I am not sure if I am the only one thinking this, but today wasn’t all that great. In my opinion the tutorials were not done properly at all, or aimed at the wrong audience. In fact, they were even misleading. Let’s quickly go over them, so you can feel my frustration, or gain whatever insight I did not get.
Scaling a Rails Application from the Bottom Up - Okay, first of all, a completely misleading title. This really should have been “Scaling Servers for Web-Applications”. It had a great topic, but I found it to be useless, mainly because it dealt with sys-admin type of stuff, which as a developer conference; we are not. The whole point of this tutorial was saying “Rails is not the problem”. I am sure Rails has problems, and I wanted to go to this tutorial to find solutions to those problems. Let’s find a way to optimize x and y, in case such and such happens. Oh well, some interesting information but nothing useful. I’d post the slides but I can’t seem to find them anywhere.
Is JavaScript Overrated? Or: How I Stopped Worrying and Put Prototype and script.aculo.us to Full Use - All I have to say is that this was really boring, and a waste of time. So much stuff here was basic documentation, and maybe a couple cool tricks. But the thing is, the tricks were just too complicated and were not something you would use. If anything all of those things could have been made a lot easier with jquery. In my fullest enthusiasm just make your life easier and go with jquery. That’s the best advice I can give you from attending this tutorial, and experience. I hear there’s even a couple plugins that replace the helpers of prototype with jquery related ones.
Harnessing Capistrano - The first one that actually had some useful information, but nothing essential in my opinion. It was cool to see some of the new futures coming out in 2.0, and realizing what things may or may not be hard to change. But honestly, again, a lot of the stuff was basic documentation stuff. I really wish we could go into some nitty-gritty examples and get our hands dirty, and actually learn some cool things. Overall it was alright, definitely better than the other tutorials. I actually got some insight from it, I just wish I could have gotten more.
More information later. Just blogging before heading off to BoF’s
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