threehv

Myself and Team Brightbox spent the weekend in Edinburgh for Scotland on Rails last week. Here is a quick micro-review:

• Ruby is all about the testing: most of the talks were about testing, test-driven development, or even better, behaviour-driven development. I certainly think that the Ruby community leads the world when it comes to this form of software development (good job I’m obssessed with it eh?)
• The next most popular subject for talks (a long way behind in second place) was scaling. Nothing too radical here; sensible design will see you a long way and the real bottleneck will end up being your database
• The best talk was Dave Thomas explaining the Ruby object model. I finally know what Ruby’s eigenclass is (hint, it’s the same as the metaclass or singleton class). It’s also nice to see how elegant Ruby is internally – your current context and scope only changes in a class definition or method invocation, which is really sweet. But not as good as Smalltalk, where class definition is a method invocation, so the model is even more elegant.
• The venue, Pollock Halls, was OK, but the chairs were a bit uncomfortable for a whole day of sitting down, there weren’t a great deal of power sockets and there was a Wifi failure at one point. The food was good, even if I didn’t know what some of it was (and there was free Irn-Bru – no stereotypes there :-))
• Overall, I really enjoyed it. I met some interesting people, learnt some new stuff and had a good time. You can’t ask for much more than that.