Sessions at Rocky Mountain Ruby on Thursday 1st September

Ever have one of those days where you sit back at the end of the day and realize that you didn't get anything tangible done? Why do those days happen? Many times is it because we lack focus during the day to complete even the simplest of tasks. Our modern lives don't allow us to practice focus; in fact they conspire against us being focused. This talk will explain why focus is important to productivity and teach one way you can practice focus through meditation.

Michael Feathers will be giving the opening keynote this year at Rocky Mountain Ruby. Michael is well known in the software community for his work with XP/Agile, improving software development and working on large legacy codebases.

The effects of API design will likely live with your project for a long time, often beyond your tenure with the project. Yet good API design is very rarely discussed and often leads developers to the conclusion that good APIs are something that "we know when we see them."

This talk will attempt to layout a set of fundamentals for good API design so that we can begin to really understand the difference between well-designed APIs and those that are mediocre. It will also explain about various trade-offs that are made when designing APIs and some of the pros and cons that come with each trade-off. Finally we'll take a look at some good APIs and bad APIs in Ruby.

REST is an architectural style for distributed systems. However, many implementations forget about the distributed part of REST and simply map CRUD operations to HTTP verbs in a monolithic application. We're gonna go further and learn why hypermedia is the crucial part of REST architectures and how machines can browse resources just like humans using self-describing representations.

Monolithic applications are boring, so let's separate things and create a REST system as it is intended to be. Let's build a simple system using the Roar gem, Rails and Sinatra and discuss the benefits and drawbacks we get from distributed hypermedia systems.

People often think of design as something that helps solve problems, but design should actually prevent problems in the first place. While you may not be a designer, applying tenets of design thinking to your life and work will help you make better decisions, build better stuff, and give you a framework to keep life and work moving forward.

You know how to raise and rescue exceptions. But do you know how they work, and how how to structure a robust error handling strategy for your app? Starting out with an in-depth walk-through of Ruby's Ruby's rich failure handling mechanisms -- including some features you may not have known about -- we'll move on to present strategies for implementing a cohesive error-handling policy for your application, based on real-world experience.

You are happily writing new code for your system when all of a sudden the code is not behaving the way you thought it should. Perhaps you just created a failing test, and the code you wrote was expected to make the test pass ... but it doesn't. What's the first thing you do?

Some Rubyists will drop some "puts" statements into the code. Some will add a raise statement. And still others will depend on logging to trace the internals of the code. But a surprisingly few Rubyists will reach for the Ruby debugger.

Despite a general disdain for the debugger in the Ruby community, the Ruby debugger is a powerful tool that can quickly get to the heart of a coding problem. This talk will concentrate on getting Rubyists up to speed on the debugger, how to use it effectively and learning other general debugging tips.

Ever wonder how software is designed and developed at GitHub? Are you curious about how new features are deployed to the site? (Hint: ask the robot.) Want to know why we don't have any managers and don't track vacation days?

This talk will explore running your company like an open source project and give some insight into how GitHub continues to leverage ruby and other open source tools to keep up with massive data loads and a growing community of users.

Many of us are familiar with the old adage about writing code "for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute" (thanks, Abelson and Sussman) - but it's easier said than done. The fields of object-oriented design, patterns, and software architecture are vast, but primarily concerned with the mechanical structure of code - what if we took a step back from the nuts and bolts of the code and look at the way we as humans read and write it? Can we use our understanding of the psychology of human cognition to better understand our target audience, and in turn write code that is more intuitive, readable, and maintainable? This talk will walk through some of the basics of cognitive psychology and relate them back to concrete ways that we as developers can optimize our code for high performance in the interpreter between our ears.

Many of us are familiar with the old adage about writing code "for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute" (thanks, Abelson and Sussman) - but it's easier said than done. The fields of object-oriented design, patterns, and software architecture are vast, but primarily concerned with the mechanical structure of code - what if we took a step back from the nuts and bolts of the code and look at the way we as humans read and write it? Can we use our understanding of the psychology of human cognition to better understand our target audience, and in turn write code that is more intuitive, readable, and maintainable? This talk will walk through some of the basics of cognitive psychology and relate them back to concrete ways that we as developers can optimize our code for high performance in the interpreter between our ears.

Learn how to go inside out vs. outside in so you can tap into your intuition to make strong decisions and come up with innovative solutions. It might just help you invent the next big thing rather than being the next Groupon clone.

There are plenty of resources on the web for the technical skills you need to be a good developer but it is harder to find good resources for the "soft" skills that make you a well rounded developer. Join Suzan, Jay and Mike for a interactive discussion about the skills that will make you not only a better developer but a better person in general.