RailsConf 2009 Schedule Grid
Below are the confirmed and scheduled talks at RailsConf 2009 (schedule subject to change).
Customize Your Own Schedule
Create your own schedule using the personal scheduler function. Mark the tutorials, sessions, keynotes, and events you want to attend by clicking on the calendar icon next ![[calendar icon]](/images/personal-schedule-icon.png){kind=icon}
to each listing. Then click on "personal schedule" below and get your own customized schedule generated.
Ballroom A
Ballroom B
Pavilion 2 - 3
Pavilion 9 - 10
Pavilion 1
Pavilion 4
9:00am
Welcome and Announcements
Room: Ballroom A-B
TBC
Room: Ballroom A-B
TBC
Room: Ballroom A-B
Rails 3 and the Real Secret to High Productivity David Heinemeier Hansson (37signals)
10:15am
Morning Break
Room: Conrad Room - Exhibit Hall
Room: Conrad Room - Exhibit Hall
12:35pm
Lunch
Room: Conrad Room - Exhibit Hall
Room: Conrad Room - Exhibit Hall
3:40pm
Afternoon Break
Room: Conrad Room - Exhibit Hall
Room: Conrad Room - Exhibit Hall
8:00am
Breakfast - Sponsored by Blue Box Group, LLC
Room: Barron Room
Room: Barron Room
10:45am-11:35am (50m)
General
The GitHub Panel
Chris Wanstrath (GitHub)
et al
The four full time GitHub employees talk about open source, community, building a business, and the future of social coding.
11:45am-12:35pm (50m)
General
In Praise of Non-Fixtured Data
Kevin Barnes (OG Consulting)
This talk explores why fixtures are mostly bad, what can be done to “fix” the unmanageable miscreant that fixtures have evolved into, and cross-examines the new breed of data generators.
1:50pm-2:40pm (50m)
General
The Future of Deployment: A Killer Panel
Marc-André Cournoyer (Sauté Inc.)
et al
The way we deploy ruby apps is changing. This is a a rare opportunity to discuss issues and ideas in real time, directly with the key people from each part of the stack, all in one room.
This is truly a killer line-up: Marc-André Cournoyer (Thin), Christian Neukirchen (Rack), Ryan Tomayko (Rack::Cache, Sinatra), Blake Mizerany (Sinatra), Adam Wiggins and James Lindenbaum (Heroku)
2:50pm-3:40pm (50m)
General
I Rock, I Suck, I am - Jumpstart Your Journey to Agile
Davis W. Frank (Pivotal Labs)
What's next after reading 'Extreme Programming Explained'? Are you suddenly now an Agile Developer? Likely not - you don't become Agile overnight. It's more of a journey to change how you think and work. Learn by example with tips and tricks from someone who's made that journey and is happier and more productive because of it.
4:25pm-5:15pm (50m)
General
Blood, Sweat and Rails
Obie Fernandez (InfoQ)
Obie reveals secrets of survival in the Rails consultancy and contracting business, based on his real-life experience as founder and CEO of Hashrocket.
10:45am-11:35am (50m)
General
Don't Mock Yourself Out
David Chelimsky (DRW Trading)
Used appropriately, mock objects are a powerful design tool that can lead to highly maintainable applications. Used in the wrong context, they can lead to painfully brittle test suites. Attendees will leave this session with more insight into mock objects, and a better handle on when it makes sense to use them.
11:45am-12:35pm (50m)
General
Discussion Panel: Women In Rails
Desi McAdam (Hashrocket Inc and DevChix Inc)
et al
Meet some of the women from the Rails community. Hear about their
experiences and what they have to say about how to bring more female
programmers into our already amazing community, as well as how to get
them more involved and active in it once they're here.
1:50pm-2:40pm (50m)
General
JavaScript Testing in Rails: Fast, Headless, In-Browser. Pick Any Three.
Larry Karnowski (Relevance, Inc.)
et al
Learn how to enjoy the benefits of test-driven development beyond just your Ruby on Rails code; JavaScript is code too, and it deserves tests! With the help of some handy plugins, Rails lets you test your unobtrusive JavaScript using tools such as Screw.Unit and Smoke. The tools and approach are library-agnostic; they work well with jQuery, Prototype, and others.
2:50pm-3:40pm (50m)
General
Below and Beneath TDD: Test Last Development and Other Real-World Test Patterns
Noel Rappin (Obtiva)
This talk explores what makes Test Driven Development really work by showing what happens where the process breaks down, focusing on rapid feedback as the key to asuccessful test-driven process. It also creates a vocabulary for talking about malformed test processes.
4:25pm-5:15pm (50m)
General
Quality Code with Cucumber
Aslak Hellesøy (Bekk Consulting AS)
Cucumber is a novel tool for Behaviour Driven Development. While early BDD tools like RSpec and Shoulda are geared towards programmers, classes and objects, Cucumber nicely fills the communication gap between customers, programmers and testers. This session will change how you approach requirements and testing of Rails applications.
10:45am-11:35am (50m)
General
The Gilt Effect: Handling 1000 Shopping Cart Updates per second in Rails
Scott Penberthy (Gilt Groupe)
et al
Gilt Groupe is a fascinating e-commerce business, where luxury items are sold at a discount in "flash" sales that mimic the New York sample sale experience. In this model, passionate buyers rush to grab items in a time-sensitive shopping cart, choose what they want, and check out within seconds. We discuss how to handle flash-floods of shopping cart updates via sharding in Rails.
11:45am-12:35pm (50m)
General
PWN Your Infrastructure: Behind Call of Duty: World at War
Jason LaPorte (Agora Games)
Agora Games has spent a significant amount of time developing the virtualized infrastructure behind Call of Duty: World at War, centering around a Rails stack that tracks the statistics for millions of players. In this talk, we'll describe how we built this architecture, how it varies from a more traditional Rails infrastructure, and the lessons we've learned doing so.
1:50pm-2:40pm (50m)
General
Writing Modular Applications
Jim Weirich (EdgeCase LLC)
Many words of programming wisdom have been written to promote the idea of low coupling between modules. "Prefer delegation over inheritance", "The Law of Demeter" are examples of these words of advice. To understand these issues, we will look at the concept of "connascence" how it applies to creating modular Ruby programs.
2:50pm-3:40pm (50m)
General
Smacking Git Around - Advanced Git Tricks
Scott Chacon (GitHub)
Much of the Ruby and Rails community is now using Git, but there are a number of fun things that are a bit more difficult to get the hang of that are incredibly helpful to know when using Git. This session will go over some advanced Git usage for the casual or intermediate Git user.
4:25pm-5:15pm (50m)
General
Guitar Hero®: Behind the Music
David Czarnecki (Agora Games)
et al
The Guitar Hero® community website (http://community.guitarhero.com) is one of the largest production RoR sites on the Internet with 600,000+ registered users. We will cover the process, programming, and infrastructure for the Guitar Hero® community site. You'll see how we've been able to integrate data from three largely different Guitar Hero® titles in a consumable fashion on the web.
10:45am-11:35am (50m)
General
The Even-Darker Art of Rails Engines
James Adam (Free Range)
A no-nonsense guide to making the most of the newly-integrated "engines" functionality in Rails 2.3, from the guy who wrote the engines plugin itself.
11:45am-12:35pm (50m)
General
UI Fundamentals for Programmers
Ryan Singer (37signals)
Ryan will explain the key concepts you should understand to design and implement UI for your apps. He'll cover screen-level details like language and visual techniques as well as implementation issues like modeling, markup, and view code.
1:50pm-2:40pm (50m)
General
Building a Mini-Google: High-Performance Computing in Ruby
Ilya Grigorik (igvita.com)
Let's build a mini-Google and compute the PageRank score for a 1-million page web – that's a non-trivial challenge! High performance computing may not be Ruby's strength, but we will investigate the available gems, tools, and algorithms which make this a tractable problem (spoiler: it's possible).
2:50pm-3:40pm (50m)
General
JRuby: State of the Art
Charles Nutter (Engine Yard, Inc)
et al
Since last year, JRuby usage has grown tremendously. We've also released more than a dozen releases, fixed hundreds of bugs, and committed thousands of revisions. In this session we'll update you on JRuby performance in real applications, show you what people are using it for like GUIs and games, and demonstrate how JRuby is improving the Ruby and Rails worlds.
4:25pm-5:15pm (50m)
General
Scaling Rails
Ninh Bui (Phusion)
et al
5 years after the initial release of Ruby on Rails, multiple large and
successful websites are powered by this innovative and still relatively
young framework. But word is still on the street that Ruby on Rails does
not scale. Is this true?
10:45am-11:35am (50m)
General
Crate: Packaging Standalone Ruby Applications
Jeremy Hinegardner (Collective Intellect)
Sometimes the best solution is a standalone application that you can give to a client or customer to just drop on a machine and run. This talk will cover the Crate project and how it may be used to package your application, be it commandline, server, or web application.
11:45am-12:35pm (50m)
General
Rails Is from Mars, Ruby Is from Venus
Rein Henrichs (PHPFog)
How Learning Ruby Can Make You a Happier Rails Developer. Basic Ruby practices and idioms that will put the fun back in your relationship!
1:50pm-2:40pm (50m)
Products and Services
Develop with pleasure, Deploy with Fun: GlassFish and NetBeans for a better Rails experience
Arun Gupta (Sun Microsystems)
This session provides all the details on how GlassFish, and NetBeans provide a fun and robust development, deployment, and management platform for Rails applications – without pain. It talks about performance tuning tips, scalability guide, capistrano recipes, monitoring guidelines and much more - all without using Java code.
2:50pm-3:40pm (50m)
General
Gov 2.0: Transparency, Collaboration, and Participation in Practice
Daniel Lathrop (The Dallas Morning News)
et al
This panel will present views on how to improve civic life, protect democracy and hold politicians accountable using Web 2.0 technology. The panelists will lay out the massive need for programmers to deploy their skills in reimagining government in a way that promotes transparency, collaboration and public participation.
9:00am-5:15pm (8h 15m)
Event
Caboose Conf
CabooseConf is the free, hacker-focused part of RailsConf. Skilled Rails coders from all over the world will meet in one room to network, hack and work on their rails projects.
9:00am-9:15am (15m)
Plenary: Welcome and Announcements
To be confirmed
9:15am-10:15am (1h)
Keynote
Rails 3 and the Real Secret to High Productivity
David Heinemeier Hansson (37signals)
Keynote by David Heinemeier Hansson.
5:45pm-6:15pm (30m)
Event
Ruby Heroes Award Ceremony
Gregg Pollack (Envy Labs)
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.
6:15pm-7:15pm (1h)
Keynote
Keynote
Timothy Ferriss (The 4-hour Workweek)
Keynote by Tim Ferriss, author of the Four Hour Work-Week.
10:15am-10:45am (30m)
Break: Morning Break
12:35pm-1:50pm (1h 15m)
Break: Lunch
3:40pm-4:25pm (45m)
Break: Afternoon Break
8:00am-9:00am (1h)
Break: Breakfast - Sponsored by Blue Box Group, LLC
