Like last year, I am again suffering from mac envy. But, oddly it is easier to deal with now that I could, hypothetically, buy one. On the other hand, I think that the number of PCs(mostly Linux mind you) is higher than last year.
I still want a web capable phone though.
James Edward Gray II started things off wonderfully talking about how reading code helps you to understand it better and write better code yourself that fits in the community. He tied it into Little Big Planet by showing how he developed a Tower’s of Hanoi level. It has its own developer community who borrow ideas from each other and its own style and idioms.
It was great to see someone who I had seen posting on comp.lang.ruby when I first began following it in person.
Restclient looks pretty awesome as a way to interact with services. It is a microframework for consuming webservices, sort of like an inverse sinatra.
James Edward Gray II recommended it as interesting reading. He also suggested looking at BJ and Terminator.
Or, you could just pick a gem and gem unpack it. But, it probably would be better to start with something less complex than rails.
Rack Middleware was the next talk. \m/
Essentially, the goal of rack middleware is to make webapps more composeable. Rather than mixing in open-id oauth and session management inside your app, you use smaller middleware apps and selectively apply them to different url spaces.
map '/private/awesomeness' do
use OpenID
run AwesomenessApp
end
You can also set internal headers inside special namespaces that allow middleware further down the stack to access messages set for them in a secure manner like for instance, whether the current session is authenticated.
One neat idea: do you need to have a proper web app at the end of the middleware stack? Not really.
Yehuda Katz made me think more about what Rails 3 will look like with its merby goodness. It is being reworked to be a set of rack middleware so different components will be more pluggable. For instance, right now, using datamapper with rails is alittle painful. standardizing the expecteds will make this much easier.
Puppet looks pretty freakin awesome.
I would care more about rubyCocoa if I had a mac.
TenaciousG is a super cool name for a graph(DAG et al not pictures) library.
Jeremy McAnally’s talk on DSLs was slick.