Last years RailsConf was a time of answers. Answers like: Do REST, use Mongrel, Solr can be huge, yes we're really doing this and making money at it, yes this will scale up. Even _why's performance was a sort of affirmative statement about Rails itself. Dave Thomas's infamous keynote was full of questions, but those all got answers with in the first few days after we all went home. This year was different...
As I take a moment to reflect on the whirlwind of information that a conference like this always brings, I find we are left with a lot of questions. How will the core team handle the multitude of open bugs? How will we bring reasonable gender balance to our community? How will we handle the fractioning that we can all feel starting? How do we leverage the power of just in time compliers? How do we rewrite core Ruby so that more of it is in Ruby? How did some decorator get away with putting pictures of waterfalls over each of the men's urinals in the Oregon Convention Center? How are most of us going to be able to afford coming next year, and if it grows 3x bigger, will we want to? For every one of these questions (except the urinals) it will take some time for answers to unfold. I heard DHH talking about a voting system for patches. Not just "Yeah I like that" but "Yes, I applied it and it worked great". But that will take time to come to shape, and I am not really sure I feel about becoming more of a democracy and less of a benevolent dictatorship. We also need to address the communities growth with new strategies. I think that the regional conferences will help this a lot, and so will the new IRC channel. I felt that DHH's keynote was more humble and inviting to newer members this year, and was delighted to see him open to what the JRuby guys, among others, had to say.
A lot of really great talks happened. My vote for the most engaging was hands down Ze Frank. He managed to be poinent while being hilarious. I thought Avi's keynote on Smalltalk and the Doing Rest Right talk by Scott Raymond tied as being the most thought provoking. I also really enjoyed Josh Susser on getting patches accepted in Rails core. The most common complaint I heard people saying about the various talks was that they felt that we needed some indecator as to the skill level for each talk. Some felt overwhelmed by talks that they thought would be entry level, but where in depth and some felt bored by hearing the basics in what they thought was a deep dive. This seems like a pretty easy thing to fix.
