Railsconf 2008 Slides for Worst Rails Code...

I'm happy to make available the slides for my well-received Railsconf 2008 presentation: The Worst Rails Code You've Ever Seen (and how not to write it yourself)

obiefernandez-worstrailscode-railsconf2008_slides.pdf

Greg Pollack (of RailsEnvy.com fame) included an interview with me about my talk in his Railsconf 2008 Videos collection. Direct link to the Vimeo clip is here.

I want to publicly thank Rocketeer Rein Henrichs for his somewhat late-minute agreement to co-present, even though it meant being up and alert at 9 am on Sunday morning after extreme sleep deprivation for the duration of the conference. We were able to riff off each other and crack up the audience -- without resorting to too many inside jokes. (Did you see what I did there, Rein?)

I also want to thank all my readers that responded to my call for bad code examples a couple of weeks ago. Explore the comments on that post for some good examples that I ended up not using.

One of the coolest things about the talk was that several community-benefiting ideas popped up because of it. I mentioned the possibility of signing authors to write a Rails Antipatterns book for my series from the stage, and Chad and Tammer from Thoughtbot volunteered pretty much immediately. Greg from RailsEnvy also suggested that he help me get the talk recorded as a video podcast and that'll happen sometime soon I'm sure, as well as the idea of turning the talk into some sort of recurring video podcast by me and Rein. We'll see... copious free time and all that being what it is.

Oh yeah, on a final self-congratulatory note, I also claim bragging rights for packing the room with 1000+ attendees on a Sunday morning! Maybe the scheduling gods will be kinder to me next year in Vegas?

Comments

[taelor]

dude, how did you steal all my code...

no seriously, great stuff, wish i was there.

[Pito Salas]

Obie I was there, and it was really really interesting. I've enjoyed your Rails Way book too (still do/am.)

I do wish that you had taken a little more time in the talk, like you do in the book, to make sure those of us who don't yet have a 200 Rails IQ to really understand and learn.

[KAMADA Tatuya]

Thanks Obie.
Unfortunately, I wasn't there. (I live in Japan.)

So, I read slides.
In the slides, "Application-wide Actions".

1) @current_user in application.rb

is bad.

2) create AuthenticatedSystem module and include

is good.

What is different?
Or, am I reading wrong?

(I'm sorry my broken English.)

[ObieFan]

Wow, that picture is awesome.

Got ego?

[Roadmaster]

Whoa, it might sound strange but THANKS for including my code in your presentation (slide 43). I've always believed that line was a mess, but now at least the experts have confirmed it. I promise I'll try to fix it! also, in my favor, I have to say it was one of my earliest Ruby projects (only using AR for database access) and I didn't yet have Obie's book :)

[Matthew Bergman]

Really could use a bit of explanation on some of the slides. Yeah, most is self explanatory but one learns not only through doing but by being told.

[Darrin Wortlehock]

Hi Obie,

Did you see my photos from your presentation? http://www.flickr.com/photos/dwortlehock/sets/72157605369245455/?page=2