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
8:00am
Breakfast
Room: Exhibit Hall E
Room: Exhibit Hall E
12:35pm
Lunch
Room: Exhibit Hall E
Room: Exhibit Hall E
D138-139
Room: Portland Ballroom
Rails Core Panel David Heinemeier Hansson (37signals), Jeremy Kemper (37signals), Michael Koziarski (Koziarski Software Limited), Rick Olson (GitHub)
10:15am
AM Break
Room: Portland Ballroom Lobby
Room: Portland Ballroom Lobby
3:35pm
Closing Reception
Room: Portland Ballroom Lobby
Room: Portland Ballroom Lobby
9:00am-10:00am (1h)
General
mod_rails: Easy and Robust Deployment of Your Ruby on Rails Applications on Apache Webservers
Hongli Lai (Phusion)
et al
Phusion Passenger (a.k.a. mod_rails) enables people to deploy their Ruby on Rails applications in an upload-and-go manner, very reminiscent of the PHP way of deploying, while retaining stability/robustness and performance.
10:45am-11:35am (50m)
General
Waxing Ballroom Floors on the Titanic (and Other Less Seaworthy Vessels)
Rick Bradley (OG Consulting)
et al
As veterans of maybe the largest enterprisey Rails project ever written, the panelists have written, tested, re-tested, and rewritten more legacy and new-legacy code than your mom has baked nasty green-pepper-with-ketchup-and-saltines meatloaf. Now tackling Ruby and Rails projects as a consulting team, they share their "insights" on software and politics with the old guard, startups, and now you.
11:45am-12:35pm (50m)
General
Everyday DTrace on OSX: A Guide to Using DTrace for Your Full Application Stack
Scott Barron (EdgeCase)
et al
Have you ever wanted to know why a part of your application is slow? How about how long that query takes? Wouldn't it be nice if you could get this type of information for ruby, rails, and the database server in one place? You can now with DTrace on OSX 10.5.
We'll show you how to best use this tool-chain to debug, profile, and gather more information about your application.
1:50pm-2:40pm (50m)
General
Building an App in 48 Hours - A Rails Rumble Case Study
Josh Owens (Four Bean Soup)
et al
So you want to build a Rails app quickly? Competitors in the Rails Rumble had 48 hours to design, develop, and deploy a complete application. We’ll take you through the development processes of the winning four-man Tasty Planner team, and compare it with those of the one-man Your Pet Records team. We’ll discuss techniques, short-cuts, helpers, and Rails plugins that helped speed development.
9:00am-10:00am (1h)
General
The Worst Rails Code You've Ever Seen (And How Not to Write It Yourself)
Obie Fernandez (InfoQ)
Most Rails conference talks, programming blogs and reference books try
to teach you the "right way" to code your applications. The thing is,
the right way to code an application is very dependent on the context
in which you are coding it.
Unfortunately, most of us learn those things via cold, hard
experience.
10:45am-11:35am (50m)
General
Scaling Ruby from the Inside Out
Ezra Zygmuntowicz (EngineYard)
This is a talk about what it takes to *really* scale Ruby applications. We will not only examine all the aspects of hardware and web server configurations, we will also look at scaling the ruby interpreter itself. Including performance quirks of MRI and how Rubinius is set to fix a lot of these problems.
11:45am-12:35pm (50m)
General
Genomes on Rails
Matt Wood (Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute)
The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute played a central role in sequencing the human genome. Learn how we're using Ruby and Rails to quickly build and deploy the next generation of genomic sequencing platforms: high throughput, scalable, multi-petabyte. Twitter have it easy.
1:50pm-2:40pm (50m)
General
Advanced Active Record Techniques: Best Practice Refactoring
Chad Pytel (thoughtbot, inc.)
This talk will cover several of the more advanced Active Record features by presenting code samples and walking through a best practice refactoring of that code, using the tools given to us by Active Record ('the Rails way'). Some of the topics that these refactoring examples will touch on include Callbacks and Observers, Complex data models, Validations, and other tips, tricks, and gotchas.
9:00am-10:00am (1h)
General
CS Nerds Anonymous
Evan Phoenix (Engine Yard)
Come and chat with Evan Phoenix and other CS nerds
We'll discuss Ruby, C++, whereever the conversation takes us.
10:45am-11:35am (50m)
General
De-Railing: Smashing the Rails Stack
Aaron Bedra (Relevance, Inc.)
Security is often overlooked when developing software. Take a look at the little demons that can haunt your application with security expert Aaron Bedra. He will show you not only tips and tricks to secure your Rails code, but guide you through the entire stack and help you make safe decisions as to how to maintain / run it.
11:45am-12:35pm (50m)
General
Oh the Fail I've Known
Adam Keys (Gowalla)
The best way to learn is by falling down. Unfortunately, some things you can only learn by falling down. Based on real world failure, find which parts of Rails sound good at first, but can get tiring once you use them a lot. Discover how to better interact with customers and teammates. Find out how to learn more, faster. All this without actually embarrassing yourself.
1:50pm-2:40pm (50m)
General
Open Discussion with JRuby Developers and Users
Open Discussion with JRuby Developers and Users
9:00am-10:00am (1h)
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.
10:45am-11:35am (50m)
General
Advanced Mongrel: Handlers and Plugins
James Lindenbaum (Heroku)
Mongrel is a pure-Ruby webserver, so why aren't you hacking it? Learn how to tailor Mongrel specifically for your app with custom Mongrel handlers and GemPlugins. Extend mongrel_rails, run filters on static assets, or parallelize high-volume actions - all with direct access to your underlying Rails app. Get hands-on with well known Mongrel add-ons, plus app-specific examples from Heroku's code.
11:45am-12:35pm (50m)
General
Lightning Talks
Short adhoc presentations from the audience.
1:50pm-2:40pm (50m)
General
ActiveRecord Associations and the Proxy Pattern
Nick Kallen (Pivotal Labs)
Ever wondered how has_many, belongs_to, etc. really work? The secret sauce is the Proxy pattern, whereby one object acts on behalf of another, intercepting and transforming messages. In this tutorial, you will learn advanced features of ActiveRecord associations, how to monkey-patch these associations to do your bidding, and how and when to implement the Proxy pattern in your own metaprograms.
9:00am-10:00am (1h)
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.
10:45am-11:35am (50m)
Products and Services
Dispelling the Myths About Rails Performance
Lewis Cirne (New Relic, Inc.)
You've heard all the myths and misinformation from the pundits: "Rails Can't Scale." "Rails Can't Perform." "Rails is ok for prototyping, but not for real websites." The truth is that rails can perform and it can scale exceptionally well - but only if you have a proper understanding of how your application behaves, and you apply good design principles when building and tuning your site.
11:45am-12:35pm (50m)
Products and Services
Payments on Rails
Emil Marceta (E-Xact Transactions)
E-xact's Payment on Rails suite allows for simple integration with existing Rails and other platforms. Using these services (ActiveMerchant/E-xact provider, Payment Forms Plugin, Authorize.NET, InternetSecure, REST, SOAP) allows developers to integrate payment processing easily, stay PCI/DSS compliant, and focus on the core of their applications rather than manage payments.
1:50pm-2:40pm (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.
8:00am-9:00am (1h)
Break: Breakfast
12:35pm-1:50pm (1h 15m)
Break: Lunch
9:00am-10:00am (1h)
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.
10:45am-11:35am (50m)
Products and Services
Building Applications Using the Ruby Enterprise Stack (RubyES)
Denis Lussier (EnterpriseDB)
The Ruby Enterprise Stack (RubyES) from EnterpriseDB is a complete package to start developing Enterprise class web application. In this session, the requirements and challenges of an Enterprise web application will be discussed and how RubyES can elevate those challenges.
11:45am-12:35pm (50m)
Products and Services
One Year of Scaling Rails on Amazon EC2
Thorsten von Eicken (RightScale, Inc)
Learn from the experience in deploying a dozen different complex web services on Amazon EC2 and how different companies leverage the power and flexibility of EC2, including scaling to thousands of servers to survive a facebook onslaught. This talk will discuss recently introduced EC2 features, how to use them, and how to put everything together into a scalable architecture.
1:50pm-2:40pm (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.
2:45pm-3:35pm (50m)
Keynote
Rails Core Panel
David Heinemeier Hansson (37signals)
et al
Q&A with the core developers of Rails. Your questions; their answers.
7:00am-7:45am (45m)
Event
Yoga on Rails (Sunday), sponsored by Intridea
Programmers do a lot of sitting, so come refresh your body, mind, and spirit before you head into the day's sessions.
10:15am-10:45am (30m)
Break: AM Break
3:35pm-4:15pm (40m)
Break: Closing Reception
