Youngblog

The Phusion Passenger guys really dropped a bomb at their Railsconf presentation today, which unfortunately was poorly attended. Their successful copy-on-write improvements to Ruby (released as Ruby Enterprise Edition) and their improved queueing mechanisms in the Passenger Apache module make it currently the Rails deployment option with the fastest execution times and the lowest memory footprint, even when compared with nginx and thin servers in front of mongrel clusters.

On top of this, they announced that the mod_rails moniker has been abandoned, since it now supports Rack (which allows you to host things like Camping and Merb apps) and WSGI, which even lets it run things like Django (!)

I personally am really excited that Dreamhost has installed Passenger, which makes it so much easier for me to host my personal Rails apps.

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.

I'm really excited to announce that Confreaks will be recording RubyConf this year. We also have a number of enhancements we are planning for our work on the Hoedown, including searchable transcripts of every presentation.

Coby Randquist and I, as part of our Confreaks side business, went to the Ruby Hoedown in Raleigh, NC. We were contracted to record the entire conference and place the content online. The first video has been posted and can be found here. It was quite an adventure, and we hope to do a lot more of this in the coming months.

It has been a long haul, but we finally finished our post-production work on the 2007 MountainWest Ruby Conference. During this process we developed a lot of scripts to make our future work easier and also learned which processes could benefit the most from better equipment. Hopefully we'll be able to use these skills in the future. Chad Fowler would like us to record this year's RubyConf and is seeking corporate sponsorship to help defray the costs. If your company is interested in supporting this effort, please contact me or Chad.

Confreaks is eager to assist with your next event. Please contact us for details.