Personal schedule for Graham Jones

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Presented by Trevor Burnham. 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.

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.

Although JRuby has maintained a high degree of compatibility with C Ruby, there still are a few considerations when making an existing Rails application run with JRuby. We'll introduce a simple step-wise process for ensuring you can trial your application on JRuby. 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.

This talk is a discussion of those tough decisions that Rails developers (new and old) face each day. What test framework should I use (and why should I care)? Does my templating system really make it harder for my designer to work? Is Bundler really essential? Two veteran Rails developers will discuss the benefits and tradeoffs (and share their own toolkit choices). Read more.

In the beginning Matz created the language and the community. Matz called the language Ruby, and saw that it was good. And Ruby was the first day. DHH said, "Let there be the framework". DHH called the framework Rails, and saw that it was good. And Rails was the second day. 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.