This is a single archived entry from Stefan Tilkov’s blog. For more up-to-date content, check out my author page at INNOQ, which has more information about me and also contains a list of published talks, podcasts, and articles. Or you can check out the full archive.

RailsConf Europe: Why the Lucky Stiff Keynote

Stefan Tilkov,

I was looking forward to this, so I was really pissed when it was announced that Why hadn’t been seen by anybody, including the organizers, when Jim Weirich’s talks started. Luckily, he arrived in time for his keynote … and it was just as expected: very funny, slightly weird, and full of magic. (Naturally, all of the slides were cartoon drawings). Some of the things Why talked about were unusual uses of when in conjunction with the * operator (enabling it to check for inclusion of some value in a list of ranges) and his sandbox stuff, which enables the parallel execution of several apps — he demoed it using two Rails apps — without them interfering with each other. This would enable dropping a .tar.gz of some application into your running web server and have it be mounted at a new URL (sort of like deploying a Java webapp into a servlet engine).