RubyRX - Session Descriptions

Git with Ruby

Git is the hottest source control system available today. Come see why this open source project has taken the Ruby world by storm and learn how you can put it to use next week by leveraging several excellent Ruby libraries.

Which Ruby Testing Framework Should I Use?

Ruby has dozens of different testing libraries, each with its own strengths and weaknesses and each taking a slightly different approach to testing. How can we possibly choose which one to use?

Hindsight is 20-20 - the Agile Retrospective

Agile development teams should always be looking for ways do develop software better, and the iteration is the perfect tool for doing so. Each iteration we can tweak, tune, adjust, and readjust our practices. So how does an agile team decide what to tweak? This is the purpose of the Agile Retrospective.

Monitoring your Rails application with ExeptionNotifier, Munin and Monit

(including side processes like backgroundrb and ferret)

Rails Application Tuning and Performance monitoring

Most developers who adopt Rails deploy their first application and see it get rushed under heavy load... thus the rumor that 'Rails doesn't scale'. Well, Rails does, you just have to know a few things

ActiveRecord Deep Dive

ActiveRecord is one of the leakiest abstractions you'll ever use as a software developer. Becoming a true master of ActiveRecord requires you to embrace that fact and dig into its guts. Knowing how ActiveRecord really works makes you a much better ActiveRecord programmer.

Ruby 1.9: What's New?

Ruby 1.9 is the first major upgrade to the Ruby language in many years. On top of a slew of new language features, it offers an exponentially faster, byte-code compiled runtime environment.

Refactoring Your Wetware

Software development happens in your head; not in an editor, IDE, or design tool. We’re well educated on how to work with software and hardware, but what about wetware—our own brains?

The Future of Agile

Agile methodologies are enjoying increased adoption and relevance. Will they continue to do so as time goes on? We understand that business needs change over time—sometimes quite rapidly. However, change isn’t limited to the business or the requirements. Markets will wax and wane. Developers and business owners will experience a change in their own views, become older, and slowly be replaced by the next generation of workers and thought leaders. In this future world, will agile continue to prosper, or will it flounder? What might agile be replaced with or evolve into?

Wetware: Part 2

We make important decisions and try and solve critical problems everyday. But our decisions and problem solving is based on faulty memory and our emotional state at the time. We tend to ignore crucial facts and fixate on irrelevant details because of where and when they occur, or whether they are brightly colored. Especially if they are brightly colored.

Context-oriented Programming with Ruby

If the model layer of MVC has ever left you feeling hollow inside, this talk is for you. For the model side of MVC, building simple graphs of objects are where most of us are at with Ruby. With libraries like ActiveRecord and DataMapper we feel we can work in the world of objects and get full object-oriented expression and automatic persistence into a relational database. For many though this just isn't enough, especially as the requirements of the model layer get more complex. In addition to complex object relationships, schema evolution creates problems because of its relational database foundation. That's some of the reasons for the resurgent interest in object-oriented and schemaless databases to hold our model object graphs.

MacRuby and HotCocoa

MacRuby is an implementation of the Ruby language that runs on the Objective-C runtime under OS X. MacRuby is based on Ruby 1.9 but contains substantial modifications including the merging of object models (every Object is an NSObject), using the Objective-C 2.0 generational garbage collector, moving core types (String, Fixnum, Array, Hash) atop their Objective-C counterparts and replacement of standard libraries to more optimally integrate with OS X. MacRuby is also undergoing a substantial internal rewrite and this talk with discuss the new Roxor LLVM-based virtual machine and new Obj-C based IO subsystem.

Cucumber, testing and communication

Cucumber is a tool coming from the Ruby community that makes standard acceptance criteria executable. By turning the standard agile notation of Given, When, Then, into executable tests, we are essentially allowing business owners to communicate with developers through code. Come see how to use it, and real world examples of how it has been used in the wild.

Rails, Rack and Middleware

There has been a lot of talk about Rack in the Rails community, but little explanation of why its needed. Rack is an interface for web servers in ruby that allows us to glue multiple applications together in a very elegant manner.

Testing Rails

Ruby on Rails was one of the first platforms to ship with a full testing harness. There are, however, some critical problems that can arise from doing straight out-of-the-box testing.

Ruby is from Mars, Functional Languages are from Venus: Integrating Ruby with FP and OO-FP Hybrid Languages

Many of the exciting new trends in functional languages are now available to Ruby developers as well.

DSLs: Blurring the Lines Between Programs And Data

Domain specific languages have played a key role in Ruby's explosive growth. In fact, much of the vital infrastructure of the Ruby world, software like Rake and RSpec and, of course, Rails, is built around a DSL of one kind or another.

Fluent In Ruby: Getting Beyond The Basics

One of the best things about learning Ruby is that it is such a familiar looking language. Solve some straightforward problem in Ruby and your code will probably be a bit more compact, but recognizably similar to what you would have written in Java or C#. Don't let this familiar facade fool you. Underneath Ruby's very mundane surface lurks a wickedly powerful and flexible language that lets you cope with hard problems in some very unexpected ways.

JRuby: The Best of Both Worlds?

The JVM is a high performance and reliable platform that is available just about everywhere. The only problem with it is that the J stands for Java: In order to get all of that good stuff, you need to write your programs in Java. Or perhaps not: JRuby is a full implementation of Ruby (it can run Rails) that is also an ordinary Java program (it comes in a jar file).

Building a GPS Tracking Application in Rails

I'm going to be sharing my experiences building a GPS tracking application in Rails using freely available open source software.

10 Rails Must Have Plugins

In this session you'll get an overview of 10 of the most used and useful plug-ins for the Rails framework. Learn how these plug-ins can complement the Rails framework to help you produced clean, robust and professional Rails applications.

Prerequisite: Basic Ruby on Rails knowledge

Alternatives to Ruby on Rails

Ruby on Rails is not the only game in town when it comes to Web development in the Ruby world. In this session we will explore other (something lighter) choices when it comes to building Web applications with the Ruby language.

Prerequisite: Basic Ruby and Web Development experience

Beginning Rails

The Ruby on Rails framework, also known simply as Rails or RoR has taken the web development community by storm. Leading the pack in the creation of modern Web applications. In this session you'll learn the fundamental of developing Rails applications and how Rails deals with the three pieces of the MVC (model-view-controller) puzzle.

Prerequisite: Basic web development, basic Ruby

Introduction to Ruby

With faster hardware platforms dynamic languages are experiencing a revival. Leading the pack is the versatile Ruby. In this session you'll learn the core elements that make Ruby such a powerful, terse and joyful general purpose language.

Metaprogramming in Ruby

Learn about the art of writing code that writes code. In this session we will explore some of the meta-programming techniques that make Ruby the ideal language for framework development.

Meta-programming techniques can greatly reduce the amount of code you write while clarifying the intend of your code. Learn how frameworks like Ruby on Rails and others exploit meta-programming to infuse that special magic that only open dynamic languages can produce.

Prerequisite: Basic Ruby

Erlang For The Practicing Programmer

Learn how to use Erlang in a practical setting. This talk will cover building and deploying a simple, but complete, web application using Erlang. The talk will illustrate how to use the OTP framework to write robust servers and how to leverage third party libraries, like Mochiweb, to make developing for the web easier.

Five Skills Every Freelancer Must Have

Lots of developers decide to try going it on their own - perhaps they're tired of being a cube rat, having technical decisions made by uninformed management, or having to service the bureaucracy before the client. Rubyists seem to have an especially high likelihood of going independent, since it gives them much more flexibility to use the language that makes them happy.

But as alluring as it might be to "be your own boss", everyone who makes the jump from the cube to the room over the garage finds out real quick that there's a whole new set of skills necessary to be successful. Even worse, freelancing doesn't come with a training manual that outlines all these important skills, and most folks just have to learn them the hard way: by trial and error.

Why Most Software Businesses Fail (And How Yours Can Succeed)

You know that business idea? The one that you're sure could take over the world but you haven't had time to start, or the one that you've built some amazing software for but it just isn't getting traction? If there's one thing I've learned from starting Terralien and more recently Spreedly, it's that building a great product is necessary but not sufficient. Come to this talk to learn how to create a "learning machine" and why that machine should be the center of any venture you undertake.