Personal schedule for Mike Subelsky

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.

Keynote by David Heinemeier Hansson. 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.

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.

How do you scale the web service that serves one of the most popular games on iOS and Android? We will take you from the humble beginnings of Chess with Friends to the lexical addiction Words with Friends. Read more.

Rails is a great framework for building web-based systems, but many of us don't have much experience outside of port 80 or 443. Dave Troy developed a scalable server architecture for Shortmail.com, implementing stateful, secure services such as LMTP, SMTP and IMAP using EventMachine and Rails. 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.

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.

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.