Personal schedule for Robert Fox

Do you need to start learning Ruby on Rails? In this morning tutorial the Envy Labs team will lead you through all five labs of their Rails for Zombies course. Unlike other tutorials, all you need to start coding Rails is a laptop with Wi-Fi and a modern browser. Read more.

Based on the Ruby on Rails Tutorial book, the second half of Intro to Rails picks up where Rails for Zombies leaves off. You'll join Rails Tutorial author Michael Hartl for some hands-on coding, including an introduction to version control with Git, test-driven development (TDD) with RSpec, and Rails application deployment to a live server. Read more.

Welcome and announcements. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Keynote by Eric Ries, creator of the Lean Startup methodology and author of the popular entrepreneurship blog Startup Lessons Learned. Read more.

We'll be handing out several trophies to people we believe to be Ruby Heroes, and giving them the round of applause they deserve and might not get otherwise. Read more.

Better software and tools are bridging the gap between software developers and sysadmins. This sessions brings together people straddling that gap to share advice, tools, and tricks. Read more.

Welcome and announcements. Read more.

Dr. Nic Williams takes you through the vagaries of Ruby's evolution, with an emphasis on the past and future of JRuby and Rubinius. Read more.

In this talk Señor Engineer Aaron Patterson will talk about the adventures he's had over the past year. Topics will include (but are not limited to), ARel, ActiveRecord, ActionPack, Code Refactoring, and Sausage. Though these topics may go their separate ways, they are not worlds apart. Attendance is required as there will be homework assigned. 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.

Learn the ins and outs of deploying Rails (and other) web apps with Bundler, from a core team member. This session will cover deploying by hand, with Capistrano and Vlad, as well as running bundled apps in Mongrel, Unicorn, and Passenger, deploying to firewalled servers, and more. 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.

You've heard about Sass but you've never really used it before. In this BoF session you will learn how to set up your rails project and get started with sass. You will learn the basic sass syntax. Led by Chris Eppstein, a Sass core team member. Read more.

A BoF for anybody who wants to get better at their TDD or BDD. We'll discuss obstacles keeping you from testing more, and how other people may have resolved them. Read more.

Welcome and announcements. Read more.

Keynote by Aaron Batalion, CTO, LivingSocial. Read more.

Keynote by Corey Haines. Read more.

Lightning keynote by Dr. Dan Melton, CTO, Code for America. 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.

Light-sabers help, but they don't win the war. Bring your computer and Ruby and we can defeat the Emperor. Tactics and tools will be shown so you can be ready for the battle! We need less robots and more thinking allies! Join us now! Read more.

You're using RubyGems on a daily basis, but what's inside of them? How can you make your own? How can you share them with others? In this session you'll learn how to make one from the ground up to help break out your Rails application code to be more modular and maybe even help out the community too. 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.

Keynote by Chad Dickerson, CTO, Etsy. Read more.