Sessions at Madison Ruby 2011 about Ruby on Saturday 20th August

Sound familiar? The Rails ecosystem is growing in leaps and bounds, like the Java ecosystem did in its’ early days. So many languages, frameworks, plugins, engines, libraries and tools. So little time to deliver your new project.

It’s tempting to hire a rock star who knows absolutely everything to get your new project off the ground. You can also hire "consultants" to help fill in the holes in your team when taking your existing product to the next level. Or maybe just hire a whole bunch of people for cheap, and they’ll get the job done... But did you ever consider the untapped wealth of the team you already have?

In this session we’ll explore ways in which the average development team can explore, learn, teach, and grow, until the sum of members of the team is as great as any Consultant or Rockstar.

Rong is a client-server Pong implementation written in Ruby that hopes to take a whack at your office productivity. Though Pong itself is a relatively uncomplex game, it allows a variety of interesting programming problems to be explored.

By using a client-server architecture, having multiplayer support, and publishing a built-in leaderboard, Rong lets us take a look at Ruby-idiomatic approaches to event-driven servers, network communication, cross-platform clients, web service APIs, gem (Ruby library) authoring and organization strategies, and more.

Most developers are familiar with the API driven architecture of Twitter, but few go so far as to develop their application the same way. By building a Great Wall between your business domain and the way users consume it, you separate your application into modular, isolated components with fewer interdependencies.

In this talk Dan Melnick and Scott Parker explore both the advantages and drawbacks of creating an application as a Sinatra API that is consumed by SproutCore. We'll also discuss alternative paths to incorporate an API driven architecture with a number of other frameworks.

Where is the "End of Men" in the Ruby community? Shouldn't the push for more paired-programming and team driven development encourage more women into the notoriously lone-wolf, up at all hours, "I'm better than a team" development community? So where are they? What percent of your software development team is women? Have you ever pair-programmed with a woman? This talk is going to ask some edgy questions about the Ruby community and who it's women are. I will be drawing parallels between my mountain climbing experiences and my experiences as a software developer.

If you've ever looked into how to create Gems, you've probably seen a bunch of ways to do that. Project generators like Hoe, Jeweler, and the like offer some nice ways to get started, but they may often be overkill for many projects. If you're just starting out, why not learn to do it from scratch?

In this talk, we'll create our own gem from scratch, using only things that are provided by Ruby, its standard library, and RubyGems to craft a simple gem. You'll learn how to set up a project, how to write and run tests, how to use Rake to quickly build the gem, and even how to create a gem that installs an executable command-line program.