Sessions at Ruby Lugdunum 2011 on Sunday 26th June

They all use several different game play mechanics to encourage addictive behaviours in their users and customers. Being a developer is much more than writing nice code... its about building an experience for your users. And, part of that is using gameplay to make sure your users have a great time and come back again.

Even if you never thought of what your building as being a game, I'll help show you that it gameplay is part of every life experience and is coded into our DNA.

To crack the code of what works and what doesn't, we need to look towards evolutionary behaviouralism as a guide. Over millions of years we have been trained to follow certain basic social behaviours and if you understand those behaviours, you can use them to give your users a very positive experience.

Some of the talk will be scientific, but a lot of it will highlight real usable techniques to get the desired effects. I hope to guide everyone through a lot of examples and analysis of companies where they went right ... and where they failed.

How we cut our monolythic application into a Rails API, 3 Rails clients, 2 Sinatra services and a Rails engine.

At least since node.js, everyone knows that real time HTTP responses are the next big thing. The secrets of handling incoming requests asynchronously with Ruby is not yet far spread among Rubyists, as the internals needed for such responses are neither specified nor documented and there is a lack of tools. Still, it is possible to use Server-Sent Events, Websockets and akin with Rack today. This talk will demonstrate the underlying technologies and how to use them.

In unreliable networks, with unreliable processors (also known as "The Cloud"), one must know all the ways their thing can fail; And just as importantly, how to recover. It is even better to have the ability to recover in an automated way. I'll go over the common failure conditions in distributed systems, and then introduce you to Doozer, the highly-available, consistant data store that makes recovering from these problems easy.

Goliath is event machine based. It uses Rack API and new features of Ruby 1.9.2. Both makes it a really lightweight framework capable of processing asynchronously a large amount of data in an elegant way. It fits to write light web services as HTTP streaming file uploads, proxies, twitter, firehoses, etc.