John Topley’s Weblog

On Sunday I returned from two days in Edinburgh for the inaugural Scottish Ruby Conference. The event has broadened its focus and rebranded from its previous Rails remit when it was Scotland on Rails. The venue this year was the splendid Royal College of Physicians, an imposing building with an ornate interior.

In case you haven’t heard, Stack Overflow is a free programming Q & A site from Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood that was born out of frustration with the existing sites in this genre. Stack Overflow has been going just over a year and during October and November Joel and Jeff have teamed up with Carsonified to embark on a world tour, with the aim of exposing developers to a diverse range of topics. Think of it as a sort of tasting menu for software developers.

A fortnight ago I flew to Edinburgh to attend Scotland on Rails. In spite of his best efforts, I managed to persuade my friend John Conners to come along too, so that he could find out why I’ve been nagging him to take a look at Ruby on Rails for years. Although John’s an experienced software developer with C++ and .NET under his belt, I thought he might find it interesting to learn more about a dynamic and purer OO language such as Ruby.

Last week I had the pleasure of attending Carson Systems‘ annual Future of Web Applications conference in London. This two day conference and day of workshops has expanded significantly since the single day conference held last February (which I wasn’t able to attend).

On Friday I attended a Professional CSS XHTML Techniques workshop given by Eric Meyer and organised by Carson Workshops. The event was superb; it’s clear that Eric has probably forgotten more about CSS than most of us will ever know, yet he was able to impart some of his vast knowledge and experience in a digestible and accessible manner.

I've just returned from a week-long RAD workshop where I was involved in the initial development of a Java framework for internal use within the organisation I work for. The workshop was a first for me and a first for my employer.