Personal schedule for Steven Soroka

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.

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.

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.

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.

Having built two object mappers in Ruby (MongoMapper and ToyStore), I would like to throw out a crazy thought. What if, on your next project, you ditch the ORM. No ActiveRecord. No DataMapper. No anything. Just you and a lower level driver, whispering sweet nothings into Ruby classes and modules. Could you? Would you? DARE you? Read more.

Selling a product once is fun, but selling that product twice is wildly excellent. GitHub does that with Firewall Install, our installable enterprise GitHub. This talk aims to discuss how you can repackage your existing product too, by covering code strategies for parallel codebases, supporting remote server infrastructures, and talking about the impressively stupid decisions we've made. 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.

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.

MVC inventor Trygve Reemskaug and James Coplien have a new vision for software, called DCI -- Data, Context, and Interaction. Although as conceptually elegant as MVC, and with the same potential to improve software, DCI's innovations are not easily implemented in Java or C#. That is not the case with Ruby, however, which puts Rails developers in a unique position to lead the way. 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.

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.

Social games backends share many aspects of normal web applications, but exasperate scaling problems. Follow this talk to see how we evolved and brought a plain rails app to 5000 reqs/sec, moved part of our data from SQL to NoSQL in order to reach 100,000 queries / second and see what we learned from this experience. 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.

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.

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.

Calling all RailsConf attendees: do you have something awesome to share with the Rails community? Can you tell us in 5 minutes what it is and why it's awesome? If so then sign up for the RailsConf Lighting Talks. 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.

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.

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.