Bruno Miranda's Notebook

Since arriving in Portland, OR this past wednesday the weather has cleared up. Today, Saturday it is mighty sunny and 65 degrees outside. The city is beautiful, the light rail (tram) transportation service is awesome, if it wasn’t for the gloomy weather almost all year around I would seriously consider moving here.

Thursday was tutorial day, the meta-programming tutorial by Neil Ford was great, really interesting concepts. The afternoon tutorial of my choice was average, so much so that I already forgot what it was about.

Photo by: Duncan Davidson

Joel Spolsky opening keynote on Friday was great, he talked about writing software that makes people happy. “Blue Chip” software, really motivating. Friday night David Heinemeier Hansson spoke on the Rails Community surplus and how he feels it will not last forever. He adviced the community to use it wisely: “Don’t spend the surplus in hookers and fur coats.”

So far there have been many mentions to Tasty Planner in numerous talks. Josh’s talk about Building a web app in 48 hours happens tomorrow at 10:45am.

The talks have been much better than last years. As the community grows, it also matures and topics seem more advanced. Jeremy Kemper’s talk was great, showcasing what’s new in 2.1. Optimizing Rails by Michael Koziarski was full of goodies and the panel by Blaine Cook, Bradley Taylor, Ezra Zygmuntowicz, Jim Meyer and Kevin Lawyer brought to the surface interesting points about scalability topics (I apologize about the crappy sound).

Scaling Rails - RailsConf 2008 from Bruno Miranda on Vimeo.

We paid a much deserved visit to Henry’s 12th St Brewery and Dough Fir, if you have not been to those places, you haven’t really been to Portland.

I am looking forward to watching Kent Beck’s keynote tonight as I have recently finished reading his great book: Extreme Programming Explained.

Here are some iPhone Conference Pictures.

Conference meals have been great. Attendance seems to be the a record, approximately 2000 I heard. Wifi is below average but stable, the community is great and seems to be more united than ever, the message board has about a million job offer notes as shown in the pics below:

More to come soon.