Personal schedule for Andrew Langman

Do you need to start learning Ruby on Rails? In this morning tutorial the Envy Labs team will lead you through all five labs of their Rails for Zombies course. Unlike other tutorials, all you need to start coding Rails is a laptop with Wi-Fi and a modern browser. Read more.

Based on the Ruby on Rails Tutorial book, the second half of Intro to Rails picks up where Rails for Zombies leaves off. You'll join Rails Tutorial author Michael Hartl for some hands-on coding, including an introduction to version control with Git, test-driven development (TDD) with RSpec, and Rails application deployment to a live server. Read more.

"Fat Models, Skinny Controllers" they scream. Pushing your logic down to the model layer is a key step to improve testability, maintainability, and code quality. But many developers now have "junk drawer" models that don't realize these goals. Having a fat model isn't enough! Come learn techniques to refactor your models and make them beautiful. 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.

The DRY Principle (Don’t Repeat Yourself) tells us that "every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system." A powerful guideline, but it is often heeded without a clear understanding of its underlying motivations, nor consideration for other principles that might lead the code in different directions. 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.

Nobody likes when their code smells. To help avoid it, dozens of special tools and approaches have been designed. Efficient coding tools, refactorings, code metrics, code analysis, code testing and debugging are all crucial for creating quality, maintainable code. 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.

This Year, Dr. Nic hosts Engine Yard's sponsored sessions, which were given away to members of the Ruby on Rails community who did not otherwise get the chance to speak at RailsConf this year. The speakers were nominated by the community, so don't miss it--the people have spoken! 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.

As in-house developers we are constantly spinning up new applications to help run our business. Most of these apps share a common set of features. Our transition to Rails 3 has allowed us to start with a clean slate and rethink what works best for us. We will discuss the base feature set needed for almost every app and how we use templates to quickly spin up a new app. Read more.

Although JRuby has maintained a high degree of compatibility with C Ruby, there still are a few considerations when making an existing Rails application run with JRuby. We'll introduce a simple step-wise process for ensuring you can trial your application on JRuby. Read more.

This talk is a discussion of those tough decisions that Rails developers (new and old) face each day. What test framework should I use (and why should I care)? Does my templating system really make it harder for my designer to work? Is Bundler really essential? Two veteran Rails developers will discuss the benefits and tradeoffs (and share their own toolkit choices). 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.