Personal schedule for Jason Meinzer

"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.

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.

As you grow your application, you tend to grow the number of databases you're using. Caches, key-value stores, document databases, full-text indices, and distributed databases all come into play. It can prove challenging to add these moving parts and keep your sanity. Learn how to incrementally add these databases to your application as it scales and keep your code clean and clear. Read more.

Want to add location, mapping, or complex spatial analysis to your Rails applications? Not sure about the difference between OpenLayers, Google Maps, Bing Maps, RGeo, GeoRuby, GeoCommons, or the many other choices in front of you? Join this session for a walkthrough of the stack choices you will be faced with while navigating the Geospatial landscape. 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.

Presented by Trevor Burnham. 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.

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.

Dive into the internals of thoughtbot's copycopter_client and discover how to handle difficult-to-test components such as HTTP, SSL, threads, forks, logging, caching, Rails engines, and others. Learn viable testing strategies for applications and libraries that contain such components with a focus on Rails libraries. 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.

Given the many features of Rails that promote good security, one gets the impression that your typical Rails web site is relatively secure. That impression is completely misleading. Without paying deliberate attention to security details, it is almost certain that your application has security flaws. This talk will cover the ins and outs of web security and help you build a secure site. Read more.

Redis is well known for being a fast key-value store and as the fantastic backend for the work queue library Resque. The functionality and speed of Redis also make it a great tool for keeping indexes when your data-write load is very high. This talk will cover how we used Redis to build a system that can index thousands of writes per second without breaking a sweat. 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.