Wow… RailsConf07 was absolutely amazing. The interesting thing is that I am not talking about the presentations, although they were top-notch. Instead, the Rails community is what made this conference so… heart-touching, even.

Chad Fowler directly announced that he picked the keynotes and sessions as his personal mold for what we should be thinking about. To this end, I thank him deeply for his choices.

While there, I came to recognize the Rails community in a new light. I don’t think I could have understood this unless actually being there either (as cliche as it sounds.) Our community stereotype as elitist, arrogant developers did not show its face.

I hope that the community stays like this, and that everyone has a chance to go to at least one conference like this.

All of the attendees were teeming with positive energy and friendly. The diversity of people was great, including people from different states and countries, and people in suits (maybe one or two) to people dressed like hippies and supermodels (you can guess here…). Breakfast and lunch was served in an enormous open room full of tables and seats. But, everyone there was inviting, and immediately started conversations naturally. This was true of people in the hallways too, and included speakers and even DHH himself. Chad even told us to introduce ourselves to somebody new during one of the breaks, although this was happening naturally anyway.

The ad-hoc organization of lightning talks and RejectConf led to some of the more interesting demonstrations. Similarly, post-session conversations with speakers that led to group discussions, which then led to BoFs ,fully capture the spirit of the conference. The BoFs in general stood on their own as hallmarks of open, informative discussion… not just presentation.

Each day opened with one of the hilarious Mac VS PC spoofs by Gregg and Jason. Keynotes were accompanied by accordion and ukulele (courtesy Joey deVilla and Chad Fowler, respectively), and even a spoof serenade (to the tune of ) to our beloved creator DHH.

DHH stressed the importance of plugins both as a community way to share common functionality and testing-grounds for Rails core-features.Avi Bryant (creator of Seaside) gave a jaw dropping and eye opening talk exposing similarities between Smalltalk and Ruby. He strongly recommending stealing from Smalltalk’s maturity in IDE and especially VM implementations. Specifically, a highly distributed virtually machine network by a local Portland company called Gem
Stone. Supposedly, converting this to Ruby would not be overly difficult. But, it would make Ruby run as fast as Smalltalk, which is approximately 10 times faster than Python (and 3 to 4 times slower than Java).
Besides that, Avi stressed his belief that state is good, and that like wine, “objects get better with time”. In his opinion, that is the path that Ruby should follow, effectively becoming Smalltalk =p. This was not a unique opinion though, as Chad seemed to support Smalltalk. As a bit of comic relief, Avi introduced himself as “from the future” and had a hilarious metaphor from 2001: A Space Odyssey (we are the apes…)

Dave Thomas even attacked the browser with its transition from form based requests to AJAX as a medium for the web. He compared it to a similar evolution of ideas that happened in early computers, and warned to not get stuck in a loop of repeating history. Dave went on to get the audience to come up with more examples of this “cargo cult”, evoking responses as extreme as REST, Mongrel, and Rails itself. Although, he did boldly reject the idea that conferences could ever be a cargo cult =p.

Dave Thomas had a donation-based all day tutorial that raised over $12,000 by itself. After witnessing this accomplishment, Chad Fowler (and many other speakers that followed) encouraged the audience to continue donating throughout the conference. Eventually, a challenge to make this the standard for tech conferences was put in place. It is still going on, so anyone is still encouraged to donate.

As a whole, RailsConf07 was one of the most spectacular things I’ve ever experienced. There were many other interesting things happening, such as the effort to understand how “the enterprise” will fit into Rails, and various thought provoking sessions. But, by far the Rails community showed that it is concerned, responsible, and innovative, and I am extremely proud to be a part of it. If you were there, please take the time to blog your version of the event (and encourage others to do so as well) so the rest of the community can understand what is happening and share the excitement.

I’ve blogged about my gripes with multiple blogs in the past, concluding with an informal protest to only use one.

A specific instance of the problem that I mentioned was having a personal blog in addition to blogging under a company. Well, it turns out that you can have the best of both worlds with little to no effort.

Yahoo Pipes takes advantage of the fact that so many sites and services distribute some form of feed syndication. It allows you interact with feeds from different sources in an absolutely incredible amount of ways. Through graphically playing “connect-the-dots” with various modules and/or filters, you gain an unprecedented amount of easily accessible power to create mashup feeds. Of course you can export these to RSS (or JSON), but they even offer email or mobile exports!… and publicly sharing the “source” file so others can copy your project where you left off and continue it!

Okay enough fanaticism (although it is completed warranted), and lets get back to the topic. Grabbing feeds from separate employee blogs to combine on a company blog has always been an option. However, Pipes makes this so easy that you have no excuse to not use it.

Here’s a simple proof-of-concept… totally usable though. It uses the “fetch feed” module that you pass an RSS url to. Then, the sort module is used to sort for the most recent entries by date published, and even by new blog comments. And then… nope that’s it, just connect to the “pipe output” module and you’re done!
(Note that I only included my blog here in the RSS, but you can add as many as you want to get mixed in by just hitting the “plus” icons):
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=3PcgeID42xGTQKjsy6ky6g

Another cool thing you could do is make a filter to only grab posts out of the feeds to put on the company blog that have been posted under a certain category… sweet!