GoGaRuCo 2010 Reflections

San Francisco's Only Ruby Conference

Just got back, had an awesome time here for two days, listening to talks, hacking on some code, learning, networking, and even managed to sign up for the UCSF gym and to take a swim.

Very nice organization, an excellent venue, and fantastic talks. Definitely coming back next year. For the price, it's well worth it.

Here are some highlights:

• A super useful resource for lookup up shell commands: http://shellhaters.heroku.com/posix

• Terminator plugin: start your dev environment as you like it. Gem install terminator

• http://github.com/rdy/fixture_builder Factory to Fixtures converter to speed up your tests.

• pprof profile Ruby interpreter. Rack-Profiler project, a great profiling tool.

• Coffee Script - wrapper (ruby-esque) for javascript; rails 3.1 supports coffee script templates

• Machine Learning - great talk, and O'Reiley book, http://twitter.com/igrigorik

• minitest fastest testing framework, many mentions, very fast, supports RSpec and Test::Unit syntax

• Caching: using fresh_when(:last_modified => ...) to enable proper HTTP caching in Rails 3.1

• Arel: enables fragment caching that does not run SQL if the fragment is cached

• ruby 1.9: require 'objspace' allows inspection of object counts and memory usage in VM