RubyNation is an annual two-day, dual-track technical conference presented by the Washington, DC area Ruby Community. The conference brings the community’s top speakers and leaders together with motivated and excited attendees for an unforgettable educational experience. At RubyNation, we debate and discuss the latest trends, techniques, and tools in Ruby software development, design, deployment, business and marketing. RubyNation is a community event to promote the Ruby programming language, and to encourage collaboration.
Have you ever thought about how much of software engineering involves explaining things? We stick comments in our program to explain why we added X to Y, we type up README files to explain the program, we write proposals to explain why the program should be funded and we spend the afternoon explaining the whole thing to the new guy so that we can move on to something new. A decent explanation can be the difference between success and obscurity: Would there be a RubyNation if there had been no ...
What good is content if nobody can find it? Many information sites are like icebergs, with only a limited amount of content directly accessible to users and the rest, the "underwater" potion, only available through searches. This talk shows how Rails web sites can take advantage of the world-class Apache SOLR search engine to provide sophisticated and customizable search features. We'll cover how to get started with SOLR, integrating with SOLR using the Sunspot gem, indexing, hit highlighting ...
Resque is a Ruby framework for intuitively defining and monitoring distributed background jobs stored in Redis. With Resque, you can easily off load long running tasks (much like DelayedJob); plus, because Resque leverages Redis as a queuing system, you can easily implement a distributed, point to point messaging system. What’s more, because Resque’s job format is simple JSON, it’s possible to build polyglot job implementations. This talk will illustrate how easy it is to get started with Resq...
When people think about Ruby, web applications are usually one of the first things that come to mind. But Ruby’s power extends beyond that. With Adhearsion you can easily create powerful applications that bridge the power of Ruby with a standard telephone. Today organizations are using this open source framework for everything from small applications with a cloud-based telephone provider to large dedicated installations processing thousands of calls. Use your voice to collect data, share infor...
Rails 3.1 introduced us to the asset pipeline. Learn the power of SCSS and how to clean up your views with the proper use of helpers, semantic markup, presenters, and just good old-fashioned ERB and HTML. We'll touch on a broad variety of topics and not attack too many sacred cows.
Ruby is a powerful server-side language with a great collection of libraries and frameworks. But to create a full mobile offering, Ruby developers need to become masters of many a craft. In this talk we'll walk through the design and development of a full stack HTML5 mobile application using Sinatra to create a robust RESTful API, Spine.js to bring MVC order to the client and jQuery Mobile to style and structure the application for the mobile world.
Keeping your front-end code clean is hard. Before you know it you're suffering from CSS specificity issues and not-really-generic partials. Find out how to keep things tidy using the HTML5 document outline and modular Sass and CoffeeScript, for truly reusable code.
Independent consultant and entrepreneur Ryan McGeary provides an entertaining lightning talk on the usefulness of commit messages (within the source code control system of your choice) in communicating the intent of software changes to future maintainers of the software. Presented at the RubyNation 2011 Conference in Reston, VA on April 2, 2011.
Mike demonstrates a design style for building Ruby web applications under conditions of extreme uncertainty with minimal resources (e.g. a typical web startup) when you want to maintain a high, sustainable rate of performance over a long period of time. This talk will feature few, if any, slides. Instead, it will feature a deep dive into real applications to show you how to keep code quality high while retaining the option to change things later. The following tools and techniques will be demo...
In this talk, Aleksander compares Node.js vs. Sinatra as a tools to build external APIs for Rails applications. He focuses on the pros and cos of sharing code with the main application, performance and scalabilty. He’ll also takes a quick look at other potential solutions. After all, maybe the secret ingredient is somewhere else?
