This past Saturday was BarCamp2 in Ottawa, an unconference. The sessions I attended were great -- Austin Hill talking about funding startups and someone from Adobe talking about Flex.

I wanted to talk about Ruby and Rails so I put a 20-minute "Ruby/Rails Roundtable" discussion in the timetable. It was very unstructured: people would ask questions and others would answer. It seemed to work pretty well. We ended up talking about things like REST, external authentication services (like the ones from Google and Yahoo) and if Rails could deal with very small projects. We ended up going the full 40 minutes for the block, and it seemed like there was still more to talk about...

...so I put another "Ruby/Rails Roundtable" discussion in the timetable, this time in a quieter back room area (the "Meeting Room"). I took better notes at this one and made a list of some of the things we talked about:

1. The new Rails deployment Book by Ezra Zygmuntowicz
2. xginx
3. rspec and Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD), rspec on rails, mocking
4. Low Pro and UJS, reducing javascript clutter in the source
5. Learning from open source Rails project code like Mephisto and Beast
6. mocking with mocha
7. REST, ActiveResource and APP
8. ferret full text search (flakey?)
9. acts_as_nested_set and tree structures
10. Rails plugin version management with piston
11. acts_as_paranoid - modifying find methods to use a non-deleted scope

It seemed like the response from these technical Ruby and Rails talks was very positive. We should definitely do more of these in Ottawa -- it was really nice to share ideas. The Ruby, and especially Rails, communities move so quickly it's hard for one person to keep up!