Tuesday, June 8, 2010

RailsConf Tutorial Day: Drinking from a Fire Hose with a Sore Throat and Hacking Cough

Below is a rundown of my first day at RailsConf. In the end, I had a good time and learned a lot. But it was a tough road since I probably should have stayed in my hotel room to get over a pretty bad cold.


5:00 AM - woke up in misery w/ this chest cold. Sore throat, hacking cough. Things are going to be rough today
6:00 - woke up again coughing. At least I have another hour of sleep
6:11 - damn this isn't working out like I had planned
6:30 - ok good, I have 30 minutes before my alarm

7:00 - alarm, hit the shower. Crank up the hot water. Stay in shower as long as I can stand it
8:00 - head over to conference center. Cringe when a friendly guy tries to strike up a conversation w/ me. My voice hardly lets me respond.

9:00 - settle in to Rails3 Ropes Course tutorial w/ a cup of herbal tea. Seems to help.
-whoa, Pollack is flying through these slides. I should have worked ahead before I got here.
-this thing is like drinking from a fire hose.

11:38 - ActiveRelation and ActiveModel have been the best sections so far. For the first time today, I completed the lab!! And they said that would be the hardest lab of the day. I think that really shows how much of a novice I am w/ Rails. The simple stuff can really trip me up sometimes.

ActiveRelation looks suspiciously like linq. I like the way ActiveRelation and ActiveModel are working to separate the model from always extending ActiveRecord. Seems like Rails3 is much more configurable out of the box

11:45 - speedwalking to CVS to pick up some medicine
12:00 - speedwalking back to the conference to grab some lunch
12:05 - disappointed in my roast beef sandwich.
12:30 - iPhone + Rails w/ Mike Clark. I'm able to keep up, but just barely. Mike is flying through this stuff. Guys sat down beside me, w/ Windows machines, didn't know what language was on the screen, and just started talking the rest of the session
12:45 - His slides were done in HTML5. Pretty cool, you can just used the arrow keys to go through them. This is a good idea. I'll have to look at the source later.
2:45 - the session has gotten more advanced quickly, keeping the same pace as when we were reviewing the simple topics. Starting to get a little lost and distracted.
3:30 - OK, so I picked up on most of the topics here. It's pretty easy to get iPhone and Rails to talk to each other in the simplest cases. He also gave some examples of good third party tools to assist in creating iPhone apps for RESTful communication

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