Presentations
Paolo Negri (autoscout24.de)
Presentation:
%w(map reduce)_first - A Tale About Rabbits, Latency, and Slim Crontabs Presentation
[PDF]
Discover how is possible to use parallel execution to batch process large amount of data, learn how to use queues to distribute workload and coordinate processes, increase the throughput on system with high latency. Have fun with EventMachine, AMQP, RabbitMQ and get rid of that every 5mins cronjob
Blake Mizerany (Heroku)
Sinatra is Ruby's most powerful and agile micro-framework. This small
package packs a huge punch. Learn why you need this tool on your belt
and how to use it properly.
Robert Dempsey (Atlantic Dominion Solutions)
Presentation:
external link
Many come to RailsConf without being in the Rails world for very long, and are looking for a simple introduction to get started. Robert Dempsey will take you through the A-Z introduction to Rails, from MVC to what's where in a Rails app.
Moderated by: Mike Gaffney & Kenny Ortmann
Come discuss and learn about the Active Scaffold library with Mike Gaffney (mr.gaffo) and Kenny Ortmann (yairgo), two core contributors.
Moderated by: Matt Wood
A very special evening of science, technology, Ruby and Rails: activeresearch.org.
Alexander Dymo (Pluron, Inc.)
You know Rails 2.x is fast, but your application is still slow. This session goes beyond the basics and gets into advanced areas such as optimizing complex has_many/belongs_to relationships, template rendering, browser performance, database use. The session covers performance-oriented development processes and tools. Special topic: optimizing for deployment on dedicated, VPS and shared hosting.
Jeff Dean (Pivotal Labs)
Erector is a pure ruby Builder-like view framework that you can use instead of ERB, inspired by Markaby. In Erector all views are objects, not template files, which allows the full power of object-oriented programming (inheritance, modular decomposition, encapsulation) in views. Among other benefits, Erector allows for inherited layouts and auto-closing tags.
Moderated by: Justin Hogeterp
Open discussion on Agile development with Rails.
Share your stories about:
- Agile adoption and the evolution of your team
- Challenges and benefits of Agile development with Rails
- Everyday best practices
- Software tools and resources that support Agile processes
Moderated by: Todd Sedano
With Agile methods, we give the developer more control over the project. A key component of feature prioritization is estimation. In this BoF we'll review Agile Estimation techniques and discuss issues that attendees are currently facing.
Jon Crosby (Engine Yard)
The ability to release early and often becomes more important as your product scales. With Engine Yard Flex, we'll demonstrate creating 'One Button' deployments that scale. We'll demonstrate building a high-volume Rails cluster and show how easy it is to create a 'Clone of Production' to test at scale.
Video
Moderated by: Scott Patten
Learn how to make your apps faster, more scalable, bullet-proof and just plain cooler with Scott Patten, author of The S3 Cookbook. Scott Patten will get you using S3, and give a quick tour of S3. We'll talk about S3 and web apps: serving data, backups, authenticated downloads and whatever other crazy things you are using it for. We'll end with a discussion of S3 tips, tricks and pitfalls.
Ben Scofield (Viget Labs)
The benefits of Rack support in Rails have become increasingly obvious; Rails Metal and integrating multiple Rack applications have made possible architectures that were impractical before, and some long-held opinions are ripe for change. In this session, we'll see how to set up this integration and explore real examples of how it can be used—including the rehabilitation of page caching.
Michael Koziarski (Koziarski Software Limited)
Sometimes as developers it can be a little too easy to lose sight of
the big picture sometimes, we can get carried away with following the
conventional wisdom without thinking about why that wisdom became
conventional. Several great ideas and techniques can become huge
time-sinks or distractions if we're not careful.
Ilya Grigorik (AideRSS Inc.)
A high-performance proxy server is less than a hundred lines of Ruby code and it is an indispensable tool for anyone who knows how to use it. In this talk we'll dissect three real-world examples: live A/B performance testing, extending functionality of existing applications, and real-time traffic analysis and performance monitoring. We'll implement each example using Ruby EventMachine framework.
Marty Andrews (Cogent Consulting Pty Ltd)
Automated code quality tools are just starting to become popular in the Ruby and Rails world, even though they've been around a long time in the Java and .NET communities. Learn what the tools are, and how to use them to improve the consistency, testability and overall quality of your Ruby and Rails applications.
Noel Rappin (Obtiva)
Presentation:
Below and Beneath TDD_ Test Last Development and Other Real-World Test Patterns Presentation
[PDF]
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.
Obie Fernandez (Hashrocket)
Obie reveals secrets of survival in the Rails consultancy and contracting business, based on his real-life experience as founder and CEO of Hashrocket.
Has the corporate gig or client work sucked all the fun out of coding? Looking to build your freelancing portfolio? Find a cause you care about build something! Micro apps can have a big impact and build your career in the process. We'll share tips we learned in building TweetCongress.org, an effort to promote government transparency.
Ilya Grigorik (AideRSS Inc.)
Presentations:
Building a Mini-Google_ High-Performance Computing in Ruby Presentation
[PPTX],
Building a Mini-Google_ High-Performance Computing in Ruby Presentation 1 [PDF]
Building a Mini-Google_ High-Performance Computing in Ruby Presentation 1 [PDF]
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).
Ed Laczynski (Zype),
Nathaniel Bibler (Rocket Jump Industries)
A team of Rails developers, designers, and an enterprising media and licensing company embarked on a challenge: How to put every video in the 4Kids Entertainment content library online, streaming free to millions of kids (and children-at-heart). This session will review the challenges and approach of the development of the www.4kidstv.com website, that streams over 1 million videos per month.
Mike Subelsky (OtherInbox)
Presentations:
external link,
Building Next Generation Web Apps with Rails and SproutCore Presentation [PDF]
Paper: external link
Building Next Generation Web Apps with Rails and SproutCore Presentation [PDF]
Paper: external link
Future web apps will be built on the client-server model: faster, more fluid, desktop-like apps that cannot be fully realized with traditional Rails techniques for building browser views. But Rails is the perfect server framework to integrate with SproutCore, an exciting new framework for building web browser clients. Students will build a full-fledged client-server app using both frameworks.
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.
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.
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.
Jay Phillips (Codemecca LLC)
Every participant in this tutorial will get to use their own cell phone to call into code running on their laptop! Jay Phillips will be interactively showing how to build voice-enabled web applications using the open-source Adhearsion telephony development framework. All you need is Ruby and RubyGems pre-installed.
Scott Raymond (Alamofire, Inc.)
The Facebook game PackRat uses Ruby to handle over 12 million
page views a day. This session will hightlite some tricks and
techniques used to build and grow a profitable app. Topics include:
the promise and perils of relying on AWS, how scaling the database
tier nearly killed us, advanced caching strategies, and when The Big
Rewrite might actually be a good idea.
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.
Moderated by: Matt Conway
Cloud computing is all the rage these days, learn one method for deploying your rails apps into the cloud using capistrano and rubber.
Arun Gupta (Sun Microsystems)
Presentation:
Develop with pleasure, Deploy with Fun_ GlassFish and NetBeans for a better Rails experience Presentation
[PDF]
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.
Moderated by: Peter Armstrong
Peter Armstrong will be demoing the MIT-licensed RestfulX framework (http://restfulx.github.com/), which brings the design principles and productivity of Rails to Adobe Flex and AIR development and makes integration with RESTful Web Services as simple as possible. If you want to use Ruby on Rails, Merb, Sinatra, CouchDB or Google App Engine with Adobe Flex or AIR, this BoF is for you.
Desi McAdam (Hashrocket Inc and DevChix Inc),
Sarah Mei (LookSmart),
Lori Olson (Dragon Sharp Consulting)
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.
Video
David Chelimsky (Articulated Man, Inc)
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.
Jon Dahl (Phronos)
Music and software a lot in common. We will look at five patterns from the world of music that are relevant to programming, and talk about how music history and theory can help us become better software developers.
Moderated by: Bill Kayser
What would you like to see in future versions of RPM? Tell us your ideas and let New Relic share some of theirs with you.
Moderated by: Chris Eppstein
Compass is the awesomest (OK only) Sass-based stylesheet framework.
Sass is the awesomest syntax for writing stylesheets.
Bring your laptop and your favorite project to this informal BoF session. In this lab will get you up and running with Compass and Sass. If you're already a pro, come to help out and also to pick the creator of Compass's brain about advanced techniques.
David A. Black (Ruby Central, Inc.)
An overview of important new features and changes in Ruby 1.9, including some compatibility issues to watch out for when you're migrating your 1.8 code.
Greg Borenstein (Grabb.it (http://grabb.it))
Facebook offers a seductive platform for accessing the most intimate social data of 150 million users. Up close, though, this beauty is horribly marred by some disgusting boils: proprietary markup, a disregard for standards, shifting APIs, and an insane dev environment. I'll present strategies for Facebook integration without causing your app, your process, or yourself any unsightly scarring.
Daniel Lathrop (Computational Journalism Consultant),
Eric Mill (Sunlight Foundation),
Wynn Netherland (Squeejee)
Presentation:
Gov 2_0_ Transparency, Collaboration, and Participation in Practice Presentation
[PDF]
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.
Presentations:
Guitar Hero®_ Behind the Music Presentation 1
[ZIP],
Guitar Hero®_ Behind the Music Presentation 2 [PDF]
Guitar Hero®_ Behind the Music Presentation 2 [PDF]
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.
Back by popular request, several Heroku team members will be on hand to walk you through the latest and greatest features of the Heroku platform and answer your questions.
Ryan Tomayko (Heroku)
HTTP's basic caching mechanisms have been around for almost a decade and still their advantages and limitations are still not well understood. In this talk, we provide a clear and simple explanation of how HTTP caching works, put forth a system for classifying response cacheability, and argue that HTTP caching should be a fundamental aspect of resource design.
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.
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.
Moderated by: Rob Vander Sloot
In anticipation of the new Star Trek movie that opens Thursday, May 7, this session is an open discussion of Science Fiction's influence on your life and career. Come and share your story.
Tony Hillerson (EffectiveUI)
RubyAMF is a Rails plug-in that allows easy, fast integration between Flex apps and Rails using Adobe’s open format for transferring typed data to/from Flash apps. We’ll walk through building a Flex application powered by a Rails back-end service. You’ll see how to work with translation to native objects in both directions, working with hierarchical data and more advanced configuration options.
Blythe Dunham (Spongecell)
With the influx of social networking and viral marketing web sites, SMS messaging has become an important part of many web applications. From choosing a gateway provider to parsing messages to sending bulk SMS messages, this session details how to send and receive text messages from your Rails application.
Erik Kastner (Wine Library / Meta | ateM)
Webhooks and Protocols (like Rack) are dumb. Like a socket, they work with anything that fits. We'll look at a whole class of problems that can be solved creatively with similar solutions. We will also look at some popular and successful real-world implementations.
Moderated by: Christophe Lucas
Christophe Lucas will be demonstrating solutions for internationalization globalization and localization of Ruby on Rails applications of Ruby on Rails applications following standards like I18n or L10n.
Moderated by: Jimmy Schementi
Cool usages of IronRuby, from the web server to the client, and in the browser.
Mike Subelsky (OtherInbox)
For all its hype, cloud computing really has introduced a potent new scaling mechanism for Rails apps, enabling your architecture to be as nimble and intelligent as your code itself. Yet there are hidden challenges and dangers for the would be cloud-jumper. In this case study, instead of hype, you'll hear the story of OtherInbox, a Rails app that scaled rapidly and cheaply (but not painlessly).
Larry Karnowski (Relevance, Inc.),
Jason Rudolph (Relevance, Inc.)
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.
Yehuda Katz (Engine Yard Inc.)
Coming soon.
John Woodell (Google, Inc.),
Ryan Brown (Google, Inc.)
JRuby developers can now use the Rails or Merb frameworks to deploy applications to
Google App Engine. We will provide an overview of App Engine, show few demos,
provide some insight into using DataStore.
Nick Sieger (Sun Microsystems, Inc.)
Get an introduction to the JRuby ecosystem and all it offers for Rails
development and deployment, including setup, gems, java integration,
application servers, virtual machine tuning, custom embedding, and
more.
Charles Nutter (Sun Microsystems, Inc.),
Thomas Enebo (Sun Microsystems, Inc.)
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.
Timothy Ferriss (The 4-hour Workweek)
Keynote by Tim Ferriss, author of the Four Hour Work-Week.
Video
Moderated by: Michael Gaffney
When a business is run by an application that houses all essential business logic (scm, ticketing, billing, contracting, and HR), it can't be thrown away. What started as a simple add on Rails app turned into a continuing conversion of just such a system. Come learn what strategies, development processes, and lessons learned have come from this rewrite of a 200KLOC Java app.
Presentations:
external link,
Lightning Talks Presentation [PDF],
Lightning Talks Presentation 1 [PDF]
Lightning Talks Presentation [PDF],
Lightning Talks Presentation 1 [PDF]
Short adhoc presentations from the audience.
Moderated by: Monty Williams
We've spent the last year implementing Ruby on top of GemStone's newest 64-bit VM. Has it been a Lovefest or a Deathmatch? Come to our BOF and find out.
David Bock (CodeSherpas)
Presentation:
external link
Workflow is a broad concept, and there are many different approaches to it. Our options in Ruby, especially declarative programming, make workflow applications fun to write, as well as very customizable without building huge "application engines". Come see how.
Moderated by: Ron Evans
Bring an instrument (or your voice) and let's make music!
Many Rails developers are also musicians. Whether you play jazz, rock, blues, pop, or whatever the case may be, come along and meet and play with other musical developers. If you can't bring an instrument, stop by anyway. There might be extras.
Moderated by: Gabriel Horner
Let's talk about machine tags and semantic tags. How to use them in Rails and what interesting things people are doing with them.
Moderated by: Eric Mill
President Obama has called for a new age of open and transparent government, and you can help usher it in.
Led by Sunlight Labs, this session will introduce you to open government projects by your fellow Rubyists, let you propose your own, then get out of your way and let you start hacking.
Sunlight Labs is part of the Sunlight Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to transparent government.
Moderated by: Sean Schofield
Session will be led by Sean Schofield the creator and maintainer of the Spree project. Come join us for a free form discussion about Spree and online commerce with Ruby on Rails in general. This is your chance to meet some of the people behind this project, ask questions and to suggest new features.
Matt Wood (Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute)
Cloud computing can help lift the burden of computationally heavy tasks such as encoding, indexing or scientific analysis. This talk aims to introduce architectures for processing on elastic infrastructures, and how Ruby and Rails make it super simple to work at the petabyte scale, and beyond. We'll illustrate with a real world example, building a full human genome in the cloud, live!
Moderated by: Jon "Lark" Larkowski
So maybe you're testing all the time. But, are you pairing all the time? The team from Hashrocket is, and we'd love to talk about it. Come debate the pro's and con's of pair programming. Already sold on pairing? Share your best practices with others.
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.
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.
Fernand Galiana (LiquidRail LLC)
Rails is in the house? Learn how to leverage the power of ruby and rails to create attractive home automation and energy saving solutions for your entire house.
Moderated by: Keith Bingman
Radiant has become the most popular rails CMS recently, due to its simplicity and extendibility. Come discuss building sites with Radiant and extending its functionality.
Moderated by: Yehuda Katz
Come get a technical overview of the Rails 3 work in progress with Yehuda Katz and Carl Lerche, who have been working full-time on the project for several months. Learn about the new architecture of ActionController, ActionView, and how you're expected to plug in to it.
Moderated by: Gregg Pollack
Join Rails Activists Matt Aimonetti, Ryan Bates, Gregg Pollack in a discussion of Rails Activism. If you have any ideas on how to encourage Rails adoption and improve our community we'd love to hear from you. Bring your thoughts, questions, and complaints and we'll figure out how to improve the Rails ecosystem together.
Brian Hogan (NAPCS)
Presentation:
external link
Want to use Rails but are stuck with a nasty existing database? No problem. This session will show you how we managed to defeat an ugly beast of a system. You'll come away armed with some strategies you can employ to slay even the ugliest schemas.
David Heinemeier Hansson (37signals),
Jeremy Kemper (37signals),
Michael Koziarski (Koziarski Software Limited),
Rick Olson (ENTP),
Yehuda Katz (Engine Yard Inc.),
Joshua Peek (Consultant)
Q&A with the core developers of Rails. Your questions; their answers.
Video
Obie Fernandez (Hashrocket),
David Heinemeier Hansson (37signals),
Tobias Lütke (Shopify),
Lewis Cirne (New Relic, Inc.)
Meet three CEO's who have each started a successful Rails-focused company. How did they start, what were the keys to success, what would they do differently? Whether you have started a company or are thinking about it, this will be interesting. Panel discussion and Q&A.
Neal Ford (ThoughtWorks),
Paul Gross (ThoughtWorks)
Presentation:
Rails in the Large_How We're Developing the Largest Rails Project in the World Presentation
[PDF]
While others have been debating whether Rails can scale to enterprise levels, we've been demonstrating it. This session shows how to scale Rails development to the heights.
Rein Henrichs (Hashrocket)
How Learning Ruby Can Make You a Happier Rails Developer. Basic Ruby practices and idioms that will put the fun back in your relationship!
Adam Wiggins (Heroku)
Rails 2.3 introduces a hot new feature: Rails Metal. Metal allows you to build Rack endpoints for selected URLs in your app and get a 2x - 3x performance boost.
Even better: you can use Sinatra, the microframework that everyone's talking about, from Rails Metal. Capture the speed and elegance of Sinatra from within your existing Rails app!
Matt Aimonetti (m|a agile consulting)
Rails3 is the result of the Merb and Rails merger. While the usual ActiveRecord/ERB/Prototype/Test::Unit full stack is still the default, Rails3 now let you step off of the golden path.
Learn more about alternative stack components, when and why to use them by looking at concrete examples.
Gregg Pollack (Rails Envy),
Jason Seifer (Rails Envy)
Presentations:
Rails_ A Year of Innovation Presentation
[ZIP],
Rails_ A Year of Innovation Presentation 1 [PDF]
Rails_ A Year of Innovation Presentation 1 [PDF]
In this talk the Rails Envy guys will attempt to sum up a year of Rails innovation in 45 minutes, covering 20 of the most useful, ingenious, and innovative new developments.
Ezra Zygmuntowicz (EngineYard)
In this talk we will explore the state of the art deployment options for large scale ruby web apps. Ruby web apps become ecosystems of many moving parts over time as they scale. We will outline a scalable architecture for configuring, building, maintaining and scaling the system as a cohesive whole. We will explore technologies like rabbitmq, chef, nanite and EY's new cloud hosting platform.
Gregg Pollack (Rails Envy)
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.
Moderated by: Kevin Weller
General discussion about both technical and non-technical aspects of running a Software-as-a-Service business which exposes Rails applications to the public.
Moderated by: Leah Silber
Do you run a local user group? Let's get together and talk about how we all generate interest, cover expenses, and keep people coming back week after week. Big and small cities alike, it's a challenge, and more importantly, a lot of work that we're all likely doing after hours. Let's get together to talk shop and strategize!
Edd Dumbill (O'Reilly Media, Inc. )
Presentations:
Running the Show_ Configuration Management with Chef Presentation
[PDF],
Running the Show_ Configuration Management with Chef Presentation 1 [ZIP]
Running the Show_ Configuration Management with Chef Presentation 1 [ZIP]
Few completed Rails apps are architecturally simple. As soon as you grow, you find yourself using multiple subsystems and machines to scale, creating new headaches in configuration management. Help is at hand! This tutorial introduces Chef, a modern Ruby-based open source approach to systems integration. Chef lets you manage your servers by writing code, not running commands.
Ninh Bui (Phusion),
Hongli Lai (Phusion)
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?
Moderated by: Christophe Lucas
Christophe Lucas is going to talk about time-saving solutions and workarounds to improve search using Sphinx and Thinking Sphinx.
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.
Pat Allan (Freelancing Gods)
The more complex your search queries becomes, the uglier
your SQL statements get, even with ActiveRecord's helpful magic.
Reclaim some clarity in your code by using the Sphinx search engine, a
powerful tool that lets you search across your models in fast and
complex ways.
Nick Plante (Nth Interactive),
Joe Fiorini (Within3),
Ben Scofield (Viget Labs),
Chris Saylor (Todobebé),
James Golick (GiraffeSoft Inc.)
The Rails Rumble is a 48-hour innovation competition in which teams of up to four developers embrace their environmental constraints to create a number of compelling microapps with Ruby and Rails. In this panel we'll talk to a number of Rumble participants and discover the tips, tricks, and techniques they used to successfully launch innovative web properties in an extremely short time frame.
Moderated by: Ben Scofield
The Rails community has a plethora of experienced, talented developers, who have contributed a great deal of advanced work to the ecosystem. As a group, however, we've lacked a consistent and welcoming approach for newcomers, be they programming newbies or people experienced in another technology. Let's talk about ways to fix that!
Moderated by: Noel Rappin
The last year has seen a proliferation of tools and frameworks for testing in Rails, followed by a wave of work allowing developers to use one framework's syntax in another tool. This session is for anybody who wants to navigate the confusion, advocate for their favorite testing tools, or try to determine what new tools are needed.
Jim Weirich (EdgeCase LLC),
Joe O'Brien (EdgeCase, LLC)
Everyone seems to be on the TDD/BDD bandwagon these days. We have gotten very good at the first two phases of the Red/Green/Refactor cycle. But in our push toward releasing new code and functionality, sometimes the Refactor phase gets the short end of the stick. Sadly, without refactoring, our code base can quickly become a nightmare of highly coupled, highly redundant code.
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.
Marc-André Cournoyer (Standout Jobs),
Christian Neukirchen (Rack Core Team),
Blake Mizerany (Heroku),
Ryan Tomayko (Heroku),
Adam Wiggins (Heroku),
James Lindenbaum (Heroku)
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)
Scott Penberthy (Gilt Groupe),
Michael Bryzek (Gilt Groupe),
Geir Magnusson Jr (Gilt Groupe),
Yonatan Feldman (Gilt Groupe)
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.
Chris Wanstrath (GitHub),
Tom Preston-Werner (GitHub),
PJ Hyett (GitHub),
Scott Chacon (GitHub),
Jon Maddox (Mustache, Inc.)
The four full time GitHub employees talk about open source, community, building a business, and the future of social coding.
Yehuda Katz (Engine Yard Inc.),
Carl Lerche (Engine Yard)
One of the hottest new features in Rails 3 is the ability to embed a Rails application in another Rails application. This allows the development of components that range from user authentication to a fully featured forum. In this talk, Yehuda and Carl will give an in-depth tutorial by building a CMS, creating a gem out of it, and integrating it into another app.
Moderated by: Michael Bleigh
Are you working with the Twitter API or are interested in getting started? Meet up with other Twitter developers to talk about the things you're working on and maybe learn a few new tricks. Moderated by Michael Bleigh who is giving the "Twitter on Rails" talk.
Michael Bleigh (Intridea)
Twitter is a bustling universe full of opportunities to create crazy, useful and crazy useful applications. Get a kick start to creating Twitter applications in Rails using TwitterAuth, the Twitter authentication stack for Rails.
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.
This session will cover details of our process .. setting engineering discipline dials to 11 .. including how we plan, estimate and track our projects. I will cover agile topics including story point estimation and sprint length selection. I will touch on Lean practices. And I will answer any questions regarding Agile, Scrum best practices.
Jake Scruggs (Obtiva)
Presentations:
Using metric_fu to Make Your Rails Code Better Presentation
[ZIP],
Using metric_fu to Make Your Rails Code Better Presentation 1 [PDF]
Using metric_fu to Make Your Rails Code Better Presentation 1 [PDF]
How can you make sure that your beautiful Rails code doesn't degrade over time as more people join a project and deadlines loom? Well, there are tools to measure test coverage, code complexity, churn, bad practices, duplication, and code smell. And all of these various open source projects have been mashed together in metric_fu - a Ruby gem that makes measuring the quality of your code easy.
Moderated by: Raimonds Simanovskis
In this session practical experience of using Ruby on Rails on Oracle database will be discussed - Oracle enhanced adapter for ActiveRecord, limitations of ActiveRecord on Oracle, usage of PL/SQL stored procedures, different deployment platforms etc.
Bryan Helmkamp (weplay)
Webrat, a Ruby DSL for interacting with Web applications, helps you write expressive, maintainable acceptance tests while sidestepping the issues traditionally associated with in-browser approaches like Selenium and Watir. We'll look at how you can use Webrat to develop a robust acceptance test suite to ensure your app stays working as you refactor mercilessly.
Charles Nutter (Sun Microsystems, Inc.),
Evan Phoenix (Engine Yard)
A walkthrough of how common and popular Ruby features are actually implemented, with a focus on how they work, why they behave the way they do, and why they do or do not perfom well. If you'd like to better understand What Makes Ruby Go, this is the talk for you.
Matthew Deiters (Inc.)
Rails has excellent caching strategies for the server side but did you know typically 80% of a responses time is on network communication? This will be an exploration of all the dirty details of caching your app's personal bits in the client browser. We'll look at what Rails provides and what you can additionally do to reduce response times and load on your application with little effort.
Moderated by: Tikhon Bernstam
With 60 million users and 35 billion words, Scribd is where discussions happen in 140 million characters or less. Join one of the largest Ruby/Rails sites as we talk about the limitations of Ruby, Rails and interesting ways we're using Rack Middleware and Java to scale one of the fastest growing web properties in the world.
Pat Maddox (The Science Department),
BJ Clark (AboutUs.org)
Rails has been out for a few years now. We're past the blogs, past the first couple rounds of new apps, and now have legacy systems to maintain. What strategies can we use for improving these systems? What specific challenges are there for Rails apps, and how does Ruby allow us to meet them in unique ways? We'll look at all of this and more, in "Working effectively with legacy Rails code"
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.
