own models through ActiveRecord.
• Why the Lucky Stiff’s friday night performance… which we didn’t blog, incidentally. Because, you know, how could you?
• Streamlined – awesome AJAX scaffolding. You know how that project you’re building needs an admin interface that you’re saving till last? No worries. You’re done.
• Metaprogramming and DSLs – Presentations by Steve Hammond, Bill Katz, and Stuart Halloway.

Overall, it was a great three days, and we met a lot of people doing some amazing things with Rails. It’s clear that it’s the strength of the community that makes Rails special. See you all next year. (May 24-27, 2007 in Portland… I think.)