I’m sure I’m not the only Rails developer who missed RailsConf 2009 due to a plethora of various reasons. Well, I didn’t let that hold me back from gaining as much information as possible from the Conference. Although these resources are pretty easy to find, I thought I would help you out by providing you with some links.
First is the official RailsConf site, hosted by O’Reilly. This would be an obvious first choice for people, but I am still going to restate that there is a great deal of free content available here. Most of the keynotes and speeches are now up in pretty high-quality video and slides are available in PDF form for both the keynotes and most of the tutorials.
Next, if you’re like most people, you might not have enough time to watch the hours of videos or sort through all the slideshows available over at the RailsConf site. Well, you’re still in a great position to learn from those keynotes, as Nick Quaranto attended a ton of events at RailsConf and took great notes, which he published here on his blog litany against fear. Some highlights include the David Heinemeier Hansson keynote on the future of Rails and the secret to being productive using Rails, some great keynotes about git and github, and a speech given about testing with Webrat. Definitely worth checking out.
The final resource I’m providing related to RailsConf is from Rails Magazine. They just published their second issue and it is a special edition for RailsConf. I really am trying my best to support this magazine because I think it would be great to see this magazine grow into something great (not that it isn’t already) and be avaialable at bookstores and news stands. The big article goes over what’s coming to Rails 3 and details about the Merb and Rails merge. Oh, did I mention this magazine is free in digital form?
And while I’m at it, I thought I’d also point you over to a very, very detailed article about the benefit of building websites for projects on github and how things should be documented. I think if this is more heavily adopted, it would make life easier for developers using a lot of various gems and plugins. But at the same time I understand that this does take effort to create and most people aren’t exactly overflowing with free time. Either way, a good read that I though I’d share. I hope these resources help you to understand what happened at RailsConf and hopefully taught you something new.
If you’re anything like me then you can never have too many wallpapers. Thankfully, Bobby Solomon, the author of Kitsune Noir, has been running the Desktop Wallpaper Project for about 6 months now. Every week Bobby posts a new wallpaper from a different artist with a short blurb describing the inspiration for or the creation of the wallpaper.
