Let's talk about the nuggets. Quick note though - I heard the complaint that the talks weren't technical enough. I don't particularly agree with that criticism. There's only so much you can cover in 45 minutes or whatever it is so I think the real purpose of most of these talks was to show us what's out there and it's up to us to dig further. My two cents. Anyways, the nuggets:

"Multi-core Hysteria": FUD about CRUD? by Andrea O.K. Wright (Chariot Solutions)-
Learned Mongrel mechanism for handling concurrent threads
def initialize(dir, meme_map = {}{
@guard = Mutex .new
}
Mutex Doc
Got this little forking snippet:
walking = fork do
100.times do
puts “walking”
sleep 1
end
end

chewing = fork do
100.times do
puts”chewing”
sleep 1
end
end

Surviving the Big Rewrite: MOVING YELLOWPAGES.COM to Rails by John Straw (YELLOWPAGES.COM) -
(This talk was awesome for me personally as it dealt with moving a large, established Web site to Rails)
Why the move? Absolute control of URLs (of utmost importance for their site), stateless HTTP, being agile & writing less code
His team and their development process which was pretty cool: ~20 people (5 core developers), sat together, 3 week (approx.) cycles - 1 week wireframe development, 1 week UI design, 1 week+ development
Web Service performance issues they tackled:

• Slow page performance caused more by asset download times than speed of web framework
• Worked through the Yahoo! performance guidelines
• Minified and combined CSS and JavaScript with asset_packager
• Moved image serving to Akamai edge cache
• Apache slow serving analytics tags – moved to nginx for web tier

Also, they debated about other technologies (Java/EJB3, Django) but eventually chose Rails because, well, it's the bomb.

CRUD Doesn't Have an 'S' in It: Managing Complex Searching in Rails by Stephen Midgley (Hutz.com)
4 architectural steps (in order):

1. POST/GET Params representing Search Criteria
   • e.g. ?s=search_parameters
2. Merging Search Criteria with persistent criteria
   • Session/backend, hidden input tags or on the URL line
3. Converting Search criteria to Search Rules to SQL
4. Paginating the Search & Render

I loved this: For clean URLs use POSTs. Make sure your URLs are distinct for core search options. If your URLs aren’t clean, you’re doing it wrong!!!

1. Clean: http://mysite.com/find-vacations/p/1/United-States/Califronia
2. Not Clean: http://mysite.com/controller/action?wtf=is&all=this

You want to store your SQL in an object so that you can pass it around

1. This makes writing your Search Rules more modular
2. Doesn’t have to be session (maybe you want searches sshared across users?)
3. Caboose::EZ

SQL Tools

1. EZ-Where
2. Squirrel
3. Sequel

Alright so that's what I got for Friday. Saturday and Sunday coming soon...