Personal schedule for Leo Liu

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.

Payment Gateways, and Merchant Accounts, and PCI Compliance! Oh, my! Getting started with credit card processing can be confusing. I'll provide an overview of the credit card ecosystem and show you how to securely accept credit cards in your application. Finally, I'll introduce a novel technique that allowed us to process over 1 million credit card transactions in a single day. 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.

Relational databases have been around for decades, and there's a vast amount of untapped power sitting right at our fingertips. The problem is that messing with SQL can be difficult and confusing. This talk, make up of 6 discrete chapters, shows how you can use a little dash of database in your app to make working in Rails easier and faster. 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.

You must choose, but choose wisely. The database world is larger than SQL v noSQL, and growing by the month. Choosing a data storage engine is an important decision, but it doesn't have to be painful if you know the landscape. If your understanding of data storage tops out at "Mongo is webscale" or "mysql + memcached = win" then this talk is for you. Read more.

Dr. Nic Williams takes you through the vagaries of Ruby's evolution, with an emphasis on the past and future of JRuby and Rubinius. 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.

An inside look at the tools, techniques, and scaling issues that Groupon has experienced during it's meteoric rise to becoming the fastest growing company in history! Read more.

Ruby might be slow, but bad code only makes it worse. This talk will teach you how to use powerful tools to see how your code is executed, so you can understand, debug and optimize it. 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.

A case study in introducing Rails into a public NASA Earth Science system. Despite a broad investment in Java, we conducted a survey of modern development technologies including Flex, Django, JSF2 and Rails. We chose to move forward using Ruby on Rails with JRuby. This presentation discusses our experiences, including technical, process, and psychological, using RoR on a production system. Read more.

Many teams and projects I've been involved with are deploying ruby applications in an atypic way, i.e. different from the mainstream "cap deploy". It has been a very nice experience so far, and I would like to share. Come hear why some people think that there are better and not much explored ways of deploying ruby and rails systems. 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.

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.

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.