Austin on Rails, May 24, 2011

I drop in on the Austin on Rails community occasionally to get a taste of what's coming to .Net in a few years. Eighty people crammed into a stuffy room to catch the latest in Rails technology.
Matt Thompson gave an overview of CoffeeScript, a semantically more pleasant version of JavaScript that gets translated into real JavaScript.
Adam Michela, aka soopa, presented Sass, Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets, a layer of abstraction above css which get translated into real css files.
The pairing of the technologies was a nice touch by Damon Clinkscales since both will be in the next version of Rails and both are essentially the same thing - a more human language that gets translated down to a tried and true web component.