Back from a very successful Conferencia Rails Hispana 2007.

We were 200+ people this year, two days, three tracks. Technical talks, but also case studies and a round-table of companies with representants from Sun and Microsoft among others.

I gave my talk about Rails internals in the first morning. I liked very much the talk about plugins given by my colleague Javier Ramírez. He used funny and entertaining, but at the same time meaningful and inspired metaphors with Lego constructions on the stage, with real Lego stuff he brought in a box. There was a good introduction to Ruby metaprogramming by Sergio Gil as well, but unfortunately it had the same slot of another excellent talk by Pablo Delgado about scalability, performance, and all about measuring and applying common sense to your application setup. Sergio's was not being recorded so I attended that one, but I am looking forward to the video of Pablo's. REST, contributing to Rails, i18n, rspec, caching, ..., a wide range of topics were covered.

Thursday night there was an excellent dinner. It had the format of a cocktail, everyone standing up taking small pieces of food in a not so big room. That encouraged meeting people a lot more than sitting in a table. We had a really great time.

As it happens with good sysadmins, you know the work of the organizers is going well when you indeed don't notice them. Everything was smooth and well coordinated, kudos to the organization.

Obie Fernandez came to Madrid with his girlfriend. He gave an excellent keynote. In the first half he explained the most relevant changes in the upcoming Rails 2.0, and then there was a good discussion about team sizes, the future of Rails, etc. He gave his talk and answered the questions in Spanish, that was a challenge for him and he did it damn well. Right after the conference we took a taxi and went to Barcelona in the same plane, we were lucky a gentleman agreed to change his seat next to mine so that we could sit next to each other. We talked about a lot of stuff, from the old-times working in Java to ontolgies and OWL. He's a really really nice person, it was a real pleasure to meet him.