Confreaks

Ruby is almost synonymous with Open Source thanks to an amazing community. Managing a successful Open Source project requires maintaining a careful balance of pragmatism, exuberance, and patience.

As soon as you have your first contributor you have to begin to think about h...

Are you confident that your code works the way you expect? Is it easy to change? Do you get accurate feedback when you do change it? If the answer to any of these questions is no, the problem is not your code: it's your tests.

We'll look at the state-of-the-art Ruby testing...

I secretly think that NoSQL data stores are rabbits. They're breeding under the floorboards when we're asleep. How else do you explain a landscape that includes Redis, Riak, CouchDB, Tokyo Cabinet, Flock, MongoDB, and Cassandra, among many others? Mopsy and Cottontail can't b...

A radically new relationship between developers and our government is taking shape. All levels of government—federal agencies, states, and cities—have begun opening their vast troves of data to citizens, free of charge and license.

It started small, but as inspired cit...

Rails 3 has added quite a number of new ways to extend the framework. These include swapping in a new ORM that still works cleanly with ActionPack, a brand new instrumentation system, and ways to build custom controllers, mixing and matching the pieces that you want. In this t...

Imagine you are at a conference. Imagine while you are at the conference, there are 30-minute sessions of various Ruby related topics. Imagine Bryan Liles is at this same conference. Imagine Bryan Liles. Imagine ActiveModel. Imagine Bryan Liles talking about ActiveModel. Can ...

In any discussion on how to improve your programming skills, one book gets more recommendations than any other: The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) by Abelson and Sussman. SICP was the introductory computer science text at MIT for many years. But how ...

We've all learned that writing tests before code is a great way to develop software. It turns out that it's also a great way to learn how to develop software in the first place! In this talk we discuss a number of projects that have used test-first approaches to teach Ruby, in...

You're so polyglot and you don't even know it. You may be using Ruby for too much. It's not the holy grail. This talk will pull from my experience at Heroku where I use much more than Ruby everyday; and I'm not just talking JavaScript. Technologies are designed to take on prob...

Back in the old days, you submitted a form to some URL and you got back some HTML. These days, you probably didn't hit submit, your URL probably didn't change, and what you got back was probably JSON—but you never saw it because it came in asynchronously in the background. B...

Modern acceptance testing frameworks like Cucumber express tests in natural language, enabling organizations to establish their own Domain Specific Languages (DSLs). This powerful capability is a huge boon for communication: technical team members and non-technical business st...

Machine learning is a discipline that is concerned with the design and development of algorithms that allow computers to evolve behaviors based on empirical data — a fancy name for a simple concept. Behind all the buzzword algorithms such as Decision Trees, Singular Value D...

The Rails revolution, and Ruby along with it, began in the loud public echosphere of startup companies. The arrival of the Rails framework and the "Web 2.0" explosion created a very thunderous effect. Magazine after magazine reported on Rails. All the hip, funded and loud star...

The Unix shell is widely despised as a modern programming language due to its arcane syntax, unpredictable control flow, and lack of support for fundamental constructs like: exception handling, objects, a module system, string functions, or even local variables! It's old. The...

How do you develop software? Is it effective? Could you do better? Where could you put the least amount of effort to improve the most? When do you do that? What would your teammates answer? What can you learn from them?

I shall give you my answers. You will give me you...