Sunday: Dave Thomas Keynote

“good technology will be used” -Chad Fowler

Dave Thomas

“rails is love”

$26,000 raised for charity.

“Don’t hold your hands as if you were describing dolly parton.”

“More people partaking in authorship” – you can ignore, control or shut down. We have the same issue in rails. There are more people contributing.

Facilitate conversation. We need to start putting in mechanisms right now that aid in facilitating conversation (blogs, help sites, recipes, how do we help new people join?).

Orthodoxy – believing the correct things
Orthopraxy – doing the right thing (practice)

Rant #1: The Browser

Dave thinks we are stuck in a cycle of repeating ourselves. He predicts the dominant interface in a few years will be your two thumbs. Most of the processing power in our homes is in our wii or ps3. The browser is a cargo cult…we need to think of different ways to interact with our users that are portable and meaningful.

Rant #2: Object Oriented Programming

It’s called object-oriented, not class oriented. The world is not hierarchical yet we use inheritance and hierarchy to define everything.

Your Cargo Cults

• relational databases
• rest
• macs
• textmate
• mongrel

“Don’t be rude about my special doggy.”
“Don’t just receive knowledge.”
“The content of the conversation is the focus.” -Ze Frank (It’s not in the technology, it’s in what we can do with that.)

Rails is cool but it’s just a tool.
Rest is a technique.
Gurus are just insecure people.

It’s about you and what you can do. It’s about all the people leaving the conference thinking I can do this or that.

Have fun and do good.