Last Thursday a delegation of three from Innovation Factory, Lukas, Martijn and I, travelled to the UK for an exciting Rails conference. We attended Rails Underground, a new London based Ruby and Rails conference which took place on the 24th and 25th of July and was organised by Mark Coleman.

The conference sported some big names such as Dr. Nic Williams, Obie Fernandez and Jim Weirich and promised to be a not-too-massive yet interesting gathering. So, excited as we were we hopped on the plane and settled down in a hostel very near to the Royal National Hotel, where the conference was held.

The next two days we spent most of our time inside of the conference rooms. There were many presentation and we did not even get to attend them all, so below I will point out only those that, to me qualify as the highlights of Rails Underground.

Day 1

Day one started early at 9. The first presenter that grabbed my attention was Gwyn Morfey (New Bamboo) talking about ‘Refactoring with fire’. He made some really interesting points about when to refactor existing code and when to simply rewrite the whole thing. Gwyn’s brilliant quote ‘Deleted code is refactored code’ triggered a fair amount of discussion. The bottom line was that in most cases one should favour refactoring over rewriting and that the choice should be a rational one, as the emotional urge to rewrite painful code can easily drift you off away from the tasks you really should be doing.

Then there was Obie Fernandez (Hashrocket) with his presentation called ‘Blood, Sweat and Rails’. And instead of a technical talk about the pains of Rails, as the title might imply, Obie’s presentation covered the subject of doing business in an agile manner and how that can be very tough. His talk walked through several topics like sales, marketing, finances and communication. Obie received quite a few questions about one particular statement which was regarding fixed bid contracts. He thinks that once a company has gained some momentum it should only work on an hourly rate. I agree with Obie here, as fixed bids just don’t fit an agile work process in which requirements constantly change. However, the world isn’t ideal and well paying clients often demand fix bids anyway, hence the controversy.

Another talk which was leaning towards the business-side of Ruby was Maik Schmidt’s (Vodafone) ‘Sneaking Ruby & Rails into big companies’. In his presentation Maik suggested several tips on how to get Ruby accepted in and used by the larger enterprises, which are often very attached to platforms like Java or .Net. He thinks using Ruby for smaller, less important helper programs of which no-one really cares about how it is implemented is a good first step for sneaking Ruby in. He also states that using the Java powered JRuby often creates more confidence.
As we are a Ruby supplier I would have liked to hear more about slipping Ruby in from the outside opposed to doing this from Maik’s perspective inside a big company.

After dinner there was time for some lightning talks; presentations of 10 minutes max, sometimes improvised. The most interesting of these I found a quick product demonstration of TeamCity, a promising continuous integration server created by the guys behind RubyMine.

After having a few pints at a local pub with a group of other Ruby fanatics we had some sleep and set off to the Royal National hotel for the second and last conference day. I felt this day had to offer somewhat less than the first day, nevertheless there were some good talks:

Day 2

After the keynote we attended Dr. Nic’s presentation about ‘Dead simple JavaScript Unit Tests in Rails with Blue Ridge and Screw.Unit’. Nic did some live coding in which he demonstrated how the Rails plugin Blue Ridge can support your JavaScript testing. According to Nic this is going to be the next big thing in Ruby land, and next year everybody will rave about it like they rave about Cucumber this year. I agree testing is important especially for the aspects of your application that your front end users will be very close to (where JavaScript plays an important role). However, I wasn’t convinced about this particular plugin (just yet). Let’s hope it will improve or other options become available soon, so we can all apply TDD in our front end development too.

At 2:30 pm there was a plenary Q&A. The panel consisted of Obie Fernandez, Jim Weirich (EdgeCase), Jonathan Siegel (ELC Technologies) and David Heinemeier Hansson (37 Signals, founder of Rails), of whom the latter joined the session over a live video link. After the panel kickstarted the Q&A some sharp questions were fired from the audience. DHH was asked about the release of Rails 3.0, and he answered that there is no fixed set of features that defines when it’s ready, so we’ll just have to wait in suspense.
Also the panel members were asked about how they feel about JavaScript and its future. There seemed to be mixed feelings about this topic; DHH was really outspoken about his aversion to it, but stated we have no choice but to deal with it. Where others really liked it and someone from the audience even brought up the possibility of JavaScript taking over the whole back end.

Another great talk was Jim Weirich’s ‘Grand Unified Theory of Software Design’. Despite he has been giving this talk for a while and I had already seen it before, I still think Jim does a great job explaining the unification of the aspects of good programming into the concept of ‘connascence’ (a fancy name for coupling), in a clear way that even the newest to programming would understand. But that may also be the reason that to some his story seemed obvious and nothing new. The matter Jim talks about might not be something we can apply in practical use right away, but the abstraction he makes at least inspires me to think about good software architecture and the way we program.

We closed off the conference with a talk by Paul Campbell. A lightweight story about Codo, who gradually becomes a better programmer having visions of Ruby icons like DHH and David Chelimski. With self-drawn, sometimes hilarious illustrations and happiness as the central theme this was a great closure of two days of Rails Underground.

Looking back at the conference nothing revolutionary came out of it but it was great to find out about the current state of things, to talk to and learn from the big names and to share the Ruby feeling over a great lunch with a piece of excellent pie. It was also good to see how attention for business rather than technology is increasing. Aside from it resulting in some refreshing talks I think it also indicates the evolution of Ruby becoming a more and more adapted platform in the business world. Despite the overeager air-conditioning I can only say that the first edition of Rails Undergound was a great success.