Personal schedule for Mark Simoneau

Smart developers have been using Ruby on Rails to rapidly build web applications for over 5 years now. Cutting-edge projects have aged into old, moldy, legacy apps. Rails 3 and Ruby 1.9 offer performance improvements and new features that are guaranteed to take the squeak out of that old wheel and grease the tracks of new development. Read more.

Although Rails contains many web framework best practices, there are still plenty of ways to create horrible code. Fortunately, as the community has matured many new techniques have been discovered which can help keep Rails apps maintainable. In this 5 part lab we will walk through the most common of these best practices and get some hands on experience refactoring Rails. Read more.

Welcome and announcements. Read more.

Keynote by David Heinemeier Hansson. Read more.

A huge step forward in the third version of the Rails 3 framework is the modularity it provides. This modularity is the result of a long refactoring effort to make it easier to extend or modify Rails to suit our application's needs. Read more.

Jason Fried says "Work doesn't happen at work" [2], but you can work as productively as possible wherever you are (even at work). We will explore principles of productivity, as well as techniques and tools you can use. [1] 5 hours saved every work week [2] http://www.ted.com/talks/jason_fried_why_work_doesn_t_happen_at_work.html Read more.

It's not what you code, it's how you code it. In this talk, I'll take you through real world examples of code drawn from the 40+ production Rails applications we have developed and maintained during the last 12 months and highlight anti patterns and examples of technical code debt in them. You do what you can do to avoid these, making your future lives simpler. Your future you will thank you... Read more.

Are your methods timid? Do they constantly second-guess themselves, checking for nil values, errors, and unexpected input? Learn how to write code in a straightforward, confident style that is more testable, easier to read, and easier to debug. Read more.

Well-designed APIs can double as a great way to help make scaling easier by splitting your application in two. This talk will discuss some new libraries and techniques which aim to let you make the transition fun and manageable by splitting your application horizontally, not vertically - into services. Read more.

Keynote by Eric Ries, creator of the Lean Startup methodology and author of the popular entrepreneurship blog Startup Lessons Learned. Read more.

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. Read more.

Welcome and announcements. Read more.

In this talk Señor Engineer Aaron Patterson will talk about the adventures he's had over the past year. Topics will include (but are not limited to), ARel, ActiveRecord, ActionPack, Code Refactoring, and Sausage. Though these topics may go their separate ways, they are not worlds apart. Attendance is required as there will be homework assigned. Read more.

MVC inventor Trygve Reemskaug and James Coplien have a new vision for software, called DCI -- Data, Context, and Interaction. Although as conceptually elegant as MVC, and with the same potential to improve software, DCI's innovations are not easily implemented in Java or C#. That is not the case with Ruby, however, which puts Rails developers in a unique position to lead the way. Read more.

Is your search box still a plain old text field? If so, you're way behind the times. This session will give you the tools to supercharge your search box, making it easier for your users to interact with your site. From outlining the basics behind autocomplete, to more sophisticated autosuggest techniques, all the way to super-search boxes like those of Facebook and Quora. Read more.

Everybody wants to do test-driven development, but switching to TDD or BDD on an existing project that doesn’t have tests presents special challenges. This session will show you how to work around dependencies that make testing legacy code so complicated. Topics include using Cucumber for black-box testing, using mock objects to limit dependencies, and using Ruby dynamism to cut through problems. Read more.

Drawing from the authors' own experiences, methods and guidelines will be presented for exposing and sharing services within and between large Rails-based systems. Read more.

Calling all RailsConf attendees: do you have something awesome to share with the Rails community? Can you tell us in 5 minutes what it is and why it's awesome? If so then sign up for the RailsConf Lighting Talks. Read more.

People keep inventing new programming languages. What is programming, and how can the design of a programming language help or hinder that process? We have learned a lot over the last five decades: principles, conventions, theory, fashions, and fads. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Read more.

Bring an instrument (or your voice) and let’s make music! Read more.

Welcome and announcements. Read more.

Keynote by Aaron Batalion, CTO, LivingSocial. Read more.

Keynote by Corey Haines. Read more.

Lightning keynote by Dr. Dan Melton, CTO, Code for America. Read more.

We all know that Rails is great for building traditional web applications that serve dynamic HTML pages. But more and more, people are reaching to other tools, like Node.js, when they build web applications with a lot of logic in the client. People often use the argument that when you remove the view helpers, there isn't much of value left in Rails. Read more.

Developers are stereotypically bad at web page design. But armed with a fresh eye for design, and a little knowledge about css, we can shatter that image. Attendees will learn a few recipes to create pleasing page design - including making sexy submit buttons, styling form elements, choosing and modifying typefaces, and styling Rails form errors. Read more.

People really get bent out of shape about what programming really is. Is is engineering, craft, art, or science? Or something different entirely? But the real question is: does knowing what programming really is help us to be better at it? Read more.

Keynote by Chad Dickerson, CTO, Etsy. Read more.