RailsConf Day 2

I don't have too much to report from today. When I woke up, I knew there was no way I was going to the conference. I spent the morning sessions going to Patient First and figuring out what is wrong with me (just a cold, a really bad one). Then I spent the afternoon sessions sleeping.

I really hate that I missed today. The sessions were chocked full of things I'm interested in. I can't wait to see video of Neil Ford's keynote on Constraints and Creativity (please tell me that's going to be posted). There were also multiple JRuby and NoSql talks I was looking forward to. Oh well.

I did get myself together for the evening keynote by Derek Sivers. He gave an entertaining talk, and had very good stories to tell. He talked about his path from PHP, to Ruby, back to PHP, and now back to Ruby (for the first three steps of this path, see his famous blog post). He came across as a very good, humble guy, which is different a different impression I had of him 2 years ago when I first read that blog post. For as good and entertaining as the talk was, I have some criticisms of it. I felt like he was all over the map, and strayed so far from his own story, that it got lost. Also, I have a pet peeve when speakers don't give full credit to their resources. He couldn't remember the name of the book Switch, and he pulled multiple stories and statistics from that book.

I still greatly enjoyed the talk, I'd watch him again, and I'd love to see how the story ends up.