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
D135-136
9:00am
Announcements
Room: Portland Ballroom
TBC
Room: Portland Ballroom
TBC
8:00am
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
PM Break
Room: Exhibit Hall E
Room: Exhibit Hall E
10:45am–11:35am
(50m)
General
Optimizing Rails
Michael Koziarski
(Koziarski Software Limited)
Optimising a framework is a very different job than optimising your
rails application. You can't just 'throw memcache in front of it' or
disable features. The benchmarks you choose will also drastically
affect your results, potentially leading to pointless optimisations
that don't help real users.
11:45am–12:35pm
(50m)
General
Scaling Rails
Blaine Cook
(Independent) et al
A diverse panel of experts offer their perspectives on scaling Rails apps in the real world and how the choices we make (or don't make) as developers affect our application's scalability.
1:50pm–2:40pm
(50m)
General
Build Your Own Distributed, Self-Configuring Rails Cluster
Dave Fayram
(Powerset, Inc) et al
Fuzed is a Rails server stack written in Erlang that can replace standard mongrel/reverse proxy architectures. It focuses on reliability and ease of deployment in distributed environments.
2:50pm–3:40pm
(50m)
General
Custom Nginx Modules: Accelerate Rails, HTTP Tricks
Adam Wiggins
(Heroku)
Got a Rails app that needs even more speed? Adam Wiggins of Heroku will show you how to write a custom Nginx module to bring blinding speed to critical code paths (and do HTTP tricks that can't be done with Rails and Mongrel alone), using examples from Heroku's own authentication module ngx_heroku_gate. Dust off your C compiler and prepare to push the limits of nginx, Rails, and HTTP.
4:25pm–5:15pm
(50m)
General
What To Do when Mongrel Stops Responding to Your Requests and Ruby Doesn't Want to Tell You About It
Philippe Hanrigou
(ThoughtWorks)
Building, deploying, and maintaining large-scale Ruby on Rails applications involves overcoming a variety of vexing problems that prove difficult to investigate using just the traditional Ruby stack. This session features field-tested tools and techniques that can used to in these situations, focusing on techniques for DTrace, strace, gdb, lsof and XRay.
10:45am–11:35am
(50m)
General
Using Git to Manage and Deploy Rails Apps
Scott Chacon
(Reactrix, Inc.)
Git is a fast, efficient and distributed source code management system. This talk will demonstrate how Git works, how to use it to manage a Rails project and demonstrate Capistrano's new Git SCM module.
11:45am–12:35pm
(50m)
General
Advanced RESTful Rails
Ben Scofield
(Viget Labs)
Designing RESTful systems in Rails carries many benefits. It is not a problem-free approach, however; there are accessibility issues with the standard conventions, and some functions are more difficult to map to resources than others. In this session, we'll look at solutions for these (and other) problems that arise when you take REST beyond the standard examples.
1:50pm–2:40pm
(50m)
General
Fast, Sexy, and Svelte: Our Kind of Rails Testing
Dan Manges
(ThoughtWorks) et al
Moderate to massively parallelized tests leveraging multi-core processors. ActiveRecord tests without a database. Yaml-less test data. With leveraging several open-source tools including DeepTest, Selenium Grid, and UnitRecord, in conjunction with techniques such as Model Factory, this session will show how to move beyond the plain vanilla Rails strategy to achieve optimal application testing.
2:50pm–3:40pm
(50m)
General
Integration Testing with RSpec's Story Runner
David Chelimsky
(Articulated Man, Inc)
Learn how to write customer-facing executable user stories and scenarios with RSpec's new Story Runner.
4:25pm–5:15pm
(50m)
General
The Great Test Framework Dance-off
Josh Susser
(Pivotal Labs)
When Rails was first released, there was just one framework for testing applications and things were simple, if not always ideal. Now there are enough frameworks that choosing which one to use for your Rails application can be a difficult decision. This presentation provides a survey of the major Rails testing frameworks and compares their strengths and weaknesses in various areas.
10:45am–11:35am
(50m)
General
23 Hacks, or, How Writing a Z80 Assembler Can Make You 10x as Productive in Rails
Nathaniel Talbott
(Terralien, Inc.)
This talk is all about classic hacking: whipping up some code just because you can, because you "need" it, because you want to explore something new and shiny. We're going to talk about some specific hacks, talk about how to hack, and talk about why your boss, clients, and even your significant other should love it when you hack.
11:45am–12:35pm
(50m)
General
Asynchronous Processing with Ruby on Rails
Jonathan Dahl
(Tumblon)
Rails makes synchronous, request-driven processes a breeze. But what happens when you need to do something a little more complex or time-consuming? Enter asynchronous processing. We will investigate several ways to bring asynchronous processing to Rails, including cron, BackgrounDRb, AP4R, daemons, and Amazon SQS.
1:50pm–2:40pm
(50m)
General
Quick and easy custom servers using EventMachine
Scott Fleckenstein
(Get Satisfaction)
The EventMachine gem provides a simple reactor-style programming model that allows a ruby programmer to quickly create servers, from custom DNS servers to full blown web-servers. In this talk I will explore the possibilities of this gem (pun intended) as well as present a set of tips you can take away to make your own servers better.
2:50pm–3:40pm
(50m)
General
JRuby on Rails in Practice
Ola Bini
(ThoughtWorks)
In the beginning of 2007, ThoughtWorks decided to commit to using JRuby for several projects. This presentation will describe the results of this decision, including lessons learned and case studies.
4:25pm–5:15pm
(50m)
General
Skynet - A Ruby Map/Reduce Framework
Adam Pisoni
(Geni.com)
Skynet is an open source Ruby implementation of Google's Map/Reduce framework, created at Geni. With Skynet, one can easily convert a time-consuming serial task, such as a computationally expensive Rails migration, into a distributed program running on many computers. Learn how Geni uses Skynet to send email newsletters, build reverse indexes, invalidate caches, and run other asynchronous jobs.
10:45am–11:35am
(50m)
General
Assembling Pages Last: Edge Caching, ESI & Rails
Aaron Batalion
(Hungry Machine LLC)
When working on scaling Rails to millions of users/day with complex personalization, caching becomes essential. This talk will cover edge caching, edge side includes (ESI) in Rails, and partial page caching higher in the stack. It will also cover ESI as a fabric for assembling heterogeneous applications into a single, cacheable web experience.
11:45am–12:35pm
(50m)
General
Building a Composite Model in Active Record
Michael Latta
(TechnoMage)
The session is a nuts and bolts look at what is required to build a model that is composed of several other models and functions with Active Record. This "virtual" model can then be used like a regular model where the user wants to interact with the virtual view.
1:50pm–2:40pm
(50m)
General
Lightning Talks
Short adhoc presentations from the audience.
2:50pm–3:40pm
(50m)
General
Small Things, Loosely Joined and Written Fast
Justin Gehtland
(Relevance, Inc.)
Exploring the evolving face of application development, building applications out of highly-granular pieces, and solutions out of highly-granular applications. We'll look at the architectures, technologies and techniques that enable this trend, from Ruby metaprogramming to single-sign-on providers to robust messaging infrastructure. And we'll do it in code.
4:25pm–5:15pm
(50m)
General
Metaprogramming and Ruby Internals for Rails Programmers
Patrick Farley
(ThoughtWorks)
Rails programmers are Ruby programmers. In this session we'll cover some useful Ruby metaprogramming techniques as used in real world Rails applications and extensions. Then we'll dig deep into MRI and JRuby source to gain a nuanced understanding of the implementation details of Singletons, Mixins and the Ruby Object model.
10:45am–11:35am
(50m)
Products and Services
Working The Way You Want To: Mingle 2.0
Chad Wathington
(ThoughtWorks) et al
Join Chad and Adam to see how Mingle 2.0 can be used to run just about any project or collaboration effort under the sun. They will show you how Mingle 2.0 builds on the effective flexible platform of the first release.
11:45am–12:35pm
(50m)
Products and Services
The Other mod_rails: Easy Rails Deployment with JRuby
Nick Sieger
(Sun Microsystems, Inc.)
JRuby is becoming an increasingly popular deployment platform for Ruby on Rails applications. We'll discuss how deployment with JRuby can make your deployment and management pains go away. Topics will range from installation, gems and library compatibility, packaging, configuration, and post-deployment tuning and troubleshooting.
1:50pm–2:40pm
(50m)
Products and Services
Heroku: Never Think About Hosting or Servers Again
James Lindenbaum
(Heroku) et al
What is Heroku really? What can I build? Where is this going? What's the difference between Heroku and a cloud computing platform like Amazon? What if I want to build really serious stuff? By popular request, the Heroku team will answer your questions and talk about the future of Heroku.
2:50pm–3:40pm
(50m)
Products and Services
Streamlined Development of Dynamic, Database-Backed Web Applications
Shelby Sanders
(CodeGear) et al
SCome see how to code, test and deliver high-quality Ruby on Rails applications faster and better using CodeGear’s 3rd Rail Integrated Development Environment (IDE).
4:25pm–5:15pm
(50m)
Products and Services
Agile Development Demystified
Robert Dempsey
(Atlantic Dominion Solutions, LLC)
Many have heard the terms agile development, self-managing teams, and many others tossed out but never explained. This session will go into the details involved in agile development and scrum, and inform you on how agile can be implemented in a company to address the many challenges they face.
9:00am–9:15am
(15m)
Plenary: Announcements
To be confirmed
9:15am–10:15am
(1h)
Keynote
Keynote
Jeremy Kemper
(37signals)
Keynote
5:30pm–6:30pm
(1h)
Keynote
Keynote
Kent Beck
(Three Rivers Institute (TRI))
Keynote
8:00am–9:00am
(1h)
Break: Breakfast
10:15am–10:45am
(30m)
Break: AM Break
12:35pm–1:50pm
(1h 15m)
Break: Lunch
3:40pm–4:25pm
(45m)
Break: PM Break
7:30pm–9:30pm
(2h)
Event
Saturday 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 (Saturday), sponsored by Intridea
Refresh your body, mind, and spirit before you head into the day's sessions.
