RailsConf - Day 4

Final day! We had to check out from the hotel in the morning itself. Denis, George are seasoned travellers and they were all ready and packed up at breakfast time! I was having some trouble adjusting to the additional 3 hours of lag introduced by travelling from the east to the western parts and arrived late for the breakfast too because of it. Denis then told me to check out of the room in 5 minutes. I made it in time by unceremoniously stuffing clothes, etc into the bag. My bag is a bit heavy. I always commit the mistake of carrying more clothes that I end up wearing on my visits :(.

Denis/George were going to speak about our RubyES - Ruby Enterprise Stack using PostgreSQL. We reached the convention center and prepared some pamphlets to spread the word about our session which was at 10:45 AM. Since it was the last day, the crowd was somewhat thinner at the venue than before. The session went well with a good round of Q & A at the end. Go here if you want to learn more and would like to play around with the stack. And if you want to know what I did in this stack, you can check out my screencast here too. The screencast was created using Jing. Check it out, my voice shouldn't scare you away :)

It was a half day session and our flight was at 9:55 PM. So we spent the remaining time at the bar in the Marriott that we had been staying in. We watched a bit of Shallow Hal, with Jack Black still being funny everytime I watch it. Denis and I also nursed some beers. I also had a shot of Goldschlager (which actually contains pure gold in it!) towards the end to get me into a sleepy mood for the flight :)

Got on to the flight to end my first RailsConf. It was not too bad!

RailsConf - Day 3

Day 3 was the last day for the exhibitions. So we again had good attendance at our booth. One thing that we noted was that all people tend to use MySQL as their database of choice just because everyone else is using it! Many did not understand the difference between MySQL and PostgreSQL and hence why they should use PostgreSQL in the first place. All of us tried to explain as best as we could but here is a link which explains in greater detail as to why PostgreSQL is a much better choice as compared to MySQL.

The breakfast and the lunch facilities during the conf were excellent and the Portland Convention Center is a huge facility indeed. But since there were so many attending the conference, it was pretty hard to get onto the wireless network there. One thing though that gave me some sort of a complex during the conf was that almost everyone who came to the conf were using the Apple Macs! I felt out of place with my lenovo thinkpad there :). Also many companies like Sun, Thoughtworks held a lucky draw and the winners were awarded free Mac Airbooks towards the close of the third day! Yup, I did enter but was not lucky this time around. Maybe next year. I did get my share of free tshirts though ;)

We ended the day by having dinner at a sports bar where I introduced Denis, George to some cool Ultimate Fighting Championship fights :). Denis refused to believe that it is a sport as he likened it to dog fights.

Saturday was also the occasion of the Rose Starlight Parade and Marathon so there were a lot of people out on the streets. It was good for me to see families sitting along side the road waiting for the marathon and the parade to pass by. I stayed around for a while to cheer up the guys participating in the marathon, but as it got a bit chilly later, I prefer to watch some of the action from the comfort of my hotel room before retiring to bed. Final day coming up tommorrow!

RailsConf - Day 2

So the brainstorming continued pretty late from day 1 and eventually I slept pretty late with the promise of waking up early in the morning. Today was the first day of our booth right! Also I along with Denis, George had to record screencasts of the respective things that we had worked on. We had a 5 minute limit and my first recording was a disaster. It was a full 12 minutes long :)

The 2nd recording was agonizingly close to completion but I ran out of a precious few seconds before I could complete it, very frustrating. Eventually on the 5th try I was able to record a decent screencast. George is going to upload it and when its done I will share the url so that you all can check it out and see what I have done :)

We had good attendance to our booth. People were a bit confused about what we do exactly with Postgres and the Oracle spin on it. Also some wanted to know what exactly was the key differentiator in our RubyES stack. We had some interesting conversations with a guy from the Heroku booth who was using Postgres. In general there seemed to be a lot of curiosity and intent to use Postgres with rails app, which is definitely a good thing!

In the evening a company called as FiveRuns hosted HAPPY HOUR at a local pub, it was pretty crowded when we reached there, so we went to another place closeby. I kinda like the American food that I am getting to eat. Am also enjoying the different kinds of drinks too ;). Well they say, in America do as the Americans do! :)

We rounded up the day by dropping Marie off to the airport. She left ahead of us to go back to NJ. Had had very less sleep the last few days, so I snucked into bed at 9:45PM and got up at 6:15 am today morning. On to the oncoming day now :)

Don't let the SUN go down on MySQL

There is a posting on /. about Sun deciding to close source some parts of MySQL. Hmmm, after paying 1 Billion Dollars in cold hard cash, its expected that Sun will try out some experiments to try and generate a revenue stream. But guess this will rub existing free users off the wrong way atleast initially as a knee-jerk reaction. Guess it will be good for PostgreSQL though :).

But to be fair, its good to see Marten Mickos (previously CEO of MySQL and now SVP at Sun) try and put out reasons for this latest move. All in all, this bodes well for my favourite DB - PostgreSQL :)

Note: The views expressed above are entirely my own personal views.