"The Rails Optimization session was great. It solidifies my long held belief that if you're going to have an optimization talk, try and get a German to do it. There's something about benchmarking that begs to be explained in a German accent. Stefan Kaes runs http://railsexpress.de, and is clearly into benchmarking and streamlining software. I have three pages of notes from his talk. Stefan was very critical (in a good way) of Rails, and is clearly committed to making big performance improvements."
Yep, this sounds like a German developer :)