Youngblog

I really enjoyed David Hansson’s keynote at RailsConf this year. He started out by discussing the surplus, or competitive advantage that Rails created, and how this surplus will eventually disappear, probably for one of three reasons:

• Other frameworks/languages will achieve what Rails has (unlikely)
• Another breakthrough technology will arrive
• Rails will become mainstream (good and bad)

My favorite part was near the end, where he admonished Rails developers to become better programmers by being more well-rounded. Among his suggestions for doing this were:

• Read more paper (reduce RSS feeds)
• Take up a hobby (examples: wood carving, banjo playing, pilot’s license)
• Get more sleep
• Reduce work time

On a side note, I have had a lot of people lament, along with me, that Confreaks wasn’t contracted to record RailsConf. Our services become especially useful at multi-track a conference like this, where you seem to always want to be watching more than one presentation at a time. While I wish we were recording it, it is also nice to be able to sit back and relax and just watch a conference for a change.