Arrrrcamp 2011

October 17, 2011 § 1 Comment

Thomas and I just got back from Arrrrcamp, a 1 day, three track conference in the beautiful city of Ghent, Belgium. The focus of the event was Ruby (which we love), Rails (which we adore), Radient (which we have no real feelings for, but are happy to hang out with), and Rum. As you can probably imagine, with that kind of a focus, the conference was a lot of fun!

Arrcamp had 2 keynote speakers this year. For the first, we all bundled up to the “Upper Deck” (the largest of the three rooms used at the venue) to hear John W. Long, creator of Radient, tell us about Serve – his new project for facilitating designers in Rails. Whilst I personally am not sold on the concept of wireframes in code, serve looked pretty neat and I’m sure it’ll be a great fit for teams that work like that.

After the keynote, both Thomas and I decided to hang around in (on?) the Upper Deck to hear Elise Huard give a talk entitled “Data-Driven Development”. I’ve see Elise speak in the past, and this was not the usual deeply technical talk I was expecting, so I was slightly surprised. Having said that, I will definitely be looking at the data our apps collect in a new light.

At this point Thomas and I went out separate ways.

Adam: I elected to head to the Lower Deck and hear what Jonas Nicklass had to say about “Practical Testing for assorted Languages”. I think this talk more than any got me itching to write code – tests even! Jonas is clearly passionate about testing and raised some really great points, e.g. in order to unit test JavaScript, your JavaScript has to be organised into units! I have recently gotten into Backbone.js, which is one way Jonas suggested organising things, however he also went over a few “vanilla” JS ways to structure your code and a few other libraries (I get the feeling Jonas is a bit of a coffee-script fan).

Thomas: I headed to the Cptn’s Quarters to hear Lennart Koopman of xing.com speak about “Managing the logs of Your (Rails apps)”. As someone who has had to grep through logs on multiple servers more times than I can remember this was something that definitely interests me. Whilst the talk covered some log management basics and tips it mainly focused on graylog2, I have to say this looked really interesting as a way to centrally store and search your logs and I’m looking forward to trying it out soon (in fact I had it running in dev the day after I came back!).

We caught up again over lunch, and fell in with Jonas, Anthony Eden and Cory Haines. This is why I love conferences! Where else in the world would you get to chat over the meaning of refactoring, API design and the like over a bowl of really great vegetable soup?

After lunch we again split up.

Adam: Somewhat inspired by what Anthony had already chatted about, I decided to hear him speak about “Building and Testing APIs with Ruby and Cucumber”. Anthony presented so great points about how you can spec out your API with Cucumber and why you might want to (great api documentation), various pros and cons surrounding methods of API versioning, and the future of web-apps and APIs. This last point really did get me thinking. For the JS intensive, single (or few) page sites, API design (and documentation) will become more important than ever.

Thomas: Having looked briefly into haml, sass, coffeescript and indeed the rails 3 asset pipeline, but on the whole giving them a bit of a body-swerve I decided to check out Roy Tomeij give a talk on “Stop swashbucklin’ and shipshape yer front-end”. As a general introduction to all of these technologies I thought the talk was great, it really consolidated and confirmed the research I’d done previously. Who knows, I might even be coming round to CoffeScript.

We were both keen to hear Andrew Nesbitt speak about the A/B testing gem Split. I had heard Andrew speak before at LRUG some weeks previously, however at the time I think the gem was 2 days old. I wanted to see how it had progressed. In some ways, it hasn’t progressed much at all – the beauty of Split is that it is so light-weight and “hackable”, you can really get it to do what you want. Andrew shared some tips for running these tests, as well as some useful resources on the subject.

By this point I was getting thirsty. Luckily, Arrrrcamp didn’t fail us. 2 delicious mojitos later and we were all set for Corey Haines to give the second key-note of the day.

The final keynote was entitled “Fast Rails tests” which was a pretty enticing title when you have sat for over 20mins waiting for a suite to run. It was a long and entertaining talk which boiled down to extracting business logic into pure ruby classes rather than leaving it in your AR ones. These can then be tested without loading rails which of course runs blazingly fast. Whilst I would love for my tests to run this fast something about this didn’t sit quite right with me. Yes it allows you to run individual tests fast whilst developing (which encourages you to run them more often, which is a great thing) and yes you can even run the ‘fast’ test suite pretty quickly, but it doesn’t really speed up your full test suite before checkin and in my experience this is where the rail pain is.

I do however think that people often forget that you can use plain old ruby classes in your rails apps (and you should!) so I was pleased to see this highlighted.

All in all this was a very enjoyable conference in a great setting, my one compliant would maybe be that the breaks were slightly too long (especially as some of the talks finished a little early), but this is a minor gripe. Well done the organisers!

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