The first session of the day and I was instantly blown away. Lucas Carlson presented an amazing introduction to developing with Ruby on Rails and I almost got physically sick in the classroom. What the Rails framework provides is the EXACT functionality I have been developing for a current project of mine for the LAST TWO YEARS!

Watching just how quickly a CRUD (create, read, update and delete) web page could be developed for a database table was just sickening to watch. I’m talking just a few lines of code in Ruby and you are done. The language itself is developed with “The Principle of Least Surprise” and after watching this session, it was easy to see how well that principle was achieved. At no point during the presentation was I “surprised” at how a function worked or where something was found in one of the libraries. It is just such an elegant language.

Lucas himself was a great speaker. Soft spoken and extremely intelligent. Watching his fingers fly as he would enter command line commands and switch back to the development environment to type a single line of code to make a web page was just phreaking impressive.

The only downside of the whole session came from the attenders themselves and it’s a problem I’ve been experiencing a lot lately when I attend presentations. People really seem to believe that saying “there are no stupid questions”. Stop it people, that’s a lie, so quit believing in it. I really find myself frustrated with people that halt a presentation with these questions that just aren’t appropriate. I don’t want to spend my whole time talking about this issue right now, I think since it bothers me so much I’m just going to have to do a post in the future about learning to ask the right questions at presentations.

So for now let’s just say there were a few individuals asking certain types of questions that made parts of this session particularly grating, hat’s off to Lucas though for his patience in dealing with the questions and moving the session along.

All in all, this was one of my favorite sessions of the day and had me so excited about Ruby on Rails that I got the environment setup on my computer to play with the next day (although one of the other 4Guys was even MORE excited than I was….). If you haven’t taken a look at Ruby on Rails and are involved in web development in any way, I would highly recommend you read up on it. It never hurts to be familiar with other web technologies and you’ll get over that sick feeling in your stomach when you realized you could have spent 3 months learning Ruby and 3 days making your entire project instead of 2 years eventually…or at least I hope you do.