Personal schedule for Keenan Brock

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.

A huge step forward in the third version of the Rails 3 framework is the modularity it provides. This modularity is the result of a long refactoring effort to make it easier to extend or modify Rails to suit our application's needs. 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.

The DRY Principle (Don’t Repeat Yourself) tells us that "every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system." A powerful guideline, but it is often heeded without a clear understanding of its underlying motivations, nor consideration for other principles that might lead the code in different directions. 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.

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.

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.

Informal discussion on the unique difficulties in building web applications for Healthcare. Topics could include modeling the complex world of medicine, patient privacy issues, UX challenges, etc. 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.

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.

How do you scale the web service that serves one of the most popular games on iOS and Android? We will take you from the humble beginnings of Chess with Friends to the lexical addiction Words with Friends. 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.

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.

Are you working on an old and big rails app that you need to decompose before it starts to decompose itself and turns into a smelly pile of goo? Not sure how to do it? ( Neither are we.) Or have you already been there and solved those problems? Let's talk! Read more.

Birds of a Feather group for technical leadership - engineers who both write code and help lead their team. Managing time, mentoring, development methodologies, and setting technical direction. 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.

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.

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.

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.