Yesterday I went to the very first edition of Montreal on Rails in the beautiful McGill University.

It’s good to see the community growing but I’ve been told that it’s still quite small in Montreal. Last year, I went to Paris on Rails and the community was already strong. I would have though that Montreal community was a lot bigger.

We were mostly 30 attendants and 2 speakers. Marc Andre Cournoyer talked about testing in Rails and Carl Mercier introduced the HAML library — a lightweight markup language.

The topics were a bit technical for a first meeting but the audience seemed to be quite advanced with Rails so it was fine. Marc-Andre and Carl were very professional in their respective talk and I enjoyed my time.

I have some topic suggestions for the next editions:

Learning the Rails way — talking about common errors and best practices to make the most of the framework. We all love to learn from the gurus.

Tales of real world experiences — talking about and good and bad of working with Rails in the enterprise world and not only in startups. How to train people? How to manage a Rails project? What is the real gain in productivity for a company?

Deploying Rails applications — talking about how to deploy and manage a Rails application in production with best practices. Rails is quite different from PHP in that regard so people who want to switch and very likely to be interested in this topic.

Congrats to Karabunga for the initiative. I’m quite sure the conference will grow fast. Heri from Montreal Tech Watch wrote a brief report of the event with photos.

See you next time.