MountainWest RubyConf 2009

MountainWest RubyConf 2009 really helped me reorient in a very good way.

The emergent theme seemed to be "modularity".

Six main talks that were really enlightening:

• Jon Crosby: Rack
• Jeremy Evans: Sequel
• Yehuda Katz: Rails Rewrite
• Adam Blum: Rhodes
  
• Jim Weirich: Unified Theory of Software Development
• Alan Whitaker: The Sweet Ruby Life
  

Rack totally changed how I thought about building a webapp. Decomposing things into pieces that have the minimum to do with each other is possible in a really clean way with rack. And treating each of those pieces as a separate app, even, with its own release schedule, etc. -- that was a very refreshing view.

When I heard Jon say that the Perl script he had up on the screen was a monolith -- he was absolutely right. And I thought that the system *I* was working on was a monolith.

I was going to give a lightning talk about fshelper.org's link feature, but I wanted to rewrite it in broken-up rack pieces. I tried my best to do that between talks, but I didn't quite get the app to function as middleware, so I just gave up and listened.