Conference Speeches

"Design Patterns" in Ruby

Neal Ford (ThoughtWorks)
Using powerful languages makes the solutions in the GoF book look hopelessly complicated. This session shows how to solve the same problems concisely, elegantly, and with far fewer lines of code using the facilities of dynamic languages.

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"Multi-core Hysteria": FUD about CRUD?

Andrea O.K. Wright (Chariot Solutions)
In a blog post called "Multi-core hysteria and the thread confusion," DHH wrote that the advancement of "multi-core technology has caused quite a few folks to pontificate that the sky is falling for Rails because we're not big on using threads." He asserts that "It isn't." In this talk I will detail specific concerns community members have brought up and evaluate them, MythBusters-style.

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10 Things I Hate About Web Apps

Micah Martin (8th Light, Inc.)
Web applications have changed the world. Their amazingly powerful and can be slick as snot. The technologies behind them however, leave much to be desired. Come commiserate about aspects of web apps that are painful and talk about why. Then learn how the pain can go away with an introduction to using LimeLight with Rails: the open source client side tool alluded to at RubyConf 2007.

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Advanced Active Record Techniques: Best Practice Refactoring

Chad Pytel (thoughtbot, inc.)
This talk will cover several of the more advanced Active Record features by presenting code samples and walking through a best practice refactoring of that code, using the tools given to us by Active Record ('the Rails way'). Some of the topics that these refactoring examples will touch on include Callbacks and Observers, Complex data models, Validations, and other tips, tricks, and gotchas.

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Advanced RESTful Rails

Ben Scofield (Viget Labs)
Designing RESTful systems in Rails carries many benefits. It is not a problem-free approach, however; there are accessibility issues with the standard conventions, and some functions are more difficult to map to resources than others. In this session, we'll look at solutions for these (and other) problems that arise when you take REST beyond the standard examples.

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Assembling Pages Last: Edge Caching, ESI & Rails

Aaron Batalion (Hungry Machine LLC)
When working on scaling Rails to millions of users/day with complex personalization, caching becomes essential. This talk will cover edge caching, edge side includes (ESI) in Rails, and partial page caching higher in the stack. It will also cover ESI as a fabric for assembling heterogeneous applications into a single, cacheable web experience.

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Asynchronous Processing with Ruby on Rails

Jonathan Dahl (Slantwise Design)
Rails makes synchronous, request-driven processes a breeze. But what happens when you need to do something a little more complex or time-consuming? Enter asynchronous processing. We will investigate several ways to bring asynchronous processing to Rails, including cron, BackgrounDRb, AP4R, daemons, and Amazon SQS.

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Build Your Own Distributed, Self-Configuring Rails Cluster

Dave Fayram (Powerset, Inc), Tom Preston-Werner (Powerset)
Fuzed is a Rails server stack written in Erlang that can replace standard mongrel/reverse proxy architectures. It focuses on reliability and ease of deployment in distributed environments.

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Building a composite model in Active Record

Michael Latta (TechnoMage)
The session is a nuts and bolts look at what is required to build a model that is composed of several other models and functions with Active Record. This "virtual" model can then be used like a regular model where the user wants to interact with the virtual view.

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CRUD doesn't have an 'S' in it: Managing complex searching in Rails

Stephen Midgley (Hutz.com)
Complex, multi-column, multi-table searches are beyond ActiveRecord's capability. This talk will explore strategies for building and maintaining complex search structures in Rails.

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Entrepreneurs On Rails

Dan Benjamin (Hivelogic)
Many of the people working with Rails are independent developers, doing freelance work or running small development shops. This makes sense - Rails provides a great framework for an indy developer, making it easy to work with with designers and other developers.

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Everyday DTrace on OSX: A guide to using DTrace for your full application stack

Scott Barron (EdgeCase), Chad Humphries (EdgeCase)
Have you ever wanted to know why a part of your application is slow? How about how long that query takes? Wouldn't it be nice if you could get this type of information for ruby, rails, and the database server in one place? You can now with DTrace on OSX 10.5. We'll show you how to best use this tool-chain to debug, profile, and gather more information about your application.

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Facebook Development and Performance with Rails

Mike Mangino (Elevated Rails)
A brief look at how to create (and scale) a Facebook application with Rails. We'll start by creating a simple Facebook application using the facebooker rails plugin. From there, we'll see some tips to scale it up to handle millions of users.

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Fast, Sexy, and Svelte: Our Kind of Rails Testing

Dan Manges (ThoughtWorks), Zak Tamsen (ThoughtWorks)
Moderate to massively parallelized tests leveraging multi-core processors. ActiveRecord tests without a database. Yaml-less test data. With leveraging several open-source tools including DeepTest, Selenium Grid, and UnitRecord, in conjunction with techniques such as Model Factory, this session will show how to move beyond the plain vanilla Rails strategy to achieve optimal application testing.

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Integration Testing with RSpec's Story Runner

David Chelimsky (Articulated Man, Inc)
Learn how to write customer-facing executable user stories and scenarios with RSpec's new Story Runner.

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Optimizing Rails

Michael Koziarski (Koziarski Software Limited)
Optimising a framework is a very different job than optimising your rails application. You can't just 'throw memcache in front of it' or disable features. The benchmarks you choose will also drastically affect your results, potentially leading to pointless optimisations that don't help real users.

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Scaling Rails

Blaine Cook (Twitter, Inc.), Bradley Taylor (Rails Machine, LLC), Ezra Zygmuntowicz (EngineYard), Jim Meyer (LinkedIn), Kevin Lawver (AOL)
A diverse panel of experts offer their perspectives on scaling Rails apps in the real world and how the choices we make (or don't make) as developers affect our application's scalability.

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Surviving the Big Rewrite: Moving YELLOWPAGES.COM to Rails

John Straw (YELLOWPAGES.COM)
YELLOWPAGES.COM is the 33rd-largest website in the U.S., handling millions of searches per day. In four months, four developers turned 125,000 lines of Java into 14,000 lines of Ruby and successfully launched a redesigned site. This session discusses the entire process, starting with project management and ending with the technical details of breakneck scaling.

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The Great Test Framework Dance-off

Josh Susser (Pivotal Labs)
When Rails was first released, there was just one framework for testing applications and things were simple, if not always ideal. Now there are enough frameworks that choosing which one to use for your Rails application can be a difficult decision. This presentation provides a survey of the major Rails testing frameworks and compares their strengths and weaknesses in various areas.

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The Launch: Dos and Don'ts of Real Life Deploys

Chris Wanstrath (Err Free)
There's more to launching an app than "cap deploy" -- the process is as much a psychological challenge as a technical one. So, what does it take to launch an app you can depend on and be proud of? With a handful of production launches under his belt, Chris will talk about the big picture and little details of bringing your site to life.

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The Profitable Programmer: Creating Successful Side Projects

Geoffrey Grosenbach (Topfunky Corporation), Tom Preston-Werner (Powerset), Chris Wanstrath (Err Free), PJ Hyett (Err Free), Ben Curtis (Catch the Best)
Many developers have the skills to implement web applications, but often lack the business skills to make them profitable. Hear from five developers who have transitioned from full-time consulting to building financially profitable Rails-based web applications

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UI Design on Rails

Ryan Singer (37signals)
What's the UI process at 37signals like with respect to Rails? Ryan talks about how designers can move beyond HTML/CSS to take responsibility for views, helpers, and more.

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Using Git to Manage and Deploy Rails Apps

Scott Chacon (Reactrix, Inc.)
Git is a fast, efficient and distributed source code management system. This talk will demonstrate how Git works, how to use it to manage a Rails project and demonstrate Capistrano's new Git SCM module.

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What To Do when Mongrel Stops Responding to Your Requests and Ruby Doesn't Want to Tell You About It.

Philippe Hanrigou (ThoughtWorks)
Building, deploying, and maintaining large-scale Ruby on Rails applications involves overcoming a variety of vexing problems that prove difficult to investigate using just the traditional Ruby stack. This session features field-tested tools and techniques that can used to in these situations, focusing on techniques for DTrace, strace, gdb, lsof and XRay.

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