• Read more about RailsConf Europe 2008: Hacking the Mid-End

Michael Bleigh and Chris Selmer gave a talk at RailsConf Europe 2008 entitled “Hacking the Mid-End: Advanced Rails UI Techniques.” If you had a chance to attend, please take a moment to evaluate the session. If not, hopefully this post will help you understand a bit of what you missed!

This talk was aimed at being an introduction to the role of a mid-end developer; someone who facilitates the back-end and front-end developers and also writes the javascript interaction layer using Unobtrusive Scripting. You can view the slides embedded below, or you can download the slide deck directly.

The Rails app that we developed during the talk is available on GitHub with all of the completed code. If you have any questions or comments, we’d love to hear from you. Thanks to everyone who came and saw the talk!

• Read more about Railsconf Europe 2008 Updates + Lonestar RubyConf

Greetings from still sunny Berlin, where Michael & I wrapped up our Hacking Rails Internals talk yesterday. We would love to hear comments from those who attended — we are actively working on getting the slides and demo code to you as soon as possible. Please rate our session if you did attend, so that we can get some constructive feedback.

Today, Chris & Michael will be presenting Hacking the Mid-End : Unobtrusive Scripting & Advanced UI Techniques in Rails. This 45-minute talk will be a discussion of the “Mid-End” — advanced user interface problems that don’t fit the traditional ‘back-end’ and ‘front-end’ categorization. You can find more details on the RailsConf site.

Chris & I will also be flying out today from Berlin to Austin, TX for the Lonestar RubyConf. Along with Adam Bair, we’re giving a 6-hour mid-level training session on refactoring Rails apps. We will be talking about how to effectively rescue horrid codebases, prevent your codebase from turning into a monster and performance issues — we’re quite excited.

While we’re sad to leave Berlin so quickly — we got the chance to checkout some excellent street food in the city. Next time you’re in Berlin, give yourself a break for one night from expensive restaurants and indulge in Doner Kababs and Bratwurst (usually found with a few blocks of your hotel). Highly recommended. We also saw some yellow watermelon, but that’s not much of a story.

Michael will be here in Berlin till the end of the conference on Thursday — please come say hello if you can at either conference!