Dave Thomas officially kicked off RailsConf Europe 2007 in Berlin with his keynote; The Art in Rails. He was fast to point out the fact that he, during the first ever RailsConf in Chicago last year, made major mistake talking about Rails itself, and that he hadn’t done that at a RailsConf since then.

Dave Thomas went on to reinforce a point he, and many others, has made before; that software engineering is like art, and that the programmer is like a poet. Like a poet, a programmer can suffer from a writers block, and the best way to get out of that is to use prototyping. He pointed out exploratory testing as his favorite way of doing prototyping; a way of realizing prototypes through unit tests and mock objects.

His two other major points about the programmer as a poet was that you have to know when to stop, and that you must satisfy the customer. For the former, he stressed modularization and iterations as perfect ways for breaking up the development process into fixed pieces of functionality, and into a fixed amount of time.

For the latter, Dave Thomas explained the difference between taking a picture and making a portrait for artists. Painters rarely just paint a person reflecting the reality exactly as it is; they try to look deeper into that person and let his or hers personality into the painting – this process transforms the painting from merely a picture to an actual portrait.

The same thing goes customers of software projects. “We all need to get into the habit of not listing to our clients” Dave Thomas said, meaning that we need to dig out the customer’s real needs by looking beyond the surface and always ask why, why, why?

Finally the notorious author and speaker made the point that there is art in engineering, ad engineering in art. Ruby is the paint and Rails is the canvas. Dave Thomas urged everyone: “Treat your next project as if it was a work of art”:

• Be an Artist
• Create Something Great
• Create Something Beautiful

You can download my full notes from the keynote here.