Sitting back in the balcony of my Hotel Room and enjoying a bottle of Berliner Kindl. While I'm still here, and everything is still fresh in my memory, why not writing a report about the conference.

I have an advantage over many other participant by being relatively new to Rails and attending RailsConf for the first time. Therefore, I had "pair of fresh eyes" and I could get at least something out of every presentation I saw.

David's keynote about "legacy software" was not one of the most enthusiastic ones, but it indeed was inspiring and gave me good reasons to be even more proud about the legacy code I've written during the years. Jeremy Kemper's keynote about performance was a very good overview about "real performance" end-users experience when using web services. It also promised a slightly better performance in Rails 2.2 and some performance tools to play with.

Tutorials on Tuesday felt a little too much too long presentations. I would have hoped more hands-on exercises with more intimate feeling and personal assistance. Perhaps the organizers should limit the number of seats next time. The session about "resourceful plugins" was actually a tutorial about how to write good plugins. I've never written a plugin, so it was helpful for me. The afternoon session about deploying and monitoring Rails apps had more hands-on work, but network problems impaired the exercise a bit. The presentation itself was very clear, but could have gone more to the details (time should not have been a limiting factor here).

The two jQuery related presentations on Tuesday morning were interesting, but the one about unobtrusive scripting was definitely more helpful. Intellectual scalability introduced a very interesting solution to write complex write applications. The "JavaScript requirement", however, was something I could not buy in my personal projects. The ResourcefulViews plugin introduced in Restful everything seemed very useful. I have always problems to remember how Rails links and forms are generated, but this baby could be the cure. Hopefully something like this will end up to the Rails core one day. A talk about Security on Rails was very clear and well presented, but perhaps the content was a little too basic for RailsConf.

My Thursday morning started with Design on Rails for usability. IMHO it wasn't about too much about Rails nor usability, but nevertheless it made some very good points about creative design process. Starling+Workling presentation was one of the more entertaining ones. Internationalization is officially coming to Rails, and that's good news! From Rails security to application security introduced a very promising plugin called declaritive_authorization (not available yet?). I think the audience did not fully get the (splendid) message, because the presentation was perhaps a bit too academic. I would have wished How not to build a service was a bit more "juicy" one. One of the personally most useful presentations was Future is video. It was also very well structured and presented - a very nice finale to the conference.

The best thing about the Wednesday/Thursday presentations was that they were quite short. You should easily be able to concentrate the 40 given minutes, and on the other hand, it clearly made the authors think beforehand what to say, and how to organize the presentation. If I've got something to complain about, some presentation titles were somewhat misleading. The presentation description should also contain a word or two about "skill level" required.

I was a bit afraid the conference would have a little too fanatic "Rails is fucking awesome" atmosphere, but it turned out to be quite relaxed and down-to-earth, instead. My humble hint to the organizers is that try to keep RailsConf "advanced" (more advanced) and perhaps start organizing "mainstream" Rails events locally in Spain, Finland, Netherlands etc. And Rails is slowly but surely becoming mainstream, don't you agree?!

Will I attend next year? Maybe. Overall, I'm happy that I did go the RailsConf Europe 2008, and I surely learned a lot. Many thanks to anyone involved!