After turning up at the airport, enduring a 40-minute queue at security followed by an anxious sprint to the gate with 5 minutes to spare, I finally made it to a sun-drenched Berlin. Andy and I spent the day before the conference visiting the sights of Mitte, the centre of Berlin, with the Reichstag, the Berliner Dom and the Holocaust Memorial being particularly memorable. The Bauhaus Archive was somewhat less so.

Here are the highlights of the conference for me.

Dave Thomas Keynote

Oddly timed as it was (7.30pm the day before the main conference started), Dave’s keynote was pretty inspirational and a great way to kick off the conference. The message was simple: create something great.

Drawing on software development best practices (prototyping, iterative development, test-driven development), the presentation was passionately delivered and very educational. There are a lot of young developers at RailsConf, some of whom might be using Ruby as their first language, many more having ‘graduated’ from a PHP background (like DHH himself). Some of these guys (and, unfortunately, it was 95% guys at this conference) might not have the computer science background of others who’ve been coding for a decade or more, so Dave speaking about these important concepts in such an accessible way was great to hear.

David Heinemeier Hansson Keynote

It wouldn’t be a Rails conference without a keynote from the Rails inventor himself. David is an assured presenter, and this presentation — all about the forthcoming Rails 2.0 — was primarily a live demo.

Rails 2.0 looks much improved over it’s predecessor (which in itself is really saying something!), introducing ‘sexy migrations‘ as standard, cookie-based sessions, more work on routing (including namespaces), HTTP authentication and — perhaps best of all — a debugger. I used Java and Eclipse for so long (and before that C++ with Visual Studio) that I felt I was missing a limb when I first started with Rails. No IDE, no debugger… WTF?! Of course I’ve learned that an IDE is totally unnecessary when you have TextMate, but I still miss being able to put a breakpoint in my code and step through rather than relying on script/console or a bunch of logger statements. So I’m pretty excited about Rails 2.0, but not excited in the slightest about all the new Rails IDEs which are now being offered.

Dr Nic Williams: Meta-Magic in Rails: Become a Master Magician

Dr Nic is a good speaker. Forthright and funny, he talked about how to do some hardcore meta-programming in Rails. Some of it practical, most of it not, but being practical wasn’t the point! I’m not sure how often I’ll use anything Nic talked about, but his talk was memorable and I now properly understand method_missing. And I also have the Guess Method gem in my toolkit should I ever need it (ahem).

Britt Selvitelle: Really Scaling Rails

Britt is from Twitter so he knows a thing or two about scaling a Rails app. The concepts he talked about were only practical if you already have scaling issues (which we don’t yet with FreeAgent, although I’m hoping we will soon!), but they were very useful nonetheless. I’m still open-mouthed about the fact that they reject requests when all the Mongrel instances are busy. Lucky for Twitter, they can do this because they massively-scaled system means that the scenario where all Mongrel instances are busy never occurs!

The fundamental point though, was that there are two categories of problem:

• Too much time spent in the application
• Too much time spent in the DB

Solve these and use memcached for virtually everything (Twitter use the pure Ruby implementation), then your scaling problems are sorted :-)

Rob McKinnon: Parliament on Rails: Constructing a Social Web Application from Semi-structured Data

The longest title of the conference and, alongside Dave Thomas’ keynote, probably the best presentation. Rob has worked incredibly hard to produce www.theyworkforyou.co.nz — a Rails-based application which screen-scrapes Hansard, cleverly categories the data and makes it publicly available. Not only has he done this all by himself, he’s managed to do it in his spare time, voluntarily. That’s some effort and it’s hugely admirable. Bravo!

In conclusion

RailsConf Europe 2007 was a really well organised conference. The venue was good, with big rooms and plenty of space for socialising. Everyone was helpful, everything was really well organised and the food was outstanding. I think I’ll definitely return next year.