Open Source Contributions & MongoDB
June 19, 2010 I recently attended RailsConf 2010 in Baltimore and the 3 major takeaways I got form it were:- The Rails community is awesome. I spent half of my time there just talking to other developers and found the experience to be as rewarding as any of the sessions.
- Everyone was really pushing for more people to get involved in open source projects. There was a pretty heavy focus on "anyone can contribute."
- MongoDB and other NoSQL solutions were all the rage. I tried to attend a few talks on it myself, since I was considering this for a project at work
I am really going to try to push myself to write more here about what I've been working on. John Nunemaker made a point in his presentation that writing helps him decompress what he's learned.
I am also going to try to push myself to contribute to more open source projects. Like I said, there was a big focus on this. The first day of the conference I randomly met up with Dr. Nic, and without realizing who he was, asked him if he contributed to any open source projects. He did walk with me and gave me some insight that I shouldn't be afraid or intimidated to contribute. The keynote by Yehuda Katz (who has been one of my heroes lately with not only his work on the Rails core, but his frequent updates to Rails Dispatch and some other screencats he's put out there) also focused on how anyone can and should contribute. So, hopefully, in the very near future I'll have some stuff up on github for people to take a look at.
Lastly, I've been working with the stuff I learned from the presentations (here and here), as well as the Birds of a Feather session, where a small group of us sat and peppered John Nunemaker with questions about MongoDB and MongoMapper, which was very helpful.
I've been working with both MongoMapper and Mongoid and have found them to be both easy and powerful to use. I hope to have an app that's using it in production soon, but there's still more reading I have to do to optimize it.
