Remote Conferences - Audio

The past, present, and future of RubyGems.org and what you'll see from the Ruby community's package manager site. Oh, and some GIFs too.

Rubygems 2.0 had partial Gemfile support, with Rubygems 2.2 almost all of functionalities ofBundler can be replicated with Rubygems, lets stop using extra layers when the core already does what we want to achieve.

The world of programming is changing. It's becoming clear that functional languages are the new mainstream. But how do you write code without objects and classes? For the answers, we can look both forwards and backwards, looking at the functional ideas of transformation, combined with some cool techniques from programming's adolescence. 

Creating games is crazy-fun and dirt simple with Ruby. If you can make a web app, you can make a game. This session will introduce basic concepts of game programming and show how to implement them using the Gosu library. This includes the game loop, sprites, animation, etc. And it will be fun!

Peter briefly built Rails apps for a living, but quickly discovered the beauty of using Ruby as a catch-all "Swiss Army knife" for jobs all over the place. In his talk, he'll look at how Ruby can be rapidly put to work doing all sorts of random things that help in other types of day to day work.

Right next to your app is a world of software you probably don't think about: app servers, Rack interfaces, reverse proxies and load balancers. Starting right next to your app, we'll look at how Ruby web apps are built. Which pieces do you control as the developer? Which pieces are traditionally owned by ops? What do they do?   We'll (quickly) talk about the standard software for these pieces -- Passenger, Puma, Unicorn, Thin, Rack, NGinX, Apache, HAProxy and Varnish, where they fit together, and why you might choose one or another.   At the end of the talk you'll know what you can put in your Gemfile to choose these, how production is different from development, and the beginning of how you'd set this all up on your own if you needed to. You'll also know why you'd have to choose one piece of software over another, versus when it's basically your call.

Design has often been cut off from the development side of the house, creating static images that are then handed off to developers to build. Invariably, this waterfall approach leads to unhappy designers and frustrated programmers, and often a product that misses the mark. Agile Development has solved many of the issues, but in many cases, designers still sit on the outside.   We’ll look at integrating your design team (even if it’s a team of one) into an agile development organization while still pushing user-centric design. We’ll study successes and failures from both consultancies (InfoEther, Hyphenated People, Meticulous) and product companies both large and small (LivingSocial, CargoSense). We’ll talk about strategies for getting your design and development teams aligned and working like a well-oiled machine.   This session will discuss:   * Integrating design into an agile development team * What processes work well * What processes lead to problems * Things to take back and try on their teams

Hundreds of books are available to help you write Ruby source code and there are multiple large disciplines about how to structure the concepts within your code. But when you execute your code it ceases to be source and begins life as a unix process alongside other processes on a piece of hardware somewhere in the actual world.   I'll walk us through how to reason about your process, how to know what it's doing and what resources it's using and how to determine whether it's healthy.   We'll learn about what you can add to your source to make debugging easier, how to debug your code as if it were merely a C program, and what kinds of unique behaviors MRI, Rubinius, and JRuby have that are distinct from processes written in other languages.

BigData is a buzz word right now and there's a lot of cool things that people are doing. In this talk I'll show you some simple ways you can use Ruby and Google's data tools to explore big data.

"Red. Green. Refactor" is a great slogan for Test-Driven Development. It's less great as a guide to actual TDD practice. The slogan provides no guidance for two very important questions in a TDD process: "What do I test next?" and "How do I break my problem into testable pieces".   You may have struggled with TDD on these two issues, leading to giving up, or winding up with "uncanny valley" tests that are hard to maintain but don't provide support for change. Using a puzzle problem, we'll show how to expand on Red Green Refactor, so you can take advantage of the code-quality benefit of TDD.

Symmetry. Simplicity. Elegance. Patterns. Much of how we understand, describe, and value code is based on subjective criteria that are easy for us to grasp intuitively but almost impossible to define or communicate objectively. Can advances in applied aesthetics and theoretical neurology provide insights into the advantages and disadvantages of relying on such elusive criteria? Do mathematical and evolutionary theories indicate that our code evolves aesthetically to enhance its survivability, durability, and success?   This talk will explore the role that concepts such as beauty, sublimity, completeness and simplicity play in the way that we model reality in software, relate to our own and other people's code, and ultimately measure the value of our work as professionals.

There is often more than one way to do it. Some ways are better than others, and are favored for many reasons. Rails conventions and the way the framework "just works" can be handy in getting your app up and running. Other times Rails puts you in a very difficult spot, and simple, maintainable solutions appear out of reach.   One place where Rails feels very limiting is inside the controller. There is often an evolution in how we deal with these limitations when they arise. Frequently we settle for something that doesn't quite meet our needs. Don't worry! There is hope. We don't need an extra library or another complicated indirection. Using routes to their fullest can give you the power of dependency injection over your controllers.

Rubyists are famously polyglot. I've heard people joke that there are more JavaScript talks at some Ruby conferences than there are Ruby talks. But there's one area in which most Rubyists don't go: low-level programming. We often say "Ruby is slow, but that doesn't matter. I'll just drop down to C when I need performance." But C is pretty scary, so we never actually do it.   In this talk, Steve will show off Rust, a new programming language from Mozilla. Steve will show you how that saying should change: "drop down to Rust," and why it's better for Rubyists than C.

Service oriented systems have become hugely popular, and the golden age of the "monorail" is starting to end. Sometimes, these services can be fantastic, and other times not so much. Learning how to evaluate APIs and identify problem areas before jumping head first into development can save us frustration, time, and money. This session will walk through evaluating an API, best practices, and red flags, all from the standpoint of a developer consuming them. No matter your experience level, you'll leave with the skills to effectively tackle your next API.

As teams build and compose more services, their dependency on logging grows exponentially. Being able to quickly make use make use of those logs can easily mean the difference between quickly finding a bug and struggling to even understand it for weeks. For this reason, services that make their logging data easy to consume by tools result in "higher order logs", allowing the logs to be usable data rather than just walls of text.   In this talk, we'll go over:    * Why you should use structured logs  * How to add structured logs to ruby services  * What you should log in the first place!  * Tools and workflows to make use of those structured logs

Let's face it. If you want to have a successful career in software development today, being a good coder doesn't just cut it anymore. Sure, writing good code will help you keep your job, but there are plenty of good and great coders out there that you've never heard of, either looking for jobs, or unsatisfied with their current jobs. If you really want to stand out and get noticed, you've got to learn how to promote yourself. Great software developers can make as much as 4 to 5 times the salary of a good programmer. But, what makes a software developer great? The problem is most companies don't know, so they go based on name and recognition. If you have a solid brand and know how to market yourself correctly, employers, co-workers, and potential clients will view you as GREAT, not just good. Billions of dollars are spent on marketing each year. Celebrities of all sorts enjoy fame and fortune that isn't necessarily related to theirs skills. Why? Because marketing works, and like it or not, if you want move beyond a basic career and really open up opportunities for yourself, you've got to learn how to market yourself as a software developer. In this session, I'll teach you some quick and easy things you can do to enhance the marketability of your skills and personal brand immediately and talk about some long term plans you can put into action so that everyone will know your name. And this session isn't just for software developers. Any IT professional can benefit from learning these important skills for this rapidly changing game.'

A live coding session where a fresh Meteor.js app is built. Cordova support will be introduced and we will start building an isomorphic js app that will output an iOS app.   Learn how easy and quick it is to get Javascript, Node.js, Mongo, and Cordova working in harmony with Meteor.js.

The most critical and valuable life learnings of one of the most prominent open-source JavaScript developers, compressed into a 40 minute talk.  

You didn't need a full-blown MVC, you just wanted to add some nice interactive functionality to your server-rendered app. But then one jQuery plugin turns to three, add a dash of statefulness, some error handling, and suddenly you can't sleep at night.   We'll walk through using Ember Components to test-drive a refactor until your front-end code is understandable, usable, and extensible. Armed with TDD and components, you can start to get excited, not exasperated, when asked to add advanced client-side interactions to your website.

WebRTC promises awesomeness. Embedded audio/video and data transfer in every website! But the API's are note straight forward and require a complicated signaling process to work. SkylinkJS is an open-source project that makes leveraging the powers of WebRTC as easy as using JQuery.  

Many of your have heard about ES6 among the chatter in the community. However, it can be tough to find one place to go that will answer all your ES6 questions and show you all of the ES6 features. As part of the show, Aaron show you each of the new pieces, a long with some guidance on how to start using ES6 today.

Javascript has become widely popular for developing hybrid mobile technologies by the advent of tools like Phonegap, Kony, Telerik App Builder. In this talk, I will demo how to create a Hybrid Mobile app using Javascript - AngularJS & Ionic Framework.

In the late 80s, Kent Beck and Ward Cunningham came up with HotDraw (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?HotDraw), a two-dimensional graphics framework for structured drawing editors, originally written in Smalltalk-80. Since then, many implementations have been created, and the principles applied in a lot of places. While a lot has been learned, the original HotDraw still outshines many of its successors. In the last few years, RoleModel Software was asked to build several systems with a complex underlying model where the user input was primarily direct graphical manipulation. This included: * a system to support educational innovators at the Friday Institute, using direct manipulation tasks to test and teach various mathematical concepts to elementary age children. * a deck designer for decks.com, to design and produce a 3D rendering, materials lists, and permit-ready plans to help do-it-yourselfers get professional designs in seconds. The solution in both cases included a HotDraw-like JavaScript approach to drawing and direct manipulation on an HTML5 Canvas, almost completely test driven using Jasmine. We'll go over the highlights of the cool technical feats and show how JavaScript is not just for manipulating the DOM.

The Angular.js team answers questions about Angular.js, its future, the framework, and anything else you want to ask about it.  

The key to quickly learning JavaScript MV* Frameworks is to break them down into a series of features. The main features of an MV* application are routing, data binding, templates/views, models, and data access. In this talk I’ll describe these features and show code examples from AngularJS, Backbone, and Ember for each feature. You will begin to concretely understand what these frameworks are trying to help you accomplish and realize they are more alike than they are different. In fact, it becomes apparent that most of the frameworks borrow heavily from the successes of the others.

Let's turn the page on programming robots with a flowchart. Robotics should be done with a hierarchy of state machines, best if self-modifying. I'll demonstrate how a js framework can prove the idea, on a Firefoxos phone even. It's a great place to set base camp and opens up more excursions like machine learning and genetic programming.

We talk about refactoring, as if beautiful code is all we need. But that's only a start. Small services are lovely to reason about internally, but they push complexity outward. Systems these days aren't so much written as assembled.   We write some code, our precious business logic, and then the real work is hooking everything together. Databases, web servers, routers, monitoring systems, search tools. Plus the easy stuff like version control, issue trackers, continuous integration.   Every piece both adds and takes away complexity. Even the most elegant technology is disaster when we implement it without befriending its internal concepts, or when we use it for an unsuited purpose.   Join Jessica as she finds both pain and beauty in the complexity of our systems. Will we ever find simplicity? or is the light at the end of the tunnel an oncoming enterprise service bus?