This last week I attended Rails Conf 2012 in Austin, which was a welcome contrast to my SXSW experience. I found lots of talks that where interesting and applicable to problems/questions I have in day to day Rails development. If you are curious about specific content, I highly recommend checking out this wiki of presentation notes created by the New Haven Ruby group.

JSON objects

The other thing is that I bought an iPad recently and used the Paper to take notes for a number of the talks. Although the process was a little slow, I’d like to try it with a stylus and expect to continue to do the same thing in the future.

Here are some quick thoughts/notes about talks I found particularly interesting. I took these using the Paper app for iPad, which I quite enjoyed and would recommend.

Realtime Web Apps w/ REST

This talk was basically an introduction/debut for the Firehose.io project, which is pub/sub server to help with creating RESTful streaming web apps. Highly relevant to a project in planning stages, and would love to try out in the future.

Wiki notes here.

Patella

Patella which is a gem that provides memoization into memcached backed by Resque (buzzwords!). What that means it is provides some caching tools to make sure that whenever a client hits a cache block that misses, it returns an empty value and calculates that value via Resque rather than slowing down the client’s request.

Wiki notes here.

Making the Web Faster w/ Google

A generally interesting talk, with the biggest take-away being that things like page load time are already tracked in Google Analytics. Would have been a nice thing to know before I setup a cron job that tracks that for some Vox pages w/ PhantomJS.

Left with a bit of shame and large determination to prioritize page load times on projects I’m on.

Wiki notes here.

Evented Ruby VS Node.js

This was a pretty informative talk. It made me actually understand evented frameworks and that although they are more CPU efficient, they aren’t any more likely to complete a request any faster. Also worth noting that it left me with almost no desire to try out evented programming in Ruby.

Wiki notes here.

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