It was the second edition of the conference I wrote about last year. This time it was bigger, the list of sponsors was longer, and the speakers’ page included more famous names. Fortunately, the conference preserved its “geek camp” atmosphere. The organizers, who were the students last year and are now graduates, had much more experience this time. The talks went according to the schedule, which was probably the biggest change from the previous installment ;). The two talks I enjoyed the most were:

• Correlations and conclusions by Zed Shaw. Mr Shaw delivered a witty presentation on measuring performance of web apps. He compared web.py with Ruby on Rails in serving a “Hello world” application. To nobody’s surprise Python’s library won by an order of magnitude, confirming Zed’s proposition that “Rails sucks”. While one could argue whether it makes sense to compare the efficiency of a fork and knife in a spaghetti eating contest, the show was entertaining.
• TDD in Rails by Andrzej Krzywda. Andrzej is a Rails developer with a Java background. He shared his practical experience with a test driven development in different languages. While he advertised TDD as almost the only sane way to develop a software, I’m still a bit skeptical. I work mostly on the UI part of Ajax-heavy applications, and it’s hard for me to imagine even partial test coverage of complicated interactions. And what about automated testing of CSS layouts? I’m currently playing with Selenium, but my first impression is that it won’t be a silver bullet for front-end testing.

I also had my own talk. I covered a few of the Amazon Web Services: S3, EC2, SQS, SimpleDB and Mechanical Turk. I demonstrated their possible use cases and pitfalls, plus Ruby API’s. As I expected, people were mostly interested in Mechanical Turk, but unfortunately this service is available only for US developers.

As a side note, I had the worst possible time slot: Sunday morning, after the conference party. The party was good enough to stop most people from getting up in the morning.

My slides are shown below. RuPy folks have promised to put videos from the talks online on YouTube.

What’s coolest about the conference is the people. My personal highlight was Netguru, a small code house in Poznań. I met three nice guys from the company: Adam, Wiktor and Kuba. It turned out they have developed the main competitor for the web app I’ve been working on recently. It didn’t stop us, however, from sharing a beer at Saturday’s party :).

Now I’m looking forward for RuPy 2009!

What kept me occupied during the last months, apart from my daily job?

• The book. In 2006 I was asked to translate The Book on Rails: Agile Web Development with Rails to Polish. I thought it was a great opportunity to learn the framework and even be paid for this. So I agreed. It took three missed deadlines, six months of labour and seven hundred pages. I found out that translation isn’t the best way to learn programming. Yet, it’s pretty good to learn how to write. I had a lot of fun working with the text and arguing with my über smart proofreader and Ruby hacker, Daniel Owsiański. The book will be published by leading Polish publishing house, Helion, and should hit the shelves soon.
• The web app. Everybody is working on one right now so why can’t I? As soon as I had finished the book, a friend of mine, Tomasz Korzeniowski, gave me a proposal to build a small web application. While I won’t be able to write any Rails code here, it’s a great chance to work with a bunch of talented people with pragmatic attitude. We don’t want to conquer the world (in the first release) but we are determined to make the darn thing happen. For me it will be an opportunity to test in practice iterative, user-centered design process, as I’m responsible for interaction design. Soon I’m going to write more about the project itself and our approach.
• The Bootstrap. Well, this one didn’t keep me occupied that much, but I feel really proud of it. One year ago a small group of programmers interested in Ruby on Rails gathered together in Warsaw. We met in a tiny, hot room but nevertheless the history was shaping on our eyes :). While not every one of us was a Ruby hacker, we have been sharing a love for the web and eagerness to do cool things with it. We have managed to meet each month to talk and give presentations. Later on we chose a name: Bootstrap. During the meeting there’s usually one technical presentation and one business one. The technical part is not limited to Rails: there were talks about Django, Amazon services or JavaScript as well. One of the greatest qualities of Bootstrap is the hacking atmosphere. We strongly emphasize technical side of the meetings and that turned out to be a great way to filter out people with ties and passion for the money only. On the other hand there were many presentations delivered by people who created successful websites. And the people who successfully learned from own mistakes. Thanks to Bootstrap I had a chance to meet brilliant individuals like Adam, Marcin, Daniel, Darek, Witold and many others. The next event will take place on 22nd September in Chłodna 25 cafe in Warsaw. There’s no entry fee, apart from an enthusiasm for the web.
• The switch. After ten years of living behind the windows I joined the cult of Steve. Being a Mac user in Poland is a SAD (if not depressing) experience but the faith is strong within me.

No więc jestem akurat strasznie zapracowany i nie mam czasu na spanie, nie mówiąc o aktualizowaniu bloga. W ciągu ostatnich dwóch tygodni wydarzyło się w moim życiu pewnie więcej niż przez poprzednie dwa lata, a obrona magisterki nie była w tym wszystkim czymś specjalnie się wyróżniającym. Podpisałem umowę o pracę, a za parę godzin przeprowadzam się do innego, tym razem nieco większego (bo stołecznego) miasteczka.

Ponieważ w moim konsekwentnie i skrupulatnie realizowanym planie przejęcia władzy nad światem niniejszy blog odgrywa istotną rolę, więc zaglądanie tu od czasu do czasu może zaowocować znalezieniem nowego wpisu. Bądź więc czujny, Czytelniku — nie znasz dnia ani godziny. Dokładnie jak ja.

After years of expensive education
A car full of books and anticipation
I’m an expert on Shakespeare and that’s a hell of a lot
But the world don’t need scholars as much as I thought
Maybe I’ll go travelling for a year
Finding myself, or start a career
Could work the poor, though I’m hungry for fame
We all seem so different but we’re just the same
Maybe I’ll go to the gym, so I don’t get fat
Aren’t things more easy, with a tight six pack
Who knows the answers, who do you trust
I can’t even seperate love from lust
Maybe I’ll move back home and pay off my loans
Working nine to five, answering phones
But don’t make me live for Friday nights
Drinking eight pints and getting in fights
Maybe I’ll just fall in love
That could solve it all
Philosophers say that that’s enough
There surely must be more
Love ain’t the answer, nor is work
The truth eludes me so much it hurts
But I’m still having fun and I guess that’s the key
I’m a twentysomething and I’ll keep being me

Which File Extension are You?

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