Program

Keynote: How to Develop without Circling the Wagons

Aaron Patterson @tenderlove Aaron's love for smooth rock is only equalled by his love of creating useful (Nokigiri) and disturbing projects (phuby, enterprise, neversaydie). ATTi employs him.

Pioneering in the Wild West of software can be scary, not to mention deadly. How can you use this fear to best the lurking dangers out there?

video

Keynote: To Infinity And Beyond

Jim Weirich @jimweirich Jim Weirich is Chief Scientist for EdgeCase. Jim is active in the Ruby community and a main contributor on several core Ruby projects - Rake, Rubygems.

The wild and wooly days of crazy Ruby development are over. Everybody knows about Ruby, no one looks at you askance when you declare yourself a Ruby developer. Ruby is now one of the mainstream languages and all the major problems have been solved. We stand at the doorstep of a brand new Ruby utopia and there is no longer room for pioneers.

Or is there?

We will explore this and other topics (including, but not limited to special relativity, space travel, and the Amish) as we work our way to greater understanding.

video

Rails Quickstart Charity Workshop

Sarah Allen @ultrasaurus Sarah leads an agile consultancy - Blazing Cloud, is working on a startup - Mightyverse and teaches with a test-first approach on the RailsBridge Open Workshop project.

Read more on the workshop page.

Reia: Ruby Evolved

Tony Arcieri @bascule Tony Arcieri is a software architect for Medioh, creator of Reia, Revactor, and enjoys beer and karaoke.

We all love Ruby, but it has its foibles, especially when dealing with issues like concurrency or I/O. Reia is a new language which serves up Erlang sandwiches on warm, crispy, delcious Ruby-flavored buns. Reia makes it easier to solve the kinds of problems which are presently difficult in Ruby, such as building complex distributed systems which can automatically leverage all of the cores of a host CPU. Reia lets you build Erlangy systems leveraging robust distribution, fault tolerance, and concurrency, all without having to deal with Erlang's nasty syntax. Reia wraps up the elegance of Ruby and the power of Erlang in a single, delicious Reia sandwich.

video

Programming and minimalism: lessons from Orwell and the Clash

Jonathan Dahl @jondahl Co-founder of Zencoder - awesome video encoding in the cloud. Previously: Rails dev shop founder, grad student in philosophy/theology, and failed Lisp convert.

Programming is writing. A programmer's job is to express abstract ideas in a specific language - just like the poet, the essayist, and the composer. But while writers and composers spend years improving their style, many programmers think style stops with "two-space indentation". This needs to change. This presentation will discuss style in music, writing, and software. We'll look at such diverse sources as George Orwell, Mozart, and punk music, and will find that much of art revolves around complexity and minimalism - just like software. Finally, we'll look at specific patterns and tools for writing software that is effective, efficient, and beautiful.

video

Introduction to Geospatial Programming with GeoRuby, PostGIS, and OpenLayers

Peter Jackson @peteonrails Pete Jackson is Director of Client Services for Intridea on ROR solutions, passions include geospatial programming, the VoteFu Rails plug-in and jQuery.

Location-based applications are everywhere, yet most modern Rubyists haven't ventured far beyond superimposing a few locations on a Google Map. In this talk, the Rubyist will learn about the many spatial programming possibilities within the Ruby landscape, including non-location-based applications, geographic applications using custom imagery, answering difficult questions using spatial queries, Moving Beyond the Dot-On-The-Map, and how to get started with Geospatial Programming today.

video

Frontend Testing Frontier

CJ Kihlbom @cjkihlbom CJ is the founder of Elabs, an agile web development and design shop dedicated to software craftsmanship. He loves rock climbing and snowboarding in his native Sweden, and should feel right at home in Colorado.

While most Ruby developers are very familiar with testing their code, frontend and 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 get you excited about frontend testing, and point you in the right direction to get started yourself!

video

Ruby on Android with Ruboto

Jay McGavren @jaymcgavren Jay uses Ruby for two game frameworks and an audio/video generator- he saves the boring stuff for his Java day job. Currently sharing his lunacy via Android.

Ruboto is Ruby for Android devices. You can access the full Android API from Ruby, giving your scripts all the power of a native application. Even better, you can build and distribute packages that will run on any Android phone, even ones without Ruboto installed.

In this talk, you'll see how to set up a working development environment (on desktop or phone). More importantly, you'll learn how to manipulate Android from Ruby, giving you access to widgets (buttons and text fields), canvases (paint to the screen), even sensors (compass and accelerometer). Android novices will learn everything they need to get up and running, and pros will gain a powerful new language for their toolkit.

video

Must. Try. Harder.

Keavy McMinn @keavy Like many of her fellow Irishmen, Keavy enjoys telling a good story. Unlike many, she trains for Ironman triathlons and is not a fan of whiskey. Cosmo, anyone?

Are you pushing yourself with the right force, in the right direction, to achieve what you want, what makes you happy, what you're capable of?

Based on her experience of training for Ironman distance triathlons, Keavy will discuss the preparation involved in pushing herself towards her own mental and physical limits, and the effects this has had on other areas of her work and life.

The talk will explore some areas in the practice and performance of sport that are critical in reaching your full potential. It will look at how these approaches can also benefit the journey not just of personal development, but career development. It won't be about achieving some grand vision of mastery, but rather on pursuing outcomes that are true to the individual; on making informed, conscious decisions about what to focus your energy on; and maintaining the drive to get there.

This talk aims to inspire people to try harder.

video

Rails Quickstart Charity Workshop

Sarah Mei @sarahmei Sarah has spent most of the last dozen years writing code, and most of the last four doing Ruby. She's a developer at Pivotal Labs and a pair programming fangirl.

Read more on the workshop page.

1000 ways to kill a Buffalo

Blake Mizerany @bmizerany Blake created Sinatra and saw Elvis at a gas station the other day. He's a polyglot and Heroku is where he hangs his hat.

I've wrestled them with my bare hands; been trampled by them; chased a few for days on end until they surrend themselves to me. I once took a large male down with a ball of yarn and an ice-cream scooper.

Problems, are like buffalos. Finding one worthy of a fight isn't easy and only few have the guts and know-how to take them down. I'll show you best of breed problems worthy of a solid challenge and how they can help you sharpen your skills, fight a good fight, and profit greatly from it.

video

Everyone should know a little about Sales

Joe O'Brien @objo Founder of EdgeCase, Ruby evangelist, speaker, husband and father, follow me on twitter for anything else

Somewhere down the line, sales got a bad wrap. People began to see it as a way of tricking others into consuming something they do not need or want. That is wrong. Sales is about identifying needs and finding solutions that fit both parties.

In this talk, I will walk you through the basics of sales. I'll show you how I have applied what I know about sales to help my bosses see why certain technologies should be used, convince my customers to team up with us to realize their visions and convince my wife to let me get an iPad (hopefully I'll have an iPad by the time I give this talk).

video

Staking your Claim in OSS

Evan Phoenix @evanphx Evan is the lead developer of Rubinius, a high performance Ruby VM, working fulltime on it thanks to Engine Yard.

Being successful in open source takes the right dash of hubris, patience, and pragmatism. Evan Phoenix will talk about how to run an open source project that can attract developers as well as users. We'll be discussing everything from how to pick a good project to how to stay focused to how to transition yourself out a project.

video

Functionally Equivalent

Jim Remsik @jremsikjr "Big Tiger" balances user experience and pushing features as a lead support engineer developing a philosophy of building simple things that work and solve problems.

Functional Languages are gaining in popularity from Lisp to F# to Clojure. Let's walk through the current functional-style offerings of Ruby, review what is available in fully functional languages, and look at where to go from here.

video

Forms Don't Have to be this Complicated

Paul Sadauskas @theamazingrando Ruby-loving web developer that writes web services and UIs for Absolute-Performance. Lives in Boulder and enjoys the typical outdoor adventures.

*HTML Forms* have made huge strides in recent years, with `AJAX` and `HTML5`. Unfortunately, our tools to make them haven't been keeping up. Since Forms have been talked to death many times before, I'll touch only briefly on the new stuff available in `HTML5`, and where current form builders (Rails' FormBuilder and Formtastic) fail. I'll give an overview of a library I wrote to ease the pain, Mold, as well as some best-practice techniques for dealing with complicated, nested forms.

video

Do not Bring a Sword to a Gun Fight

Wayne Seguin @wayneeseguin Three letters, RVM. Need we say more?

Would you slay a buffalo with a spoon or pan for gold with a hammer? Let's explore how you pick the right tool for the job.

video

Avoiding the Seven Year Itch

Jay Zeschin @jayzes Jay is a technical director at Factory Design Labs, a Denver-based advertising agency. He's a Ruby ex-pat from enterprise Java.

In any reasonably long personal or professional timeline, periodic spells of extreme self-doubt, boredom, and general dissatisfaction are a recurring theme. Philosophers and psychologists know these as existential or midlife crises, classic film buffs are familiar with the infamous "Seven Year Itch", and developers as the long-term project-from-hell. At one time or another, almost any developer has been stranded on a project that could (perhaps generously) be compared to a long, slow trudge through a desolate wasteland comprised solely of fodder for TheDailyWTF. The Ruby community's increasing maturity, combined with the recent explosion in the language's traction and popularity, has resulted in the frequency of such projects going from exceedingly rare to much more commonplace. But for every midlife crisis that ends in personal disaster, many more end with fresh energy and a renewed outlook on life. This talk will be about the latter, and using specific case studies from a recent large-scale, real-world example, offer some solid techniques and strategies (personal, technical, and methodological) for turning a deadly slog around into something interesting and exciting.

video