Sessions at GoGaRuCo 2011 matching your filters

We're facing a tidal wave of rescue projects. So many developers dive into writing Rails applications without building a real foundation in Ruby. Instead we focus on the new whiz-bang features of Rails or the hot gem of the week—missing the awesomeness right in front of us.

Let's talk about Ruby and fill in some of the gaps. This isn't about mind-blowing features and crazy metaprogramming, it's about the fundamentals that are often overlooked in Rails applications.

• WTF are modules, anyway?
• Writing utility objects
• Measuring performance
• Everything worth manipulating is a collection
• Rails "features" that Ruby does better
• Bringing science back into development

Master these techniques, and write better applications with better Ruby.

I work for a mobile payments company called Square. Square has a great development culture driven by a lot of smart people. Part of that culture includes acknowledging failures, figuring out what should have been done differently when failures occur, and learning how to fail less in the future.

I'm going to discuss the mistakes made when developing a major Rails app feature, the struggle to increase test coverage for the Square iOS client, and the consequences of bad architectural decisions made when creating a distributed build system. I'll then talk about how each of these were addressed.