The last past days in Amsterdam for Ruby En Rails 2009 were really great.
I arrived on Thursday and had the chance to discuss a possible security vulnerability in Rails I discovered a while back with Yehuda and Mislav during lunch.
Afterwards we went to the conference dinner and met many very nice people and had a long discussion about voting systems, European vs. American culture, gun laws, and political systems.
Friday was the first conference day and started for us with being 40 minutes late as we headed up to the wrong metro station. Yehuda was supposed to give a keynote as the first session... luckily the organizers swapped the sessions. So unfortunately we missed the first session but were in time for Yehuda to give his keynote.
Yehuda talked about the Rails/Merb merge and dissected what was achieved. It was a very good, in-depth presentation about the new features of Rails 3 and what left to do. I really liked the new router DSL, actions being Rack-apps, and the death of Rails Metal (the new, slicker possibility to build simpler/smaller controllers takes care of this.).
After the coffee break I gave my Rails Security presentation about common attacks against web applications and how you can protect against them in Rails. Usually this is quite heavy stuff and people tend to sit quiet and listen as this is new to most. In Amsterdam I had some very good questions and discussions on session fixation, JavaScript high-jacking, and app reconnaissance.
Then we listened to Julio Javier Cicchelli talk about Rubyists.EU, an effort to make the different European Rails communities easier to find and build a common European community.
We went to lunch with James which gave us some time to catch up. Took us a while to find a decent place around the conference hall but we managed to find a restaurant where we tried to estimate the global financial burden due to Internet Explorer and what will happen to Microsoft if they were charged for the extra work needed done.
After lunch Eloy educated us about the current state of MacRuby. I'm really looking forward to spending some time hacking Mac apps in Ruby.
The next session gave an overview about monitoring, performance, and the different tools like request-log-analyzer or Nagios.
The conference was closed by Jeremy giving a keynote about Rails, Ruby, and the current state of things in the community (and a sneak-peak at ActiveRelation and what it will be able to do). It was very well received and a good closing session.
Afterwards a big group headed for dinner. We ended up in a small, very local restaurant. It included very nice food, good discussions with new friends from Finnland, and a waiter/owner who runs the restaurant homepage with Rails and asked Yehuda for help :-)
The next day was titled Geek Day and included many lightning talks (that ended up being nearly full sessions and had very good content). Parallel to the great sessions about MongoDB, DataMapper, or experience reports there was a Rails Rumble featuring five teams going on.
The most notable session of the second day was Justin Halsall, dressed for Halloween, talking about BlockHelpers and view DSLs. It was a hilarious show.
The Rumble was a great idea. In contrast to the usual Rumble the teams got a specific challenge. They should build something that improves the situation with Rails dependencies and out-of-date gems laying around in vendor/gems. The winning team would get two tickets to RailsConf 2010.
One team extended builder to list outdated gems and got their changes even merged back to builder by Yehuda on the same day. Another team extended Webistrano to accept projects dependencies and display them on the stage page. Some teams build a command line tool to extract local dependencies like your gems or even the MySQL version and push those definitions to a central place. The winning team had the the most advanced idea regarding update notification and gem-sets for applications. I could really see something like this being integrated into gemcutter. Congratulations Ludo and Michel!
Ruby En Rails day two was celebrated with a big dinner and drinks. After a very nice evening we headed back to the hotel as everybody had an early flight out. Some were still discussing Rails, some were lucky to be able to enjoy Amsterdam longer.
I really enjoyed the conference and Amsterdam. Thank you Chris and Tim Obdam for organizing the whole event!
