goruco2008

I attended GORUCO yesterday.
What a great time; great presentations, great after party, great people.
I didn't bring a camera, but others are tagging photos from the event.

Some of my highlights of the event:

Bryan Helmkamp's Story Driven Development. I've looked at Rspec a number of times, but have never gotten my butt off of standard rails unit test. The new story telling framework and webrat integration with Rspec has inspired me to schedule some time to look at this again. I really liked the feel of the "given some situation", "when this happens" "then I expect these results" syntax. And the webrat dom integration to fill in form field with syntax as simple as "fills_in last_name" with 'shaw' " looks sweet.

Giles Bowkett's - presentation. OMG! As soon as this is up on confreaks check it out. I really can't begin to explain this presentation, you have to see it to understad. Make sure the kids aren't around or at least the headphones are on. He was on a rant about VC firms being muppet f'ckrs that was pretty hilarious.

Chris Wanstrath - Forbidden Fruit - Ruby's parse tree. I'm a fan of his Ambition project and enjoyed hearing him speak.

Ezra's Merb 'All you need, none you don't' - I've been keeping an eye on merb since Ezra first started publicly talking about it. So, hearing him speak about it was cool. However the really really huge news was the information about what his is doing for Rails. This is huge news. Ezra is taking what he has learned from writing merb, and giving back to rails. He has been hacking away at Rails ActionPack and is removing the legacy cgi dependencies. He has reworked action pack to play nicely with Rack, and in doing so has supposedly made some improvements in the size of the rails mutex lock. This is really huge news. He mentioned that he is devoting something like his next 6 weeks to work on getting this stuff wrapped up and into rails core. I just realized that he blogged about this too. Wow!!!

The after party was a blast! Engine Yard hosted the after party at the Tribeca Grand; open bar, wi-fi, wii gaming, and general meet and greet stuff. Before the night was over I got a chance to say hey to a few of the guys I was looking forward to meeting.

Great event!