After Ostrava

Well it’s been a couple of weeks since my weekend escapade to Ostrava on Rails in the Czech Republic.

I had a thoroughly good time. My trip out was as uneventful as Toby’s was eventful. I had about an hour of time to kill at the Holešovice station and as I hadn’t eaten I decided to try some Czech cuisine. Granted, I probably didn’t choose the best representation of Czech restauranteurs but my fried cheese with deeply fried chips wasn’t too bad at all. I actually managed to order ‘ketchup’ without having to point to it.

When the train finally arrived I met up with Jamis , Toby and Filip. They were all really nice guys and I hardly noticed the 3½ hours the (very comfy might I add) pendolino train took to take us to Ostrava.

When we actually got there, it was pissing down with rain. Thankfully, Lucie was there to pick us up and though her car’s demisting system decided to go on holiday and the trip to the hotel was a bit harrowing (at least from where I was sitting :), it was a short trip and we were soon settled in. Lucie kindly pointed us to the local diners and in the end we chose a pizza place, whose name I forgot but which was really very nice. Though I didn’t try one myself the pizza’s were huge and looked very tasty.

Day 1 of the conference, and Lucie was there again bright and early to pick us up. I really enjoyed the nice relaxing walk over to the conference center. That really made the world of difference and helped me calm my nerves.

Jamis was up first and talking about capistrano was inevitably a hot topic and very interesting. I got a few questions in as regards deprec and cap2 which was of especial interest to me as I want to see when will be the right moment to integrate capservext with deprec. I’d rather not have to repeat myself.

I was up next and I felt I did a good job mostly though I couldn’t completely shake off the nerves. There certainly was a lot of interest from the public judging from the questions I got which I thought was a very good sign for globalize and i18n on rails in general. You can see the videos of the talks here. The slides I used are available here.

We then had an interesting talk about possible rails networking initiatives in the Czech republic and the chance to talk to an existing java user group in Luxembourg. I must say that I agree with Toby and Jamis when they say that these things are better off started on a smaller more local scale via occasional meet ups and communication via interested developers and then scale up. Nevertheless, the Ostrava conference showed that there was plenty of interest in the Czech republic (and in the greater eastern european area) for rails and I think it was a great platform to bootstrap the kind of rails communites required to build up a solid rails presence.

Certainly, the efficiency with which the whole conference was handled is a great testiment to their commitment for promoting rails. I am thoroughly looking forward to next years edition, and though it would make more sense to do it in Prague, I felt right at home in Ostrava, thanks to people like Robert Cigán, Jiří Kubica and Lucie Maliková.

After the video conference, Tobias Luetke was up talking about how he got shopify to where it is today. A really interesting talk and very eye opening. I smiled when he said ”....if in doubt the designer is always right” (or something like that). I’ve had a number of ‘disputes’ shall we say with my ‘designer’ (Thomas Maas) and inevitably he ends up being right.

Luke Francl, talked up using sms gateways to send/receive sms/mms and showed us how he came up with a nice simple way to automate this. I might have use for that some time soon but seems like spanish carriers don’t like to play ball in this respect.

I really enjoyed Tim Lossen’s talk on setting up a rails cluster for 100.000 CZK. He suggested virtualizing a physical server into separate ‘logical’ servers for the app servers and db and then expanded on this. He mentioned switfiplied mongrel which I’ve been meaning to test. He also showed a site where you can find good deals on dedicated servers. All in all an excellent talk. Check out his slides when they come out.

We finished off the day with a final discussion. A few questions were heard then but mostly people were ready for the bar :)

After the Day 1 talks were over we were taken over to the downtown area on Stodoiny street. We had an excellant dinner at a cocktail bar and then some really nice czech beer at theatre-themed bar which we had practically to ourselves.

Day 2, despite having the slides in english was all in czech and though I’ve an ear for languages, I really need an extra one for czech :) Most of the talks were introductory ruby/rails aimed at students. Robert Cigán gave a talk on the porting of Skvely.cz main product to rails. From the slides I understood he was using a separate database for each customer and had come up with a neat technique for how to switch database connections for each client. Jiří Kubíček talk on rails deployment was also very interesting. He works for railshosting.cz which is offering free accounts for developers to try deploying their rails apps. When you sign up they actually send you a preconfigured cap deploy recipe as an attachment in the welcome mail so all you need to be up and running is modify the repo url and cap deploy. Very nice. We spent the rest of Saturday after the talks in a bar decorated in american 60s style. That was our last evening in Ostrava.

All in all I had a great time. I met some lovely people, listened to some interesting talks, had interesting discussions and hopefully made one or two friends. I found myself connecting with and discovering that I had many things in common with others that live on the other side of the world. And all this was thanks to the great success that was the Ostrava on Rails conference.