This past week I attended Advanced Rails Training in Chicago that was put on by Pragmatic Studio. Pragmatic Studio is Mike Clark’s training company and includes Ruby / Rails heavy weights Chad Fowler and Dave Thomas.
It was a great experience and I highly recommend that you attend one of the Pragmatic Studios in the future. What is always interesting about these types of events is that the value in attendance has to as much with the offline discussions as it does with the training program itself. There were so many great people that I had an opportunity to get to know and others that I got to get reacquainted with. I was especially fortunate because Mike Mangino, founder of Elevated Rails, put me up and chauffeured me around. I learned so much from Mike during my stay. I highly recommend his company if you need a quality solution for your next Rails project.
There was also another unique opportunity for the attendees of the Advanced Rails training program. David Chelimsky, lead developer on RSpec, was also in attendance and was kind enough to give us all a special presentation (including fine libations donated by Object Mentor) on RSpec one evening. David discussed RSpec, it’s history, it’s use in Rails applications, and how to make the transition. His presentation was exactly what I needed to get me over the BDD hump. I’ve decided that my next project will be using RSpec and hopefully I’ll have more to say about that as I get into it.
All in all it was a whole lot of fun. If you want to god deeper into Rails development, or if you’ve had your head down and need to get updated on the latest Rails approaches, like Simply Helpful, Capistrano deployment, Restful Routes, etc…, head on over to the Pragmatic Studio website and get signed up for the next available course.
