Yehuda's GoRuCo talk was on the subject of Rails as a Ruby citizen - that while Rails was already a pretty good Ruby Citizen with 2.3, 3.0 is about making it a better citizen.

Ben Stein of Mobile Commons is giving a talk on Cross-platform Mobile App development. They hadn't done any client mobile work, but lately clients have been asking "what about iPhone?," "what about Android?" and the like. Whether or not this question of navigating the mobile client world is important to you now, Ben predicts it will soon be, as that's where we're headed.

Thoughts and experiences from Mobile Commons' first mobile client apps:

Jake Howerton gave a GoRuCo talk about Rails Anti-Patterns, drawn from his years as a rails developer.

Over lunch with Jake, I'd wondered aloud "where are all the wide-eyed optimistic presentations?" and Jake starts by saying he's sorry that this will not be one of those talks.

We've been programming in Rails for several years now, and now more than ever we're left with the problem of how to deal with, maintain and correct projects which may be riddled with out-dated thinking, mistaken ideas and problematic implementations.

In other skilled enterprises there are core ideas which are repeated by for practice and for their general utility. In martial arts, these are called "katas," in programming, we have "patterns." Patterns are general, reusable solutions to common problems in software engineering, which are often arrived at through emergent design. Anti-patterns, likewise, emerge in the general work on a project, but their presence is harmful. They're the mistakes we make again and again in our projects.

Jake then laid out a few patterns and anti-patterns for your consideration: