Personal schedule for Kevin Wang

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.

BohConf is the official RailsConf 2011 unconference. At BohConf, we're going to get our hands dirty writing code and sharing ideas in an open and free-form environment. It's free and will run alongside RailsConf in the convention center. Everyone is welcome. Read more.

The Rails View layer is the Wild West. Bad mustaches, crazy fights over simple things, and complete and utter confusion abound. When do we use a helper or a presenter? How do we keep logic and markup separate? What's this here new fangled boilerplate and HTML5/CSS3 thing? 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.

"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.

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.

This is a talk about what being a Rails developer means to me, why I'm proud to be one and why you should be too. Read more.

One exciting feature slated for Rails 3.1 is the "flush": pushing pieces of the view out early, before the view has finished rendering. Learn how to use this effectively to minimize your perceived response times, how it influences the way you factor your application, and how it can complement other existing caching techniques, such as client-side personalization and edge side includes. 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.

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.

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.

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.

Let's face it. CSS is dumb. There is no such thing as a DRY CSS file and stylesheets are often the biggest blemish in an otherwise beautifully coded app. Sass is the future of stylesheets. Rails 3.1 includes it by default and the W3C is adding concepts from Sass to CSS itself. 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.

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.

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.

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.

A funny thing happened at DreamForce this year. The company that made it safe for CIOs to buy cloud services bought a wonderful little company called Heroku. DreamForce is not a show a lot of RailsConf old-timers care much about, but it's a place where CIOs (and the kinds of companies that have such things) go to learn about how to do things better, faster, and cheaper. 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.