David Heinemeier Hansson RailsConf 2006 Keynote Address
Posted by Michael Cervieri Sun, 09 Jul 2006 22:01:00 GMT
There’s smart, then there’s really smart, and then there’s really damn smart.
We believe David Heinemeier Hansson’s keynote address below from RailsConf 2006 in Chicago is further evidence of the really damn smart tag that’s been placed on him.
Due to the popularity of this video, it has been moved to a permanent home at ScribeMedia.Org
A bit about David, in his own words from his LoudThinking.com:
A product of Danish Design from the Winter of ‘79. Grew up, lived, and graduated in the city of Copenhagen, then moved to Chicago in November of 2005.As a partner in 37signals, I helped transform the venerable design shop into a product company. Basecamp, Backpack, and Ta-da List are all applications launched since the shift came into effect in February 2004. I did the programming for all of them.
In July 2004, I released the framework Rails (also known as Ruby on Rails) from the work on these applications. I’ve been managing that as an open-source movement ever since. And lately, quite a few people has been taking notice. That means a bunch of speaking engagements including RubyConf, FISL, Reboot, OSCON, ETech, JAOO, and many others.
In August 2005, I won the Best Hacker of the Year award at OSCON from Google and O’Reilly:
In March 2006, I accepted the Jolt award of product excellence for Rails 1.0 and was featured in Wired magazine:
In addition to Rails, I’ve also created the most downloaded Ruby end-user application. It’s a small, light wiki called Instiki. I’m no longer actively developing on it, but still proud of how far I made it go. I even used it to write my final project towards my bachelor’s degree in Business Administration and Computer Science at the Copenhagen Business School.
Might we pretty please have it a) downloadable b) not in a bastardized FlashVideo form (QuickTime or MPEG will do most well)?
Thanks a bunch from Flash-Unhappy ones.
Fully agree with you there, Julik… Flash Video is an abomination as it really can’t play in the background very well. I like to listen to the keynotes whilst working on a Rails project, but it stutters like mad. A downloadable “proper” video like QuickTime would be much easier and would also provide a better way of rewinding/pausing to review what has been said.
I blame YouTube for the growth of FLV video… shudders.
Are his slides posted anywhere so we can click along through them as we watch the video?
Brian: you can download them here: http://www.loudthinking.com/arc/000593.html
All, we’ll podcast the keynotes in the next week or so so you can listen to them in the background/not have to deal with your disliked Flash player.
“Doing by Hand Leads to Good Dsign”... yeah, it also leads to typos :P
I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating. This online video solution is not good enough and not worth the $50 I paid for it if it does not provide the video synchronized with the slides. Please fix this!
well that was fantastic!
I’ve never seen david on video.
No blog post I’ve read has done his presentation justice. I sure am lucky to have seen it. So I’ll give a quick thanks to ScribeMedia and all the people who contributed to the content of this page: Awesome! Thanks a million guys!!!!
Well, that did clear up so many things.
This is really an exciting new avenue that we will all be going down in the next year. I didn’t really understand until seeing this that ActiveResource was built on top of the “strictly CRUD ” approach and not simply facilitating it. Ive been confused about ActiveResource for a while. It all sounds really great.
And “strictly CRUD ” has already made my current project much better organized and easier to deal with simply due to the good people that have blogged about David’s talk. So thanks to you as well!
I have to admit though that I am a little bothered by the ‘URL identifier always being a database primary key because it isn’t worth fixing’ part. Rails is FULL of things that go against this. The user interface starts with a URL and that seemed to be one of the fundamental assumptions of this talk. Ok, this may be something more fitting for a plugin. But still, I don’t like that it is brushed off as insignificant. THE URL IS THE INTERFACE . Everything else is really icing on the cake. I don’t think we should loose site of that. I posted a comment about that at the ‘has_many :through’ site ( great site and great guy BTW ), so maybe that’s why it caught my attention.
All in all I just think it’s fantastic that the routing of requests is getting attention in rails. ActiveRecord is the powerhouse of rails. 1.2 was a huge update to AR. I am glad to see that things are being spiffed up in other parts now. It would have been boring if we had new crazy ways to model a schema. But this is hitting another nail. Great.
Im really happy that I have dedicated so much time to rails. Im a better programmer for it. And who couldn’t make that statement besides the folks who never gave it a shot.
Great video David and the producers. I loved it and I enjoy working with rails. And things like this video are a big confidence booster when there is too much paper on the desk!
Thanks, john
I’d love to see downloadable video as well. With it segmented like this, I can’t watch this video on the train. Plus, if I want to follow along with the slides, I have to pause the video every time I flip a slide to avoid the flash stutter.
Complaints aside, I’m thrilled that you’re putting this up online!
Instead of complaining I want to thanks you guys for putting these video’s online!!!
hi all,
we will post the content (audio / video) in downloadable formats as well. and PowerPoints too. you gotta start somewhere though, right?
when you edit a few hundred hours of conference video each week and learn about subjects ranging from urinary (and bowel too!) incontinence to participatory media to video games to ajax, the first step is to just get something out the door.
personally, i like flash for streaming more than windows media, quicktime, real player, etc. my 2 cents….
but yes, downloads would be nice, and will be available soon.
thanks for your patience.
peter
Powerpoint?!? Forget that…
Thanks for putting this up guys, really great talk. Looking forward to the downloadable version (and one that automatically synchs with the slides?).
This is really great content, but flash video just doesn’t scale for long content.
The experience of using the ideo is just extremely irritating.
I must say, this is one of the few times that feeling RES Tful after a talk isn’t insulting ;)
Ok, i repent.
Watching the flash in FireFox was perfectly doable. Not fun in Safari.
This would have been much more useful to have in Quicktime format however.
Please release the whole thing in Quicktime format. I would also like to watch the RubyKaigi.
thanks
Sure is a lot of really awesome spam here!
It’s really ironic (or possibly upsetting) that there is a lot of whining about Flash being used because it doesn’t work so well for some, and then people ask for Quicktime instead. Sheesh. Closed and proprietary or closed and proprietary? How about asking for a format everyone can play, without demanding certain platforms, codecs or other lock-in?
That said, this was one of the most impressive talks I’ve seen in… well… forever. ;-) I love these new ideas and concepts, and furthermore I have a new specialized application in planning that I was already thinking about how to implement all these different views (for the same data) that now already exist in the framework! Fantastic!
It’s been 16 days, still no direct video download? Still Flash? Anything buy Flash, please!