Mark Your Calendar:

RailsConf Europe 2007, Sept 17-19, 2007, Berlin, Germany. (registration starts in June)

RailsConf 2008, May 29-June 1, 2008, Portland, Oregon.

RailsConf 2007 took place last week/weekend in Portland. Some of the presentation slides and files from the sessions have been generously made available by the speakers. If you weren’t able to attend this year’s event (especially since it sold out), these notes are a great way to learn, to find out what you missed and to convince yourself that you should attend the next one!

If you know of any that I’ve missed, let me know and I’ll update this post.

RailsConf 2007: speaker notes page

Chris Wanstrath: Memcaching Rails

Ezra Zygmuntowicz: Xen and the Art of Rails Deployment

Josh Susser: How to Contribute to the Ruby on Rails Open Source

[Previous Post: Rails Conf 2007 Keynote Notes]

Eric Meyer, Jeffrey Zeldman and the crew at A List Apart have been putting on series of web standards conferences called An Event Apart. The first conference was in Boston in March. The second event will be in Seattle next month.

Yesterday, they annouced the third of four events for 2007: An Event Apart Chicago will be held August 27–28 at the Chicago Marriott Downtown. Tickets are $795 through July 27, regularly $895. The last two events sold out before the early registration deadline, so if you want to go I wouldn’t wait too long.

I attended An Event Apart Boston and it was quality content with a great atmosphere. The speakers covered web standards, CSS, design principles, accessibility, best practices, and even working with clients. To me, the Chicago schedule looks even better. (Full disclosure: they are clients of mine too.)

Mark your calendar: MySQL Conference & Expo has announced their 2008 conference will be April 23-26 in Santa Clara, California.

Today is the last day to participate in A List Apart’s first annual Web Design Survey.

In their words: “People who make websites have been at it for more than a dozen years, yet almost nothing is known, statistically, about our profession. Who are we? Where do we live? What are our titles, our skills, our educational backgrounds? Where and with whom do we work? What do we earn? What do we value?”

The survey ends tomorrow, May 22nd, and took me about 10 minutes to complete. Selected participants, chosen by random drawing, will win a free ticket to one of their events; a 30GB iPod, a jump drive, or a t-shirt. You can fill it out anonymously too, but then you can’t win stuff.

It will probably be another day or two before the speakers recover from the weekend and get around to posting their slides and notes, but you can already find out what you missed in David Heinemeier Hansson’s keynote on the new features coming in Rails version 2.0. (And you can watch the fourth “Hi, I’m Ruby on Rails” video while you wait for more speaker notes.)

Brady Forrest has a good feature overview on O’Reilly’s blog.

Justin Ball blogged the keynote in real time.

Giles Blowkett offers a more stream of consciousness post on his blog. (My favorite recap moment is: “Involuntary debugging demo.”)

I love this idea. Full Code Press is a competition between web development teams to build a complete website for a charitable organization in 24 hours. They’ll have complete freedom as to the platform: HTML, Ruby on Rails, LAMP, or whatever else they like. Each team is made up of seven web members, and all of the teams compete at the same location on the same day. At the end of 24 hours, a team of judges will select the winner.

The first event will be held in Australia on August 18-19, 2007 between Australia and New Zealand. In May 2008 early February 2008, they will be hosting a worldwide challenge, open to teams from all countries, to be held in Wellington, New Zealand.

Interested teams and interested charities can get more information and sign up on their website. If you can’t attend, they plan to make it possible for you to follow the event online via blogs, interviews, Twitter and YouTube.

Personally, I’d love to see this event spread to other countries. Developers often get requests to do pro bono work for charities, but developers are usually either booked with paying clients or looking for more paying work. The charities can’t offer cash, but through contests like this they can offer something that developers covet even more—bragging rights.

php|Tek took place last week in Chicago. Some of the slides from the sessions have been generously made available by the conference and the speakers. There’s an official page being maintained by the conference. Where my list overlaps theirs it is because a) some of the speaker’s blog entries contain information to supplement the slides, or b) they are updating their list more often.

If you know of any more, let me know and I’ll add them to this post.

php|Tek official slide page

Jason Sweat:
Test Driven Development

Sebastian Bergmann:
Testing PHP/Web Applications with PHPUnit 3 and Selenium

Lukas Smith:
Database Meets OOP / Lock Your Database Application!

Jeff Moore:
Writing Maintainable PHP Code / Dependency Injection / Exceptional PHP

This week’s music post is about Jonathan Coulton. Coulton is a 30-something, Brooklyn-based, singer/songwriter. Add those three labels together and they equal “smart and cheeky hipster musician”. I already had him in mind for a future music post, but when the New York Times profiled him this week, it pushed his name to the top of the pile.

In September 2005, Coulton quit his job as a computer programmer and became a full-time singer and songwriter. To jumpstart his already budding career, he set himself the tough goal of writing one song a week and publishing it to his website. He called it “Thing a Week”, and he succeeded plus earned himself a fanbase in the process. If you don’t know Coulton by name, you may have heard some of the popular results from his “Thing a Week” project: his funny programmer anthem, “Code Monkey” or the surprising, light-accoustic cover of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back”. All 52 tracks are now available on four albums.

In case those two examples don’t fully illustrate the particular brand of humor in Coulton’s music, let me also note that he is friends with the Daily Show’s John Hodgman. In fact, he made an appearance on the Daily Show to sing a song about dropping snakes from airplanes to defeat Iraqi insurgents and accompanied Hodgman on his list of “700 Hobo Names”. His subjects and lyrics are wry, wittty, and modern.

(More on Coulton, They Might Be Giants and this week’s notable new releases after the jump.)

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Zend has announced PHP Abstract, a twice weekly podcast for PHP developers. “Each episode features a different special guest bringing you their expertise, compressed into a five to seven minute package.”

I think Zend knows a thing or two about PHP. Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski, two of Zend’s founders, are key contributors to PHP and creators of the open source Zend Engine.

The first episode will be June 5th. Should be good.