Copiando o que eu já havia escrito: http://blog.codevader.com/2008/10/17/rails-summit-latin-america/
Eu acho que dava pra ter sido melhor, dava pra ter feito um track mais técnico, com menos “introdução” e menos “venha pra comunidade”, acho que todo mundo já tá careca de saber disso.
[quote]Well, I?m at the Guararapes Airport in Recife and it?s time to review what I?ve seen these two days at the Rails Summit. The first thing to say is that even without so much time to get everything done, the organization did pretty well. The event was well planned, the places were big enough to hold everyone and, most important, it was about time that the Brazilian and Latin American Ruby and Rails community had it?s own ?Rails Conf?, so, here goes a big compliment to Fabio Akita and the guys at Locaweb for making this possible.
Day 1
The opening keynote with Gilberto Mautner (Locaweb?s founder and CIO) and Fabio Akita was a nice introduction to Locaweb?s history and also our little Ruby and Rails community history, with the first Portuguese written books about Ruby and Rails. A nice introduction for one of the biggest Rails events Brazil has ever seen (we had another big one in Rio, the ?Rio on Rails?, not that long ago?).
DHH
And then came the real content, the first presentation was given by DHH, the idea was that people would ask questions and he would answer them. I asked David about the thread-safety in Rails and if it?s now thread-safe from top to bottom and how this would impact in our current state with rails deployments, he said that while it was nice that they had done it, only JRuby would be able to get something out of it, as the MRI (Matz?s Ruby) doesn?t use native threads and can?t really be ?concurrent?, also, some plugins might need some changes to get working again with these new changes (I?ve already had to struggle with masochism to get it working with edge rails).
The idea of having him answering questions was cool, but I don?t think it really worked, the questions were too fragmented and maybe it would be better to let him just talk about some interesting topic or something like that (or maybe not even bothering to call him at all, more about that later).
Chad Fowler
Next one was Chad Fowler and he was the star on the first day with a great presentation about what he spoke at the ?My Job Went to India? book (and there?s a new version coming) . A lot of interesting tips to make you a better developer and how being a great developer isn?t going to make your job fly to India. Unfortunately, the event agenda said his talk was about ?Evolving a Framework? and I couldn?t see any of this in there and this wasn?t really cool, he gave an awesome presentation, but it wasn?t what I was expecting it to be.
George and Danilo
Then we got George Malamidis and Danilo Sato talking about REST architectures and a little bit about the Rails RESTful way, it was a great introduction to the topic. One of the most interesting things that I got is that you can use proxies (like Apache and Squid) to perform caching of pages with ?question marks? (eg. ?/articles?id=1?), even if this doesn?t work with rails itself. Obviously, if you?re using REST you shouldn?t have resources accessible with URLs like that one, but sometimes you don?t really have a choice.
Dr. Nic
Well, this one was definitely cool, but almost everything Dr. Nic said here had already been said by Chad in his presentation. Obviously it was not his fault and he gave a great presentation about how you can use the tools available to develop software collaboratively and how to make yourself well known in the community, but we already knew that and it made his presentation lose some of it?s glow.
At this point, I was completely overwhelmed by sleep so I headed to the hotel to have some sleep and didn?t see Chris Wasntrath presentation. The people who attended it explained it more or less like this:
?He got a piece of paper, read it out loud from head to tail and didn?t say the GitHub word not even once?.
Maybe it was better for me going to sleep early.
Day 2
Phusion guys
This one started the day in hot voltage. The Phusion guys are definitely cool and gave an awesome presentation, about a lot of scalability myths in and out of Rails and obviously about Passenger and Ruby Enterprise, their flagship products. If you haven?t tried them, go do it now! 
Charles Nutter and Tom Enebo
To tell you the truth, this was the talk made me travel two hours by bus and 3 by plane to reach São Paulo, unfortunately the JRuby guys couldn?t come to Brazil (Passports and customs?) so they gave their presentation using Skype and sometimes the sound was impossible to understand. Beyond that, the talk was interesting, with an introduction about JRuby, what it could do, where it?s being used and where they are heading to. The most interesting news was the work towards enabling native libraries written in C in JRuby as they work in Ruby, this would give us the solution for the last JRuby problem, that is the Ruby gems and libraries that depend directly on C code.
Jay Fields
Jay did a presentation about how our testing is immature and how the tools that we use have some cool features and a lot of drawbacks. He walked through Selenium, Test::Unit, RSpec, expectations and gave examples about how they work and how they can fail you in some scenarions. The message was, take the tool that you like, but understand the drawbacks and issues they will insert into your code and tests to be sure that it?s exactly what you?re looking for. But one thing I can?t really accept is that he said that we don?t have best practices or patterns in testing, that we?re too new and we?re still experimenting things. IMHO, we have a lot of best practices on the testing community, we even have books written about it, so stating that there are no well known patterns and best practices is being a bit too radical.
David Chelimsky
And here comes the second best presentation of the day, with David Chelimsky talking about RSpec and Cucumber (the new story runner). He spoke about testing, about TDD, about how to notice and avoid code smells, how to design classes and even had some time to talk about RSpec, Cucumber and show some live examples (he?s even able to speak a little bit of Portuguese ). I wasn?t really that interested in the Story Runner but having him talking about it and showing some live examples is definitely changing my ideas about that.
Phillipe Hanrigou
Phillipe have a presentation about testing (third one today?) and about how to make you tests run faster using a Selenium grid. I was definitely interested in this presentation hoping that we was going to show something about DTrace, debugging or profiling but most of the talk was about testing and how to get things happening faster. It was interesting, but nothing that new.
Fabio Kung
Well, it?s definitely hard to talk about someone that you know, but Fabio?s presentation was a cool introduction about why you should care to run Ruby on Java and why you should care about integrating Java to Ruby. He spoke about how the JMV is designed, why it?s so fast at running any kind of code and how people deploying rails applications can get a big performance boost (specially with the new concurrent rails). He also showed a demo about how to use the jetty_rails plugin to run your rails application with Jetty.
Obie Fernandez
And then we reached the ending keynote with one greatest guys in the Rails community, Obie Fernandez. He closed the event with the best presentation given on it, he spoke about his company, Hashrocket, how they manage to build their applications, what do they do to get things done and how Ruby, Rails and agile development play a big part in it all. It was great to see someone with his experience speaking about entrepreneurism and about how to build a cool environment to get a lot of work done without making the people feel they are wasting their lives. And as he say, never lose sight of the fun in what you?re doing.
Concluding
The event had it?s problems but it was definitely nice in the end, I got to meet a lot of people I only knew over IM tools and meet again with some old friends. For me, the biggest problem was the lack of ?deep? talks. Most of what was shown were introductions to common things and we had 3 presentations about testing (obviously, every presenter had it?s own talk, but it would be nice to have some other topics in there). We had some big guys like DHH, Dr. Nic, Chad Fowler and I think they could all be better used with deeper talks about not so introductory and ?basic? material. I know that not everyone that was there is working with Ruby and Rails daily, but there were two tracks and I was expecting that at least one of them would be more about new things and interesting stuff you didn?t hear about.
But anyway, it?s the first one and they didn?t have that much time to get everything up and running, so let?s look forward to the see what the next year will bring to us. And yet again, my most sincere compliments to Fabio Akita and Locaweb for making this all possible![/quote]
