February 19, 2006
Jonathan Rentzsch shows off his “bagel with sprinkles”
Going into the day, I thought that we were on schedule but I question that now given how much material we covered and how little time that we spent coding (this day was the exception — day two had us spending quite a bit of time editing code). We started off with coverage of the has and belongs to many association (which prompted a discussion on the new polymorphic associations), transaction support (with associated caveats about versions of MySQL that don’t support transactions), Action Mailers and associating both a text and html version for multipart emails (the new method makes this trivial to do), testing with Mocks, a lot of coverage of the checkbox form element because it’s a source of common confusion to a lot of people, Active Record and Action Controller hooks and Action Controller filters, Action Web Services (REST, SOAP, XML-RPC and WSDL), security (SQL injection, form stuffing, XSS and not trusting ID parameters), Deployment (where to store session info, choosing a web server, logging, the production console, sending exception emails, query optimization, caching), Performance Testing, Ship It! (development and production environment differences, SwitchTower), Post-Production Checklist, Plugins, etc.
I actually went through the course book for the above paragraph because I glossed over what happened on Day 2 and only hit the high points and wanted to provide people interested in attending Rails Studio with a detailed example of how extensive and intensive the Rails coverage really is. I had a great time — both Dave and Mike are wonderful instructors and both are very much taken with the Rails environment. But not so taken that they weren’t willing to say, “Now this part coming up, I’m not happy with the way that this was done.” And that sort of intellectual honesty is one of the big attractions that I have to Ruby in general and Rails in particular.
David Heinemeir Hansson does a question and answer session during lunch
Dave promised us a lunch surprise and delivered — David Heinemeir Hansson showed up for a question and answer session. He was peppered with great questions (“What version of Rails does the 37Signals apps run on”, “How many requests/second is campfire handling and what hardware setup is being used?”, “What did 37Signals think about you releasing Rails as an open source project?”) and David handled them all with a relaxed and candid manner. It was nice of him to take an hour out of his Saturday to visit with us — especially when you realize that his drive out to Hoffman Estates and back had to be two to three hours on top of the time that he spent with us.