The next two days in Prague the things went more like they should :) . We had a nice first day with interesting talks. Unfortunately most of the talks were in a little bit “philosophical” direction. This IS interesting too, but it seemed to us, that nothing really new was said during that talks, so that the technical ones were more “innovative”.

Koichi’s topic was VERY interesting. Maybe it would’ve been cool, if he had the opportunity to speak something like the Netbeans tutorial. A longer, less philosophical, more detailed explanation of his work.

A very interesting talk of the first day was the lightning introduction to the “Agile Whiteboard” by Kingsley Hendrickse and his companion. This is actually a white board web application where you can pin notes (story cards) to a virtual whiteboard, drag and group them into categories. It may sound very simple but their implementation looked nice and really usable! So as far as we’ve understood there is no public version of this one now, but they will release it’s source in the near future. Maybe they should consider to make a “white board service” from that, too. There likely will be users who would pay for such a service.

Davids talk via Skype was nice, but philosophical, too. But what he said perfectly fitted into a Ruby conference! We thought it might be a little bit misplaced, beforehand. What turned out to be somewhat true during the Q&A session after his talk. As it wasn’t a talk about “hard facts” not many questions regarding the talk arose and it seemed, that the people didn’t really know what to ask him. Maybe this is a little bit surprising, as a quick poll during Matz’s talk showed, that around 90% of the participants come from a Rails background.

The day ended with a nice party.

I had a beer and Goulash (thanks again, Carsten) with the person who taught me the Rails basics, a professor at the University of Bremen, and we talked a while about the conference day, a Rails/Ruby user group in Bremen and many other things.

Sunday morning I delayed our arrival at the conference with my strong feelings against getting up on time. So we missed the first talk which, accordingly to Carsten, was a very interesting one. So if you feel like testing if your mocks represent the mocked objects correctly, you should have a look at Synthesis by George Malamidis.

Tomasz Stachewicz held an interesting talk about running things in background (mostly) in Rails. His solution is far superior to our StupidBackground, but the reason why he and we built our solutions seems to be the same: BackgrounDRB is too complex to use and run. So if you’re looking for accurate timed, background operations have a look at his project (no link, we’ve to wait till the slides get released). But if you just need a real simple solution with a nice, little DSL to define when things should run you definitively should have a look at StupidBackground ;) .

My favorite talk of the whole conference was the “Building Rails Playground” one by Petr Krontorád. They built a system, similar to Heroku but (different to what Jürgen suggested in his moderation of the Q&A session after the talk) we think that this system is better than Heroku! It has a nicer editor, access to the hosted projects via WebDAV and nice statistics. And: It’s a non-commercial project! They see themselves as a platform for beginners to start working with Rails. I’ve requested an invite to the system just after 2 minutes of the talk. Can’t wait to be accepted! A lot of kudos to this Petr and the rest of the team!

Unfortunately we had to leave after this talk and missed the last two talks which sounded really interesting, too (”Aspect Oriented Programming in Ruby” and “Lessons Learned Writing Native Extensions”). And maybe even more unfortunately we missed the rest of the lighting talks :/ .

But we should stop moaning! It was a great weekend and the organisators of the event did a GREAT job! We should say thank you to all the sponsors: SUN, ataxo, brightbox, CODE GEAR, Engine Yard, Unicorn College, Bit Nami, Dr Nic Academy, iQuest, Kraxnet, Nodeta and Skvělý.cz to help making such a great experience possible!

See you all next year somewhere in Europe :) .

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Hey folks,

we’ve just returned, after an adventurous journey over Geneva, from Prague and brought a lot of impressions back, to Germany.
After the Euruko 2007 in Vienna, last year, this was the second Euruko we attended and we think that it was a great success! The familiar spirit couldn’t be washed away by a quadrupled number of participants and so we had two days full of fun and information, a great combination. I’ve splitted our report up into two parts. This one is a narrative summary of what happened, before the conference has even begun and the second part will be a less narrative summary of our favorite talks and comments on the conference.

It shouldn’t take too long, till the first curious thing happened to us: Just arrived at the Prague airport, we took our luggage, and wanted to take the next taxi to our hotel. But as we were just checking how long the transfer to the hotel would take by bus or tram, Peter and Marianna asked if we are attending Euruko… It took a while, but I can’t imagine anything that roughly sound like Euruko so I had to believe that they really said “Euruko”. After he explained, that he remembered our faces from the last conference the situation was little bit more clear ;) . But then that: They were at the airport with Karel and waited for… *drum roll* Matz :) . Woah! Alright, we changed our plan: No more taxi, instead a public transportation ride with Matz to the city. Nice start of this weekend! But actually the plan was changed once again. Sebastian was hit by a nasty virus last week and still struggled a little, so after waiting for about 30 minutes we left, without Matz and the his reception committee by taxi. Strange first hour in Prague :) .

After we had checked in at the hotel, I discovered Prague on my own. After a delicious meal near the hotel it was already somewhat around midnight, but I thought that tough Rubyists would doubtlessly partying till the early morning, so it would be worth go to the party, even if I would be a little late. A long story short: There is a club in Prague called “Farbique” or somewhat like that. I was confused, that it isn’t possible to buy a tram ticket IN the tram and then walked all the way down town, where this club is located. I found it… but it wasn’t “La Frabika” ;) . So this was my party-night at Friday. I found a ticket machine in a metro station, took the tram back to our hotel.

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Hi,

we’ve been working on a Rails tutorial series in the last couple of weeks and the first of those articles has now been published.
Take a moment and head over to the guys from galaxy-news.net. We’re proud being asked for this tutorial by Galaxy-News and hope you like it! Please leave any comments, regarding this article, at the Galaxy-News comment section.

To the article!

Yours,

Thorben
FEtMab-Team

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