Today was the first day at railsconf, and I attended two tutorials: “Refactoring your rails application” and “CI for the rails guy/gal”.
First, I’d like to say that the tutorial format really doesn’t work well for large groups. Tutorials are best if the teacher/speaker can walk around the room and coach the attendants through a bunch of examples that illustrates the use of a tool or technique. When there are more than 100 people in the room the tutorial really becomes an extended talk. In that format it is better if the tutorial is an introduction to a tool or technique where the speaker(s) walk though the examples, but do not expect attendants to follow every move.
The “refactoring” tutorial had a lot of problems. The topic was interesting, and the speakers seemed to know a lot, but the problem was that attendants were expected to download an example application before starting, and then get that up and running on their own laptops. When 200 people try to do that at the same time over the same network it takes a long time. I was missing a gem (rcov) which took even longer to download, and while I was working on that, the speakers talked and I missed a lot. It was too bad. When I gave up on the application and focused on the speakers it got better. I never heard of the presenter patterns before, nor services, but both are something I want to look into further.
The tutorial on continuous integration was better, because the speaker presented the subject in a way so you could follow along and type in all commands, but you didn’t have to. The first half was very hands on: “this is how you set up your CI environment”, and the second half was pointers to more advanced topics. The material (a handout and a bunch of files which I copied from one of the DVD’s that the speaker had prepared and passed around) was excellent, and something that I am sure I will use when I start experimenting with this. I want to look into Selenium right away.
Tonight I will attend one of the BOF sessions, and then crash early, because tomorrow the real conference starts and I know from experience that there will be so much information to absorb that I’ll need to be well rested and sharp.
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