RailsConf 2008 Lightning Talk Summaries

photo by James Duncan Davidson

A few months back Chad Fowler asked me to coordinate the lightning talks for this year's RailsConf. It turned out to be a rolicking good time! We had 36 speakers in three sessions over three days — more than half the number of official talks! Topics ranged from announcements of new plugins (man, there are a lot of these suckers out there!) to demos of cool sites (Shared Copy certainly blew some minds) to rants and harangues (Ryan Davis never disappoints in this regard).

Below, I've attempted to summarize each of the talks and provide appropriate links where I could find them. The results are based on my sketchy notes while keeping time (and preparing my own talk) and so are definitely less than definitive. If you spoke and I got some of your details wrong, drop me a comment and I'll make corrections. If any speakers want to send me links to their slides, I can add those as well.

Thanks to everyone who participated — audience and speakers alike — and thanks to the RailsConf orgnaizers for letting me put this together.

Friday

• Jon Garrin - Gatekepeer Plugin
• Max Baumann - Varnish as a Page Caching Alternative
• Prabode Weebadde - Paging: Pro-Paging
• Four Hewes - "Designers: Will you respect me in the morning?"
• Scott Chacon - Git + Lighthouse
• Chew Choon Keat - Shared Copy
• Luke Francl - Fan Chatter Stadium
• Gleb Arshinov - Keyboard Shortcuts for the web
• Ryan Davis - Write less code

Saturday

• Max Warnock - RDF framework
• Josh Goebel - Pastie
• Greg Borenstein - RAD: Ruby Arduino Development
• Matt Conway - Rubber for managing EC2 with Capistrano
• David Lowenfels - Scrum Ninja
• Jeremy Seitz/Mike Hill - geo search w/sphinx (PrimoSpot.com: find parking spots in NY)
• Rich Cavanaugh - acts_as_reasonable
• Ryan Jarvinen - Earfl: Voice Flickr
• Brian Chamberlin - RailsBrain ajax docs
• Eric Mill - ohnomymoney.com: Wesabe integration
• Matthew Deiters - Content Management DSL, DSL Engine

Sunday

• Dan Chak - Active Resource Kool-Aid
• David James - Method Trails
• Michael Slater - buildingwebapps.com
• Noel Rappin - iPhone on Rails
• Robert Thau - Permissioning in ActiveRecord
• Loren Johnson - Resful Workflow Plugin
• David Woodward - REST with Rails and ejabberd
• Jon Dahl - How Not to Present at RailsConf
• Brian Durand - Performance Plugins
• Jacob Dunphy - KABLAME!! (check a git or svn repo to find out who didn't write tests)
• Ben Mabey - RSpec Story TM Bundle
• Chad Wooley - Geminstaller
• Aaron Campos - Automator
• Joannou Ng - NSTableViewFTW
• Mark Anderson - Jive Pages Plugin