This morning's tutorial was about Ajax on Rails by Stuart Holloway. He talked about the Prototype and Scriptaculous Ajax libraries and about Rails RJS templates. I haven't actually done any Ajax development - just read about it and used Ajax web sites. It's pretty cool stuff and with these tools it looks like it's getting a lot easier to do. And it didn't hurt that Stuart was an entertaining speaker.
For the afternoon I had signed up for a tutorial on the RT (Request Tracker) ticketing system. I recently bought their book although I haven't read it yet. My company has a homebrew ticketing system that works pretty well, but if nothing else, I figured I might get some ideas. One negative (for me) is that it's written in Perl which I'm not very familiar with. I wasn't as excited by this talk but it was still interesting. One of the things I was curious about was what techniques they used to make RT customizable and extensible but, unfortunately, I didn't get too many good ideas on this front.
There were a number of people speaking in the evening. I skipped most of them but snuck in and out for Kathy Sierra's talk on Passionate Users. I knew of her from the Head First series of books. If you haven't seen these books, they're worth checking out. She gave a talk that was entertaining and inspiring (if you care about users).
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