Scotland on Rails 2009 was held at the University of Edinburgh 26-28 March. I confess that when I registered and made travel plans I regarded the conference as a good excuse to visit Scotland but not much more. It ended up being one of the finest conferences I have attended in a while. Good assortment of sessions, fascinating speakers, a good venue and superlative organization made the conference as valuable an experience as it was enjoyable. The conference organizers deserve a lot of credit for the job they did.

For me, the highlight sessions included:

  • Marcel Molina’s opening keynote – fascinating and humorous insight into the early development of Rails.
  • Jim Weirich’s session “Building Blocks of Modularity” – turned out to actually be a thought provoking “Grand Unified Theory of Software Development”.
  • Joe O’Brien’s and Jim Weirich’s “Ruby Code Review” – shined a light on taking simple steps to rein in untested code (and earned a good many guffaws in the process).

But, yeah, it was still a good excuse to visit Scotland.