Last week, the European conference on Ruby, Rails and more took place in Berlin. I was lucky to be invited to take part in the workshops and two great conference days.

On Monday, I took the Workshop on Behaviour-driven Design in Practice by Jens-Christian Fischer of InVisible GmbH. He is the author of the best selling German book “Professionelle Webentwicklung mit Ruby on Rails 2. Das Praxisbuch für Entwickler” (affiliate). It was obvious from the beginning that he not only knows a lot about Rails but also about teaching — I learned a lot there. In the evening at the VIP party in 4010, we talked about the next edition of his book.

The next day was my Ola Bini day. First JRuby Internals by him, then Embracing Events by Lourens Naudé and then again Ioke for Ruby Developers, again by Ola. After Lunch there was a Keynote on the Present and Future of Programming Languages by Ola. In between I had some chats with Ola. The conference day ended with a talks by Michael Koziarski and Yehuda Katz. Later that evening there was a party at the weekend club.

Wednesday started with a great talk from Neal Ford on Metaprogramming. I learned a lot in this talk. Now it’s time to take his input and cleanse my own meta programming code. After that, Michael Johann from Rails Experts gave an introduction on integrating Enterprise Java with JRuby on Rails. As we were already doing a lot of stuff with JRuby on Rails here I knew most of the thing he was telling. In the following keynote, Yehuda Katz explained how Rails 3 will look like. Very promising!
After the lunch break, Neal Ford, gave a talk how he manages the biggest project based on Ruby on Rails in the world - with 10 pair programming pairs and some more stuff. I will copy many of his ideas to enhance our workflow at the Topic Maps Lab. Ralph von der Heyden from Xing AG gave many great Ideas how to optimize the frontend of web applications. We are already doing some of his tips but after listening to him, I have to admit there’s still much room for improvement than I was aware of. The final talk I attended was Ruby/Rails in the Enterprise from Maik Schmidt of Vodafone. He presented how Ruby was failing in some enterprise uses cases and how to work around that. I was happy to see I was already heading in the right direction with .

We already received some applications for our open positions, of course, mostly for the Ruby on Rails Developer one, so the conference clearly was a win-win.

Many others already blogged about RailsWayCon and you can follow me on twitter to find out what’s up.

Concluding, I’m looking back three great conference days with many new contacts and a long list of tools and ideas to integrate in our projects. I’ll definitely go to the next RailsWay Conference next year.