I guess I'm a few weeks late posting my follow-up on RailsConf 2007. I actually took a week long road trip from Portland to Colorado Springs after the conference, so I am just now catching up on my list of post-RailsConf follow-ups. You can see pictures from the trip here.

RailsConf 2007 was great. It was bigger than last year's event, by about 1000 attendees. The event felt bigger, and seemed to have less of a community feel to it. Last year, when all the attendees were in the same hotel, everyone gathered at the bar and discussed Rails-related issues, hacked away on projects, or played 8-way Mario Kart on the DS Lite. This year was missing some of that, but it was still good.

By far the best event at RailsConf 2007 was the RejectConf - held at the Portland Free Geek building. Free Geek is a pretty cool service to the community. I would like to see more of them around the country. RejectConf was a gong-show style event, where anyone could present their idea, as long as you agreed to leave if you were booed off the stage. I don't think anyone got booed this year (the Microsoft representative did last year), and I got to see some amazing presentations. People presented their plugins, gems, projects, and ideas to a packed room. The most interesting project I saw presented was Rubinius. I had heard about it at last year's RubyConf, but did not know how far it had progressed since then.

In addition to RejectConf, there were a few presentations during the conference tracks that are worth mentioning. Tom Preston did a great job talking about his FixtureScenarios plugin. I love test driven development, so fixtures are important to my development process. They have some issues in the current version of Rails, and Tom's plugin does a great job of making them more flexible. Another presentation worth attending was the Twitter guys talking about scaling their Rails application. Twitter is arguably the biggest Rails app out there right now, and they are having some issues scaling. What I found interesting is that Rails allows Twitter to focus on the 'real' scaling issues, not the mundane stuff. In other words, Rails does scale by taking care of the mundane, and lets Twitter deal with real problems of scaling - issues that any technology would have on a site as big as Twitter.

The issue of Twitter and scaling ties into the third great presentation I attended - Jason Hoffman of Joyent. Jason presented all of the concrete numbers and costs associated with building a large-scale Rails appclication. I get a lot of prospective clients who like to ask "will my app scale?" To me, this question is a "shark-attack" question. Sure, you could get attacked by a shark if you go swimming in the ocean, but you should probably worry about other things first, like rip-tides, water temperature, etc. If you ask me this question, I will usually respond with numbers. It's hard to argue with concrete numbers, and that's what the Joyent presentation did a good job with. If Twitter is getting 11,000 requests per second at peak, they need roughly 32 cores to handle the traffic. Is your app going to be getting 11,000 requests per second? How about 1000?

All told, RailsConf 2007 was great. Portland was great, especially Stumptown Coffee. I wish I could attend RailsConf Europe in Berlin, but it looks like I will have to pass this year. It was great to meet a bunch of new people, pretty much all of whom were doing some type of Rails freelance work. The Rails market is strong, and is only going to get better. I have a feeling that RailsConf 2008 will be upwards of 2500 people.