acts_as_conference 2008 - Day 1 Report

acts_as_conference
started earlier today (now yesterday) in Orlando, Florida with href="http://actsasconference.com/charity-session">Charity
Session.  Completely sold out with 165 attendees!

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Ezra Zybmuntowicz
( href="http://www.merbivore.com/">Merb core
developer) talked about Merb.



What is Merb
?

• Started after tried to make Rails thread-safe and memory
  foot print lower.
• All (everything?) you need, none you don't.
• Key features of Merb are: Thread-safe, ORM-agnostic,
  JavaScript-library
  agnostic, and Template language agnostic.
• Replacement for href="http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/ActionPack">ActionPack.
• Similar to Rails, fixes a bunch of problems like
  performance, memory collection.
• 2000 requests/second
• merb-core, merb-more, merb-plugins are some of the key
  components.

Read more about Why
Merb ?
(Speed, Lighweight, Powerful). In later discussions, Ezra told me that
somebody on #merb
IRC channel has already tried Merb on href="http://glassfish.java.net">GlassFish. I'm
certainly waiting for him to provide me more information on that.
Unfortunately I could not find the chat archives :(



Then Evan
Phonix (started Rubinius)
talked about the "Ruby kernel written in Ruby". He talked about how
Rubinius is a community-driven implementation (90 committers in last
365 days) and building a rich and high-performance environment for
running Ruby code.



In the welcome session, Robert
Dempsey explained the two goals for the conference - "wide
& deep on variety of topics" and "technologies that integrate
with Ruby". Here are some statistics presented:

• 30-70 people for every Rails meetup
• Orlando #16, Tampa #17 for Rails jobs

And some more gathered during another session:

• 90% using Rails as part of job
• 50% first time visitors to any Rails conf
• 50% local to Orlando

The last session of the day was a nice talk by href="http://hivelogic.com/">Dan Benjamin on
"Simplicity". I enjoyed his metaphors for emphasizing how simplicity in
user interface is important to meet customer's requirement and keep him
happy. Here are the two quotes he used: " style="font-style: italic;">Everything should be made as
simple as possible, but no
simpler" by Einstein and " style="font-style: italic;">Simplicity is the key to
happiness in the modern world" by Dalai Lama.



The party at Orlando Ale House
was a good blast. Here are some pictures:

alt="" src="http://lh5.google.com/arun.gupta/R60ucw2gTrI/AAAAAAAAFSI/SQ--BA3MpGo/s144/acts_as_08_1481.JPG">	alt="" src="http://lh4.google.com/arun.gupta/R60uWg2gTmI/AAAAAAAAFRc/lM1dvnB8n5c/s144/acts_as_08_1483.JPG">	alt="" src="http://lh5.google.com/arun.gupta/R60uVw2gTkI/AAAAAAAAFRM/59gR5p02FGU/s144/acts_as_08_1484.JPG">
alt="" src="http://lh6.google.com/arun.gupta/R60uXA2gToI/AAAAAAAAFRw/XllY928-eYY/s144/acts_as_08_1486.JPG">	alt="" src="http://lh4.google.com/arun.gupta/R60uTg2gTdI/AAAAAAAAFQU/xF8Pt_t0tsY/s144/acts_as_08_1488.JPG">	src="http://lh3.google.com/arun.gupta/R60uWQ2gTlI/AAAAAAAAFRU/2FcLQnPPrEQ/s144/acts_as_08_1490.JPG">
alt="" src="http://lh3.google.com/arun.gupta/R60uTQ2gTcI/AAAAAAAAFQM/fc7dbxkoh6M/s144/acts_as_08_1494.JPG">	alt="" src="http://lh6.google.com/arun.gupta/R60uUA2gTeI/AAAAAAAAFQc/HnuM_sd1fP0/s144/acts_as_08_1492.JPG">	alt="" src="http://lh5.google.com/arun.gupta/R60uQw2gTTI/AAAAAAAAFPE/sm2NH-smuII/s144/acts_as_08_1496.JPG">

And finally the day ended with dinner @ href="http://golthetasteofbrazil.com/">GOL! The Taste of
Brazil - highly recommended with a great variety of salads
and meat. I particularly enjoyed Lime & Strawberry href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caipirinha">Caipirinha.



In next few hours, stay tuned for Charlie's session on href="http://jruby.org">JRuby
and Brian's talk on NetBeans/Ruby
tomorrow. You can always come and talk to me about href="http://wiki.glassfish.java.net/Wiki.jsp?page=JRuby">GlassFish/JRuby
- an "eco friendly" alternative to WEBrick and Mongrel at Sun booth. If
not there, I'm sitting in back of the room :)



And we are also giving away 5 copies of href="http://www.pragprog.com/titles/rails2">Agile Web
Development with Rails: 2nd Edition in sweepstakes tomorrow,
right after Brian's talk.



The complete album is available at:

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Follow the conference at twitter -  href="http://twitter.com/acts_as_conf">acts_as_conf
or IRC - #actsasconf.




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