Personal schedule for Daniel Barron

Modern browsers have changed web development by offering new, more powerful capabilities, known by the marketing buzzword "HTML5". In this tutorial we'll build a sophisticated example that shows you how to take advantage of workers, sockets, canvases, local storage, media embeds, and more. You'll learn how you can use HTML5 to build newer and better web applications, leaving old hacks behind. 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.

Whether you are a student, a freelancer, an employee or running a company, your career is your responsibility. This talk will deliver a plan to review your career in terms of mind, body, heart and soul health. The talk will incorporate both personal experiences and those from others in the international Ruby community on reviewing your own career. Read more.

We all use ActiveSupport 3 every day. Many of us don't take the time to dig down into some of the more interesting parts. This talk will explore the history of ActiveSupport and demonstrate areas most aren't familiar with. 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.

After spending the last few years developing and deploying Rails applications we're ready to unload all the tips and tricks we've learned. But each nugget of experience will be ruthlessly culled to fit in two minutes. You'll get the whole seat but you'll only need the edge! Read more.

While most Ruby developers are very familiar with testing their code, JavaScript testing is still a new frontier for many. This talk will show you how to easily write and run JavaScript integration tests with Capybara and Cucumber, and unit tests with Evergreen and Jasmine. The goal is to inspire you to get started with JavaScript testing, and point you in the right direction to go do it! Read more.

The Ruby/Rails community is known for it's adoption of TDD, yet that seems to stop at the border that is our web browsers. The issue isn't testing tools, the browser or the DOM. It's us. We write untestable JavaScript and our tests are yelling at us, begging us to change. Will we listen? Come and learn how we can push the Ruby testing philosophy into JavaScript, and impact the apps of the future. Read more.

Learn the ins and outs of deploying Rails (and other) web apps with Bundler, from a core team member. This session will cover deploying by hand, with Capistrano and Vlad, as well as running bundled apps in Mongrel, Unicorn, and Passenger, deploying to firewalled servers, and more. Read more.

A deep look into 2 common performance problems web developers face. We will consider these problems and then I will show solutions to these problems. From here we can generalize the solution into a pattern I call: The Worker Pattern. 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.

When we build rich client interfaces in JavaScript for our Rails applications today, we have no other choice than duplicating code and logic in both worlds. In this presentation we will show you how to use Google's V8 JavaScript engine in your Rails application to eliminate those duplications, write model code only once and therefore make your code DRY again. Read more.

Make your users happy by building webapps without page loads. People waiting 2,000ms or more for a page on your app to load are losing interest and focus. Learn how easy it is to create an interface that responds in less then 100ms with Backbone.js, a JavaScript library created to seamlessly integrate with Rails and keep your JavaScript organized and readable. Read more.