Today at RailsConf I got my ass kicked… in the good way.

The first whooping came during TJ Murphy’s session: Flexible Scaling: How to Handle 1 Billion Pageviews. Strong blows include:

• “SELECT-less Reads”
• Tons of interesting info. about using the Amazon Cloud
• His monthly server costs for Warbook (an awesome game built in RoR which has a bazillion Facebook users) and their monthly income (more than the server costs)
• Caching/memcache, ActiveRecord tweaking
• He essentially did Warbook by himself, assisted by the almighty power of Google and folks who are willing to help by providing pointers to good info.

I got a chance to talk to him for a moment afterwards and told him that I really enjoyed playing Warbook until the jackass 13-year-old gangs started to beat my solo-self to a pulp repeatedly. I also mentioned that I was grateful for that because that experience took my smack-talking to the next level.

The second bit of major beatdown came during Erik Kastner’s session: Microapps for Fun and (Micro) Profit (his addition, not mine!).

• Learning and self-gratification (in terms of making what you want to make) is personally profitable, and a worthwhile endeavor. I cheered inside when he said that his microapps have made $7 with Google AdSense.
• Limiting your project to one day makes you toss features that aren’t actually needed and gets something into the world.
• Rails isn’t the hammer for every web application nail… there are good reasons to use Camping, Sinatra, Merb, etc. (and even better… sample code demonstrating how to use Sinatra.

The especially painful Chuck Norris Roundhouse kicks were Erik’s comments regarding get your stuff out in the world now. Pare down, do the minimum you have to, get your alpha OUT. (As he pointed out, this is nothing new… Getting Real, “Real Artists Ship,” etc., etc.) It was a message I needed to hear.

Amy Hoy also chimed in about shipping now vs. entering analysis paralysis and relayed some personal anecdotes that I’d paraphrastically summarize as:

• It made me feel good to get something done and out.
• It made me more credible… I’ve shipped, so I don’t have to feel like a hypocrite when I (rightly) encourage others to ship.
• It’s just straight-up badass to deploy something you’ve worked on.

I miss my RailsConf2007 posse, but I’m having a great time with my RailsConf2008 posse. I’ve met TONS of cool people, and we’re only half-way into it.

Categories: Ruby on Rails
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These are some interesting things I want to investigate in more depth, so I’m posting links for revisiting later.

Flex Stuff:

• Flex MDI: Simplifies multiple-window(document) interfaces. Way cool.
• dpunit: Flex Unit and Integration Testing, apparently different from FlexUnit.
• FlexUnit: Flex Unit Testing
• Spectra: A cool Flex Newsreader written by Microsoft. (via Bruce Eckel’s blog)
• Degrafa: A Declarative Graphics Framework for Flex.

Rails Stuff:

• Dr. Nic: Generating New Gems
• Gemspec Reference
• Single File Rails Application
• Yaml for Ruby Documentation
• Sake: System-wide Rake (HANDY!)

Categories: Cool Stuff, Flex, Rails, Ruby
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I’ve been experimenting quite a bit with the Ruboss framework, and finding that I like it quite a bit. Although the documentation is pretty darn sparse at the moment, I’ve been able to figure a fair bit out on my own, and am really impressed with how responsive the developers are. I posted a few questions and got detailed, useful responses with code bits and instructions as to where to stick ‘em (y’know, in the good way). Seriously awesome.

I fully intend to post snippets of stuff as I go along, I’m sure mostly for my own self-reference… but hey, if one person finds something useful, then awesome.

One of the more obviously cool bits about Ruboss is the yamlscaffold generator:

Create a Rails app, install the Ruboss plugin (dirt simple), create a model.yml file with your models and their relationships, run the yamlscaffold generator, compile using Flex Builder or the Flex SDK, and voila - a neat tabbed CRUD Flash interface which implements a pretty slick client-side MVC framework.

Give it a try, it doesn’t take much to get something happening…

While I’ve been spending a fair bit of time with Ruboss and have been exploring some other coolio stuff, I haven’t spent much time on a2sg proper. RailsConf is next week, so I’m either go apeshit on it this week, or more likely… not.

Seriously good news on the “deploying alpha versions to Dreamhost front:” no need to even go down the Capistrano route ’cause Dreamhost has installed Phusion Passenger, which makes deploying a Rails app to a shared hosting environment literally as simple as uploading the project directory to one’s account via FTP. I was shocked that it worked the first time, and seems to run well. Verrrrrrry cool!

I’m currently sitting in a coffee shop, sorta watching open mic. Sadly, the jackass who keeps noodling on his guitar while other people are on stage playing is my friend. Ugh.

There’s a hackfest tomorrow… I’m totally looking forward to that. See ya there if you’re goin’!

Categories: Flex, Rails Plugins, Ruboss
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