Personal schedule for Paul Cook

Smart developers have been using Ruby on Rails to rapidly build web applications for over 5 years now. Cutting-edge projects have aged into old, moldy, legacy apps. Rails 3 and Ruby 1.9 offer performance improvements and new features that are guaranteed to take the squeak out of that old wheel and grease the tracks of new development. 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.

Ignite is a high-energy evening of 5-minute talks by people who have an idea - and the guts to get onstage and share it with the rest of the Rails community. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.