Let's face it, everything seems to move at a breakneck pace in our industry. It seems like every other day there is a new start-up with some amazing product that's supposed to change the way all of us work. At least once a week I get software update notifications for some application or another. It is our job (and usually our passion) as developers to keep up with the tools that we use, and constantly be evaluating these upgrades, new features or sometimes even the alternatives. As a Ruby on Rails shop, there is nowhere better to check the pulse of the Rails community than RailsConf 2008.

RailsConf 2008 was held in Portland, Oregon again this year and Chris and myself had the chance to experience it first hand. It was the first RailsConf for both of us so our expectations were high, and for the most part we weren't disappointed. We met some really cool people from all over the world (including the cool guys from Blue Box Group), picked up a ton of information on where things with the Rails community are headed, and Chris even held a Birds of a Feather (BOF) discussion about his GiftWrap plugin.

There's simply too much to cover in a single blog post for those who couldn't make it, so please excuse my brevity. You can check out O'Reilly's website to read all about the events and schedules, and you can even grab most of the presentation materials there too.

Maybe my surprise was simply because this was my first RailsConf, but some of the best stuff for me wasn't specifically related to Rails! I went to a cool BOF on Rails alternatives, an interesting discussion about frameworks like Merb, Rack, and Mack, and we even got into the DataMapper ORM and replacing Subversion with Git. I also saw some great presentations on meta-programming, the internal workings of Git, and perhaps the topic I was most curious about – Phusion Passenger. I also enjoyed the well-delivered keynotes from Joel Spolsky and DHH. All these things gave me a taste for what else is out there, and how people are using not only Rails but other tools as well in our industry. The BOF sessions were great as well, bringing small groups of really bright people together to just chat about different topics. Oh, and the food rocked – plus all the Starbucks coffee you can handle, sweet.

That said, there were a few things that weren't so great that I thought I should share as well. The topic of scalability has been a hot one since way back when. Maybe it's just because we've built several high-traffic applications, but the scalability issue has been beaten to death in my opinion, and was beaten quite a bit more this year with about 5 talks covering scalability. Also, the tutorials weren't really worth the extra fees in my opinion – don't get me wrong, they were useful and interesting, but several of the topics ended up being covered in other sessions that were part of the conference, some of them were even the exact same presentation! Finally, while it was great to get a feel for a lot of the other tools out there being used, I must admit I was hoping for a bit more Rails-specific content. It was great to see the keynote by Jeremy Kemper announcing Rails 2.1 (some great stuff in there), but I still don't have a feel for the roadmap of development for Rails and where things are going next.

Overall RailsConf was great, and Portland was a great location for it (despite the 4+ hour flight from Chicago). Would I recommend it? Absolutely. You won't find a collection of brighter developers out there than the ones in the Rails community. Everyone seems to 'get it' and they're all interested in advancing the framework and expanding Rails into the main stream. So thanks to everyone who presented, it was quite an experience – see you next year!