Obie Fernandez

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?

Truly Awful Rails Code (Send it to me!)

There's tons of material out there telling us how to properly write code (or attempting to anyway), but in an effort to be creatively different, I decided that my Railsconf talk this year will be all about bad Rails code. Entitled "The Worst Rails Code You've Ever Seen...", I'm basing it on both code and practices that I've both done myself, stumbled across as a neutral observer or rescued during the last few years.

After working through a draft, I'm feeling a little short on examples, so I'm reaching out to you for some help. Please email me your heinous Rails coding examples, stuff that you're truly embarrassed about. I'm looking for stuff that has obvious "better ways" or not, the latter being good topics for discussions of how Rails occasionally leads developers down the wrong path.

If you want to be a little bit more anonymous than email permits, you can also post a comment to this entry linking to snippets on Pastie. Not to worry, none of the example code in the talk will be direct copy-paste of actual client code or stuff that you submit. I plan on changing variable names and anonymizing stuff to the best of my ability and for my legal protection.

If I get enough material, I plan to make the content of the talk and submissions into a regular series of posts on this blog. Thanks in advance for your help!