Jamie Thingelstad

• 1:24pm: Stop at Ramone’s Bakery in Eureka, CA.
• 1:46 pm: Having a very nice stop in Old Town section of Eureka.
• 2:18 pm: Mazie and I playing with the pigeons.
• 2:51 pm: Resuming leisurely drive down 101 to San Francisco.
• 8:06 pm: Ate at In-n-Out Burger for the first time. Yum!

See full Summer of Love Collection.

This is definitely a parent story. If you don’t have kids, you may just want to skip this. :-P Being a parent is really great. When Mazie says “I love you Daddy!” I pretty much melt on the spot. But being a parent brings you really close to things like boogers, poop and puke. Traditionally Mom’s bear this brunt more than Dad’s, and that is definitely true in our family.

Mazie is now totally potty trained. She hasn’t touched a diaper for a few weeks, even at night. She’s doing a great job. Fantastic actually. She sleeps through the night and everything. However, she wont go near a normal toilet. She insists, and will really only use, her kids potty. We have it with us as a result. It sits in the van and has made appearances all over on the Summer of Love road trip. Side of the raod potty stop, check. Sidewalk potty stop in downtown, check. Quick potty in the car while getting gas, check check.

Today Mazie announced at lunch that she wanted to “go and take a poop”. We were downtown Portland at a fabulous restaurant and had finished. Tammy took Mazie to the bathroom and she predictably decided she didn’t have to go when she saw the toilet in the bathroom. Off they went to the van to use her potty. Right there in downtown, in the van, we had a #2 stop but lacked anywhere to “take care” of the potty. So, we started driving with a window cracked open.

We stopped after about 15 miles to get gas and Tammy took care of the potty. Tammy, being a fully immersed mom grabs the ‘container’ in the potty. She doesn’t put it in a bag or anything. No real attempt to conceal anything. She just grabs it and walks right into the gas station and heads to the bathroom. Total bad ass. I chuckled to myself while pumping the gas thinking of the amount of angst that would have went into that procedure before being a parent. What are you going to do, right?

We just left Portland today on our continuing Summer of Love trip. You wont find much about Portland from me though. Our stop in Portland for me was a visit to RailsConf 2008. Tammy did post about her thoughts on Portland. It was totally awesome that our good friends, the Tangen’s were able to come out and join us in Portland. Kent attended RailsConf with me, and Maril, Simon and Caroline hung out with Tammy and Mazie. Mazie just adored Caroline the whole time.

Let me share some of my comments on RailsConf 2008. I’m not going to dive into super detail on the Rails 2.1 release announced at the conference, or the details of various sessions. You can find that elsewhere online and many of the presentations and sessions are now up on the RailsConf wiki.

Sessions

Here are the sessions I attended:

• Building Great Products Keynote by Joel Spolsky
• Entrepreneurs On Rails by Dan Benjamin
• Hosting and the Woes by Ezra Zygmuntowicz, Jamie van Dyke, Tom Mornini
• CRUD Doesn’t Have an ‘S’ in It: Managing Complex Searching in Rails by Stephen Midgley
• Flexible Scaling: How to Handle 1 Billion Pageviews by TJ Murphy
• UI Design on Rails by Ryan Singer
• Keynote by David Heinemeier Hansson
• Rails 2.1 Keynote by Jeremy Kempter
• Using Git to Manage and Deploy Rails Apps by Scott Chacon
• Asynchronous Processing with Ruby on Rails by Jonathon Dahl
• Build Your Own Distributed, Self Configuring Rails Cluster by Dave Fayram, Tom Preston-Werner
• Custom Nginx Modules: Accelerate Rails, HTTP Tricks by Adam Wiggins
• The Worst Rails Code You’ve Ever Seen (and How Not to Write It Yourself) by Obie Fernandez
• De-Railing: Smashing the Rails Stack by Aaron Bedra

Sadly, I missed Kent Beck’s Keynote on Saturday evening. I hear it was really good.

Highlights

The conference started off on a strong note with Joel Spolsky’s keynote. Some of you that have mentioned Spolsky to me may have heard my immediate rant. Prior to his keynote I wasn’t a Joel fan. However, his keynote was great. He had a good message, presented it very well, and really got his point across. I liked it a lot, and take back anything bad I’ve said about Joel in the past (or at least most of it). It was really good.

I liked the Entrepreneur session quiet a bit. Unfortunately halfway through it the fire marshall ordered about 1/4th of the people out of the room because it was standing room only. Ryan Singer’s session on design and Rails was awesome. Ryan was preaching what I truly believe is the model for designers and developers to engage and work collaboratively to make great things. The world needs more Ryan Singer’s out there evangelizing and showing how this can be done to do great things. Jeremy Kemper’s keynote on Rails 2.1 was really good as well. The 2.1 feature set looks great.

Perhaps the most high-density presentation was Scott Chacon’s Git presentation. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten barraged with so much high-density information so quickly. At one point I turned to Kent and joked “I feel stupid.” Directed acyclic graphs were being thrown around as quickly and furious as could ever be done. Great presentation though, really liked his stuff. I recommend checking out his site, Gitcasts.

David Heinemeier Hansson’s keynote on Friday night was a little odd. He steered away from any technical topics and really focused on giving some input on creating great products and being a great developer. I’m not sure how the talk went over with the audience. DHH is the creator of Rails, and as a result I doubt anyone would pan it that much. He drew a full crowd back from dinner at 8:00pm after all. His talk however seemed to me to be trying to get people to appreciate the aesthetics of code. To admire the beauty of architecture. It seemed clear to me that he was trying to send a message beyond Rails, to creating great things and continuing creative inspiration. I liked the message, but I wondered how many people in the room really heard it.

Lowlights

There weren’t any bad sessions that I went to. Some could have been better, but I wouldn’t say any of them were horrible. However, I would have liked to see a bit more technical depth and heavy lifting in the sessions. Too many of them seemed to gloss on big topics of scaling, deployment and architecture. I realize it’s a big conference, but more technical depth would have been good.

The WiFi network for the conference was a general disaster. It had 14Mb and was 100% full every single day except Sunday. Not sure what was using that bandwidth, but it made even checking email painful.

With that said, I almost wish they would just get rid of the WiFi. There was simply too much social networking, messaging going on. RailsConf has an “official” back-channel in IRC at the #railsconf channel. I hopped on it at one point to see what was going on and found 200 people bitching, whining and making inappropriate comments in the channel. It was horrible. The worst of anonymous streaming spew that you could find. In several sessions I watched more than a couple of people just sit there and type into the IRC channel the entire time. Yikes!

Lastly, I really wish there was some more diversity in the developer community. There was maybe 1 woman in attendance for every 50 or 100 men. The group could use more diversity, I think it would help the developer community in a number of different ways.

• 11:24 am: Awesome bakery stop this morning followed by an improptu haircut at a cool barbershop.
• 12:12 pm: Childrens Museum in Portland, OR. Very well done. Much Mazie happiness.
• 2:57 pm: Amazing falafel at Karams in Portland. Wow!
• 3:34 pm: Filling up Honda at $4.16/gallon.
• 3:34 pm: Leaving Portland for an impromptu 1-night stay in Eugene, OR.
• 7:08 pm: At Mezza Luna Puzzaria in Eugene, OR for dinner.

See full Summer of Love Collection.

I’ve been trying to post updates from the Summer of Love trip pretty regularly but we seem to have arrived and left Seattle without even a mention of the stop. So, rather than backdating some posts (which I always feel gross doing) I’ll just do a big recap post. If you get bored easily, suffice it to say that Seattle was really cool.

Put on Your Walking Shoes

We did a lot of walking in Seattle. After being in the car for three long days of driving interspersed with a decent amount of driving at Glacier National Park we decided to park the Honda and set out on foot. We stayed on the fringe of downtown, about 5 blocks from Seattle Center, and about a 10 block walk from downtown Seattle. We probably walked around 4 miles or more total each day. It was nice to stretch the legs and see the city up close. However, the downside of this was that we didn’t get much further out of downtown than our feet allowed.

Great Places

We found a number of great places to check out. The first full day we were in town we found the Elliot Bay Trail and had a nice morning walk while checking out Puget Sound. Then we had a nice coincidence of being in town during the Northwest Folklife Festival. We didn’t plan it but we really enjoyed checking it out, listening to some music and hanging out in Seattle Center.

We decided, and Mazie let us know, that it was high time she got to swing. She was looking for the swings when we got to Glacier National Park. It was high time she needed to do some swinging. We walked over to Cascade Park and Mazie was able to get a solid hour of swinging in before we went over to the Flagship REI store. I feel a little odd gushing about a store, but this REI in Seattle is amazing. Just entering it you go on a little mini hiking path and can’t help but want to buy some hiking boots by the time you get into the store. Plus, they had the perfect layout with the play area for the kids, sitting area for dad with free WiFi and the massive array of womens clothing for mom. Genius.

We checked out the Experience Music Project. The architecture of the EMP is pretty amazing, so even just visiting the building was a lot of fun. They had a great exhibit on Jimi Hendrix as well as an overview of music of the northwest, with a big spread on grunge music and related bands. It was a cool place, but not the best place for little kids. In contrast though, it would be a great place for older kids, and there were a lot of them there having a great time.

Great Eats

We had some good meals in Seattle but two places were really great. We had some amazing pizza at Tutta Bella followed with some great gelato. And we had a wonderful dinner at the Five Spot with a relative of mine that lives in Seattle. We liked it so much we made a return visit for breakfast before we left and had the most amazing cinnamon french toast I’ve ever had.