Schedule
Below are the confirmed and scheduled talks at RailsConf 2008 (schedule subject to change).
Customize Your Own Schedule
Create your own RailsConf schedule using the personal scheduler function. Mark the tutorials, sessions, keynotes, and events you want to attend at RailsConf by clicking on the star next to each listing. Then click on "personal schedule" at the top of the page and get your own customized schedule generated.
Portland Ballroom 253
Portland Ballroom 252
Portland Ballroom 255
E145 - E146
10:45am
TBC
D135-136
8:00am
Continental Breakfast
Room: Exhibit Hall E
Room: Exhibit Hall E
10:15am
AM Break
Room: Exhibit Hall E
Room: Exhibit Hall E
12:35pm
Lunch
Room: Exhibit Hall E
Room: Exhibit Hall E
3:40pm
Break
Room: Exhibit Hall E
Room: Exhibit Hall E
9:00am
Announcements
Room: Portland Ballroom
TBC
Room: Portland Ballroom
TBC
Room: Portland Ballroom
Meet the Sun You Don't Know Charles Nutter (Engine Yard, Inc)
10:45am-11:35am (50m)
General
Entrepreneurs On Rails
Dan Benjamin (Rails Machine)
Many of the people working with Rails are independent developers,
doing freelance work or running small development shops. This makes
sense - Rails provides a great framework for an indy developer, making
it easy to work with with designers and other developers.
11:45am-12:35pm (50m)
General
Surviving the Big Rewrite: Moving YELLOWPAGES.COM to Rails
John Straw (YELLOWPAGES.COM)
YELLOWPAGES.COM is the 33rd-largest website in the U.S., handling
millions of searches per day. In four months, four developers turned
125,000 lines of Java into 14,000 lines of Ruby and successfully
launched a redesigned site. This session discusses the entire process,
starting with project management and ending with the technical details
of breakneck scaling.
1:50pm-2:40pm (50m)
General
Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief Modeling Systems
Jim Weirich (EdgeCase LLC)
et al
Sit in like a fly on the wall with a development team as they wrestle with the issues of data modeling versus object modeling. This is not your standard slideshow and talk, but a dialogue presented in three acts in which we explore the themes of simplicity and modularity as an application is developed. Watch the sparks fly as old-school objects modelers meet the Rails generation.
2:50pm-3:40pm (50m)
General
Flexible Scaling: How to Handle 1 Billion Pageviews
TJ Murphy (Mobian Design)
What happens when you combine the intensity and furor of gamers with the leverage of massive social networks? One slow rails app.
This tutorial will walk through the tools used, the tools built, and the code written to bring Warbook from 1 to 1 million users and sustains it at over 16 million daily pageviews.
4:25pm-5:15pm (50m)
General
Microapps for Fun and <s>profit</s>
Erik Kastner (Etsy / Meta | ateM)
Microapps are a great way to test ideas, blow off steam and vet your crazy ideas. No longer is the "one off" app the sole domain of PHP. Camping, sinatra, merb and friends let you create the next great microapp in hours and days instead of weeks and months. In this session, we'll examine a few live microapps and even code up the skeleton of one live.
8:00pm-9:00pm (1h)
Keynote
Keynote
David Heinemeier Hansson (37signals)
Keynote
10:45am-11:35am (50m)
General
IronRuby on Rails
John Lam (Microsoft)
et al
Many folks have wondered whether IronRuby would run Rails. Our goal is to make a compliant, fast implementation of Ruby 1.8.x, and an important test is running Rails. Come to this talk to see how far we've come in making this happen.
11:45am-12:35pm (50m)
General
10 Things I Hate About Web Apps
Micah Martin (8th Light, Inc.)
Web applications have changed the world. Their amazingly powerful and can be slick as snot. The technologies behind them however, leave much to be desired. Come commiserate about aspects of web apps that are painful and talk about why. Then learn how the pain can go away with an introduction to using LimeLight with Rails: the open source client side tool alluded to at RubyConf 2007.
1:50pm-2:40pm (50m)
General
CRUD Doesn't Have an 'S' in It: Managing Complex Searching in Rails
Stephen Midgley (Hutz.com)
Complex, multi-column, multi-table searches are beyond ActiveRecord's capability. This talk will explore strategies for building and maintaining complex search structures in Rails.
2:50pm-3:40pm (50m)
General
"Design Patterns" in Ruby
Neal Ford (ThoughtWorks)
Using powerful languages makes the solutions in the GoF book look hopelessly complicated. This session shows how to solve the same problems concisely, elegantly, and with far fewer lines of code using the facilities of dynamic languages.
4:25pm-5:15pm (50m)
General
Podcasting & Screencasting in Rails
Gregg Pollack (Envy Labs)
et al
A Panel discussion with Gregg Pollack (Rails Envy Podcast), Ryan Bates
(Rails Casts), Chistopher Haupt (Learning Rails), Michael Slater
(Learning Rails), and Geoffrey Grosenbach (Peepcode & Ruby on Rails
Podcast).
10:45am-11:35am (50m)
General
"Multi-core Hysteria": FUD about CRUD?
Andrea O.K. Wright (Chariot Solutions)
In a blog post called "Multi-core hysteria and the thread confusion," DHH wrote that the advancement of "multi-core technology has caused quite a few folks to pontificate that the sky is falling for Rails because we're not big on using threads." He asserts that "It isn't." In this talk I will detail specific concerns community members have brought up and evaluate them, MythBusters-style.
11:45am-12:35pm (50m)
General
Hosting and the Woes
Ezra Zygmuntowicz (EngineYard)
et al
What are the day to day issues with Rails hosting. How can they be solved, and what are the best practise methods of avoiding them. Engine Yard have extensive experience with high volume Rails applications and would like to talk about what we've learned and what our customers have learnt.
1:50pm-2:40pm (50m)
General
Facebook Development and Performance with Rails
Mike Mangino (Elevated Rails)
A brief look at how to create (and scale) a Facebook application with Rails. We'll start by creating a simple Facebook application using the facebooker rails plugin. From there, we'll see some tips to scale it up to handle millions of users.
2:50pm-3:40pm (50m)
General
The Profitable Programmer: Creating Successful Side Projects
Geoffrey Grosenbach (Ruby on Rails Podcast)
et al
Many developers have the skills to implement web applications, but often lack the business skills to make them profitable. Hear from five developers who have transitioned from full-time consulting to building financially profitable Rails-based web applications.
4:25pm-5:15pm (50m)
General
The Launch: Dos and Don'ts of Real Life Deploys
Chris Wanstrath (Err Free)
There's more to launching an app than "cap deploy" -- the process is as much a psychological challenge as a technical one. So, what does it take to launch an app you can depend on and be proud of? With a handful of production launches under his belt, Chris will talk about the big picture and little details of bringing your site to life.
10:45am-11:35am (50m)
Session
To be confirmed
11:45am-12:35pm (50m)
General
Lightning Talks
Short adhoc presentations from the audience.
1:50pm-2:40pm (50m)
General
Faster, Better, ORM with DataMapper
Yehuda Katz (Strobe, Inc.)
This session will cover using the DataMapper ORM with Ruby on Rails, and go in-depth into its code. It will focus on integration with Ruby on Rails and provide an advanced-level overview of the codebase and design philosophy.
2:50pm-3:40pm (50m)
General
Remote Pair Programming: Impossible or So Possible?
Michael Buffington (Grasshopper Labs)
et al
Join Michael Buffington and Joe O'Brien as they conduct an open conversation about what they consider to be the ideal situation: productive and exciting coding sessions while remaining as far away from other developers as possible. We'll cover what technologies and techniques work (or not), and why Michael thinks that the Xbox 360 is an unlikely, but essential, tool for effective remote pairing.
4:25pm-5:15pm (50m)
General
UI Design on Rails
Ryan Singer (37signals)
What's the UI process at 37signals like with respect to Rails? Ryan talks about how designers can move beyond HTML/CSS to take responsibility for views, helpers, and more.
10:45am-11:35am (50m)
Products and Services
Rails Powered by GlassFish and jMaki
Craig McClanahan (Sun Microsystems, Inc.)
JRuby on Rails brings the agility of Rails to Java technology-based servers and applications, from the simplest web applications to the largest enterprise deployments. In this session, the developers will learn why GlassFish provides an easy-to-use, robust development and deployment platform for JRuby-on-Rails applications than the conventional Rails model.
11:45am-12:35pm (50m)
Products and Services
Two Web Apps, Four Daemons and a Gazillion Clients
Steve Sanderson (FiveRuns)
et al
This is not a typical product pitch. FiveRuns and InfoEther developers will offer an informal, interactive panel discussion about building a new FiveRuns hosted service. Hear from Bruce Williams, Adam Keys, Rich Kilmer and others how The Big Rewrite succeeded.
1:50pm-2:40pm (50m)
Products and Services
Deploy Rails Apps Faster than Brewing Coffee
Guy Naor (Morph Labs)
Deploy your own application (or watch Guy deploy one) into a FREE Morph AppSpace. Guy will provide tips on multi-tenancy architecture and Rails features. Learn about using DB MIGRATE to initialize your database and how to use Capistrano to deploy from differently supported source code control systems.
2:50pm-3:40pm (50m)
Products and Services
Rubinius - Under the Hood and Behind the Curtain
Evan Phoenix (Engine Yard)
et al
Rubinius is a virtual machine built from the ground up to provide a robust, high-performance runtime for Ruby code. The Rubinius team is guiding the development of 20,000+ specifications that define the Ruby language.
4:25pm-5:15pm (50m)
Products and Services
MagLev: Ruby That Scales
Bob Walker (GemStone Systems, Inc.)
et al
o We're working on a new Ruby VM which is built for scale and performance from the ground up, with some features we guarantee will blow your mind. Come see how far we've gotten and weigh in on our future directions.
8:00am-9:00am (1h)
Break: Continental Breakfast
10:15am-10:45am (30m)
Break: AM Break
12:35pm-1:50pm (1h 15m)
Break: Lunch
3:40pm-4:25pm (45m)
Break
9:00am-9:15am (15m)
Plenary: Announcements
To be confirmed
9:15am-10:15am (1h)
Keynote
Keynote
Joel Spolsky (Stack Overflow / Fog Creek )
Keynote
7:30pm-7:40pm (10m)
Keynote
Meet the Sun You Don't Know
Charles Nutter (Engine Yard, Inc)
You think Sun is the Java company. Enterprise Edition. Steak and strippers. But Java's only part of the story, and the story is changing every day. In ten minutes, you'll get a whirlwind tour of a different Sun, one that gives hardware breaks to startups, open sources cornerstone software like Solaris, OpenJDK, ZFS and DTrace, and actively funds Ruby projects on and off the JVM.
7:40pm-8:00pm (20m)
Event
Ruby Heroes Award Ceremony
We'll be handing out several trophies to people we believe to be Ruby Heroes, and giving them the round of applause they deserve and might not get otherwise.
9:00pm-11:00pm (2h)
Event
Friday Birds of a Feather Sessions (BoFs)
Following the planned sessions during the day, it's time for RailsConf participants to take the floor. BoFs are informal conversations that you and other participants plan. Visit the BoF page for more details and to sign up to lead a BoF of your own.
7:00am-7:45am (45m)
Event
Yoga on Rails (Friday), sponsored by Intridea
Refresh your body, mind, and spirit before you head into the day's sessions.
