RailsConf Writeups: The Dark Art of Developing Plugins

This presentation was one of the highlights of the conference to me. For me, it was a perfectly structured talk. It joins the V is for Vexing, Joyent Happy Hour, and the make_resourceful talk as the overall highlights of the conference for me. (make_resourceful link coming soon!)

In my experience, there are a lot of developers who are learning Ruby by programming in Rails. Most of us know that Rails takes a lot of advantage of the advanced metaprogramming techniques in Ruby, but how many of us take the time to learn all the mechanics of how it works? What made this talk so effective was that James was able to take a part of Rails that a lot of developers have to interact with (plugins) and explaining some of the Ruby magic behind how it all comes together.

You’re left with a very solid understanding of how everything works behind the scenes. As a result, you’re in a much better position to be able to write your own plugins, but also how to be a good plugin consumer. Don’t waste any more time listening to me and check it out.