Rails Under the Knife

Posted by Jacob Harris Fri, 27 Jul 2007 01:20:00 GMT

After months of rehearsing and revising, I finally gave the talk at OSCON. I think it could use another month of refinement, but people seemed to enjoy it, and I actually enjoyed giving it as well. If you were at the talk, thank you for coming and feel free to let me know if you have any feedback or questions.

My talk was Rails Under the Knife, a look at the some of the internals of Rails to get a better idea of 3 powerful Ruby techniques:

• Metaprogramming
• Reflection
• Blocks

You can download the slides at

• http://s3.amazonaws.com/harrisj-share/oscon2007.pdf (5mb PDF!)

This talk is aimed at an intermediate Rails programmer who knows the basics of Rails coding (I have another similar talk for beginners called Rubyisms in Rails), but still is a bit unsure about the power trio of serious Rails hackery. Hopefully, this will help to provide some inspiration for you to delve into the Rails code on your own. Enjoy.

Posted in Programming | Tags oscon, rails, ruby | no comments

See You at OSCON, Maybe...

Posted by Jacob Harris Tue, 24 Jul 2007 02:44:00 GMT

I know I haven’t been posting to this blog much lately (see this link for one reason why). But I just wanted to note that I will be giving a talk at OSCON 2007 in Portland this week, and I would love to talk to you if you are there.

• Rails Under The Knife (Jacob Harris) July 26th, 2:35pm to 3:20pm (Portland 255)

In addition, my coworker will be giving a talk on the DBSlayer (one of the projects we’re open sourcing) that should be fun to see.

• DBSlayer: Architecting Database Connection Pooling (Derek Gottfrid) July 25th, 2:35pm to 3:20pm (Room E142)

Finally, be sure to come to one of our Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions:

• Using Amazon Webservices EC2/S3/SQS for computing on large data sets July 25th, 7:30pm to 8:30pm (Room F150)
• Shaping the Web Future of the Newspaper July 25th, 8:30pm to 9:30pm (Room E143-144)

Now I just have to make it there, which is the subject of another angry post about disconnecting effects of technology, or how United Airlines can oversell flights and then randomly bump a father and mother with 2-month old infant leaving them to scramble for a flight next day. To be followed by 45 minutes waiting in a customer service line only to be told I’m supposed to go to a customer service station in the next terminal. Joy!

The shorter version of this story: United Airlines is a miserable and indecent excuse for a business and when they go bankrupt again, I shan’t shed a tear…

Posted in Miscellaneous | Tags oscon | no comments