alt.NET beers #4
Well, that was fun. Got up in front of the camera for the first time, which was different. It’s run park-bench style, so there need to be 3 speakers to kick things off; since I’d contributed to the opening question, I was picked.
This method of picking speakers does break the ice, but it also ensures that the first people up know nothing about the subject they’re asking about. I always feel like I’m not really contributing anything useful under those sorts of circumstances. I know I’m not good at thinking on my feet (how difficult should it be to explain mixins and Modules, really? Gah) but maybe I just need practice.
I definitely learned useful stuff, though. For starters, I think I’ve pretty much got a handle on AOP now, and where it might be useful. There’s a chance it might come in handy on a Rails app I’m working on. I know DHH and the others rejected AOP as an overall approach for the framework early on, but there’s a layer between the framework and the domain models where inheritance is a bit of a bodge. Hell, inheritance is the wrong way to do serialisation in my book – why does my Account class care about the database? Anyhow, I guess that’s opinion for you.
Also REST: now I get it. I didn’t see before how all the various parts of a practical web page fit into the REST style; you need some way to move navigation, personalisation and so on out of the resource, and ajax makes that trivial. I don’t know why I hadn’t seen that before. I’m still unsure on how to degrade it gracefully, but it’s one more piece of the puzzle.
There’s still not a lot of IronRuby noise, which surprises me, although there were a couple of other Rubyists around last night. I must make more contact with the London Ruby set, they seem like a fun bunch.
Also ended up drinking in Soho on a school night. This was Fun.