Personal schedule for Nathan Long

"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.

Learn more about how you can spot development trends in your version control history and use that information to guide your choices going forward. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.