Great Lakes Ruby Bash

A lot of research is coming out that says that success is far more about persistent and deliberate practice than some innate ability. Covering a mix of reminiscing the past and predicting the future, you will leave with a clear guide on how to be whatever it is you want to. Spoiler: it involves a lot of work.

By far the most common means of making data available inside your Rails views—be they ERB or HAML—is by setting up instance variables inside your controllers. Although Rails makes this dead-simple for you, in reality it breaks encapsulation and leads to a spaghetti-like interleaving between two ostensibly seperate portions of the MVC stack. Enter decent_exposure, a lightwieght gem written at Hashrocket that is intended not only to clean up how data shows up in your views, but to simplify your controller logic as well. Incorporating lazy loading, memoization, and a super-tight implementation, decent_exposure represents a useful new Rails idiom. We’ll discuss how it works, how it’s written, and how to use it in your own apps.

Maybe you’ve played with jQuery a little bit but still don’t feel comfortable with it, or maybe you’ve only heard about it. Either way, it doesn’t take long to learn enough to be dangerous. While jQuery can be intimidating at first, it’s based on some very simple principles. Once you grasp those principles, your JavaScript life will never be the same.

This talk will focus mostly on jQuery itself, but I’ll also hit the basics on how to make the most of jQuery in your Rails apps. I’ll cover the relevant changes in Rails 3, and why you don’t need Rails 3 to take advantage of those changes. By the end of this talk, you’ll be easily navigating and manipulating the DOM, writing your own plugins, and of course, amazing your friends with the power and elegance of jQuery.

Interface design is more than just visuals. Good code is designed with the user (developer) in mind. Learn to write beautiful code that people want to use, because it’s well designed!

Here’s what you’ll learn:

• Why is designing your code important?
• What makes code usable?
• How do you simplify your API BEFORE you build it?
• How can you make your code intuitive for other developers?"

If your first thought when deciding to build a web application with Ruby is to run “rails APPNAME”, I’m here to tell you: You’re doing it all wrong.

Ok, that was a bit harsh. But you needed to hear it. Q: Has Ruby on Rails transformed the way we think about building web applications? A: Yes. Q: But isn’t it true that using Rails is extremely simple to use even if I haven’t done Ruby before? A: Yes. Q: So Rails is what I should you use build Ruby web applications? A: Maybe.

If Rails is a hammer, it’s my goal to show you that your next project may not need nails. I hope to show you the benefits of how using simple Ruby can put you on the path to better application design. I’ll also show you a few tools of the Rubyist’s trade that enable you to build a modular web application from emerging needs of your problem space. In the end we’ll come full circle and I’ll show you how the Rails philosophy is shifting in the direction of modular design and how we can leverage all of our knowledge with Rails to build powerful Ruby applications for the web.

Node.js is a server-side Javascript library running on the V8 Javascript engine that gives you the power to create TCP and HTTP applications using pure JS. Node has some unique strengths that give it an edge over Ruby in some areas such as asynchronous processing and long polling. Learn a bit about Node and how you can leverage it in your Rails application to accomplish great things.

Attendees will learn about Node.js and its applications from a Rails developer’s perspective; that is, they will learn the areas where Node can complement Rails to improve the performance or architecture of an application. Topics will include:

• What is Node.js?
• Where does Node shine?
• Connecting Node and Rails
• Example: Real-time updates using Node
• Example: Online gaming using Node"

Most Rubyists can agree that writing tests is a good thing; the benefits are many and the criticisms few. Although writing unit and functional tests first may help deliver a less buggy application, that application may not be exactly what a customer wants. Outside-in development driven by stories (written in Cucumber) will help guide iterations and client expectations while ensuring the application functions in the manner the customer expects.

Lambdas and the related property of closure can be powerful tools, and they lie behind a lot of magic in Ruby (as well as other languages) Unfortunately, these tools are often misunderstood by those who didn’t cut their teeth on Lisp or Haskell. The talk will cover the most common syntax, dive into the conceptual underpinnings, and go over a number applications.

Ruby is very well suited to do distributed programming and there are several available technologies to choose from. The presentation will give the audience different ideas on how to leverage the power of distributed programming techniques in Ruby, from built-in libraries to third party frameworks.

For years developers have been looking for ways to improve how they write software. As a result we’ve gotten a plethora of methodologies, practices, and tools at our disposal. But how do you know when and what to use? And to what extent do you use them?

No one wants to produce a mess of buggy and unreliable software. On the flip side, what good is NASA quality software that never gets used?

This talk is a reflection on the presenter’s experience practicing BDD and balancing the pendulum swinging from not enough to too much while producing reliable, working software.