I will be giving the MetaRails talk at RailsConf 2006. The purpose of the talk is to expose and document Ruby power techniques that are used in the Rails codebase itself. If you have always wondered how Rails does some piece of seeming magic, drop me a line or comment on this blog entry. I'll add the most interesting/challenging suggestions to the talk. My current list of topics is

• Three Easy Pieces
  • The to_proc Trick
  • Indifferent Access
  • How nil Became whiny
• How'd They Do That?
  • How Does Rails Guess Names of Things?
  • Where do ActiveRecord Accessor Come From?
  • How Do Variables Get From Controllers To Views?
  • How Do Classes Get Reloaded During Development?
• Deep Magic
  • How Transactions and Versioning Work
  • How breakpoint Works
• Following Their Example
  • Writing Your Own Validations
  • Generating Tests
  • Creating Non-ActiveRecord Models
  • Creating an Internal DSL