RailsConf 2008 is now over. It was a great conference, and here are a few of the highlights:
On the theme of distributed processing, there was a great demo of Skynet, a map/reduce style processing framework. The Rails plugin for skynet gives some great features with a slick API. For example, the 'distributed_find' for ActiveRecord models will let workers each handle a small slice of any given model.find and process the data accordingly.
David Chelimsky gave a great run through of what rSpec's story runner looks like, a tool which I'll be using as much as I can justify. Integration with webrat makes it even more useful, as now stories can be tested using the full rails stack.
The highlight of the weekend was hanging out with Phil and working on Bus Scheme. My first real pair-programming experience was hugely insightful, and now I've decided that it's essential that I find some time to work closely with some great programmers on a more regular basis. Aside from learning some excellent emacs tips (eshell, for instance), we got lots of TODOs knocked off and made some important structure changes in bus-scheme's AST.
Now I've just got to digest all the new code I've seen and the 20 new RSS feeds I now subscribe to.
