Scotland on Rails: a micro-review

Rahoul Baruah — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 18:27:10 +0000

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.

threehv » scotland on rails