In his defense, his body clock did think it was 3am at the time! Great insight into the birth of Rails.

I enjoyed this. I thought it was an interesting talk, with a nice insight into early rails and the development process. I thought the delivery was good. (and great for someone jet-lagged!) I think though, the subject mater probably didn't have such a high value to people. Compared to the tutorial, this leaned more towards "Hmm, that was interesting, when is lunch?" rather than "Wow, that's useful info. How can I use this in my own code, how can I apply this to what I'm doing at work" But it was nice to see the story of Rails development and a perspective of how we got to where we are. It was also a nice background to have before Yehuda's talk on where rails is going to next.

I think one of the important messages I picked up from Marcel's talk was that David developed Rails within a relatively short time-span after coming to Ruby. He had aborted an attempt at building what evolved into Rails in php previously after recognising the shortcomings of the language as a platform for his ideas. Ruby gave him the power he needed to build Rails. While the members of the audience may not be budding DHH's we can use the power of Ruby for realising our own ideas however small if we take the time to understand the concepts Matz has harnessed in creating such a powerful language. That for me, as a raw Ruby nube and a relative novice programmer, is a strong message to take away from Marcel's talk and the conference as a whole.