I arrived yesterday to Berlin to attend RailsConf Europe – Berlin 08 as Akhtaboot’s ambassador. I arrived to the conference’s venue at 9:00AM as scheduled for the first session.

The first session was common for all of the participants so they opened the 3 ballrooms of the conference to be one. The first speaker was David Hansson from 37signals, he had some notes and tips on the web development and the web applications in general and Rails Apps specifically for 75 minutes. That session very helpful and a good start for me.

30 minutes later the sessions started, 5 at a time. I have chosen the ones I’m going to attend before arriving to the Berlin so I entered the ballroom where a session that is titled Hacking the Mid-End was going to start. I guess that it concerns me a lot as I’m the usability specialist (design and development) so I do most of my work on the front end and some on the back end, but I never knew that there is something in between until that session started. Again the information was very helpful and direct to the point.

Working on Akhtaboot’s CRM was the main reason behind heading to the next session; Enterprise CRM on Rails, that was a case study for an existing project the has been transformed to a Rails App lately. That session had a lot of tips for me to make my baby CRM feels better.

Again and after the lunch I entered the ballroom where a session about working with Multiple Rails Apps, for me there was nothing new about it. I would attend another session if I knew it before.

RESTful everything was the next session, that was a helpful one especially for someone like me. The speaker Ingo Weiss from twinity.com introduced a new plug-in for rails that is very useful.

Unfortunately the speaker of the session “Object Database with Ruby on Rails didn’t show up! And as they said there was no show for that one. So I moved to the one titles “Distributed Browser Testing with Selenium“. Well, I knew what is Selenium after another session that I heard the name at so I’ve done a small research and figured out that it’s a testing platform for the web apps. So it was nice to know more about it. Especially that we always face the cross browsers problem.

“Meet the Sun You Don’t Know“, that became “Meet someone from Sun You Don’t Know” as the speaker Nick Sieger (staff engineer at Sun Microsystems) wanted it to be as everyone knows Sun, talked about Sun Microsystems support for Rails. Then Jeremy Kemper from 37signals talked a lot about the performance of the Rails Apps and how to make it as fast as possible.

That was a quick review on the first day of RailsConf Europe – Berlin 08. I will get back to you with a review on the second day with some photos as well.