I totally read it on Some Guy’s Blog

Ben Scofield, who I had not met, works with Patrick Reagan, who I have. Combined with the fact that almost every Rails site that I have written has some amount of static content, I was interested to see the talk.

In the style of Bob Martin’s talk early in the day, Ben’s presentation dealt with a progression of potential solutions to the problem of handling static material within Rails. The first solutions were very greasy! Check out this potential security hole:

def show
  page_path = params[:path].join('/')
  if File.exists?("#{RAILS_ROOT}/app/views/static/#{page_path}.rhtml")
    render :template => "static/#{page_path}"
  end
end

Obviously, that was from phase one. In the end, they end up with a solution of some elegance!

I don’t want to short-change Ben here, but I would like to give a better writeup when he comes to speak at CVREG in the coming months.

Their plugin is available, as are the presentation slides.

Adam Keys made a big splash last year with his presentation AC/DC, Stravinsky, and Rails. Reading open-source code is one of my primary methods of learning, particularly languages in which I’m not that experienced. So I was pretty pumped for this session.

Despite Adam’s entertaining style, I thought this presentation was pretty slow apart from the rapid-fire, laugh a second intro. (Check slide 8 for the “hottest thing he could think of.”) I would have much preferred to see a few more examples of real code that he thought were particularly enlightening, although he has promised to write more about that in his own blog post.

Wow, this party was awesome! I went for the first two days. The second day gets its own entry, because me and Jon Maddox were some of the last people there. We shut the party down!

The most exciting thing that happened for me during the entire conference was on the balcony at the Doubletree when Chris Wanstrath (from err the blog) pulled out his business card. On the back it says “Mite!” and I loudly proclaimed that his partner P.J. must have “Dyno” on the back of his. I was, of course, correct. Maybe next year (crosses fingers) I’ll actually collect them to prove it.

Basically, the best part about the Joyent party was that it was a lively exchange about a lot of different things, from the poverty/hockey relationship in Detroit with Grant McInnes, a talk about SXSW with a guy who used to dislike it but now works for them, running into Gianni Jacklone who has a switch to OS X commercial, and the list goes on.

The specifically Joyent part was also nice. I had a brief but enjoyable chat with David. I heard Jason talking to other Joyent staffers about things he probably wouldn’t want repeated. Kristie told me that she loves me, presumably for starting this thread and gave me a hug. She also gave me the advice to bring the Cubs hat, which isn’t a bad idea to help people recognize me. I met Ryan Schwartz and Mark Mayo, on top of the Scotts that I had met the day before.

When we got there, we saw something like this and when we were done, it looked like this.