Sessions at RailsConf 2012 about Productivity on Tuesday 24th April

Are you having trouble launching new features because of friction between development and operations? At CustomInk, we've reduced this friction by making changes to our teams, processes, and tools. Come find out what we've been up to and learn how you can implement similar changes in your own environment.

There's always a bit of tension when getting features from idea to production. In this talk, we'll look at some of the changes CustomInk has made to reduce this friction and keep the new features coming. Gone are the days of bi-monthly deploys, office pools dedicated to guessing when this deploy will be rolled back, and the ceremony surrounding the deploy-rollback-fix-deploy cycle. Today, ideas flow from product managers to developers to production with ease thanks to a number of changes that we've made to our teams, processes and tools.

During this talk, we'll look at:

• How product managers drive the release cycle
• Ideas and customer feedback
• Prioritizing development requests
• Managing branch merges and deployments (yes, product managers can help here!)

• How operations enables developer productivity
• Spinning up development environments - Vagrant, Chef
• Infrastructure Automation - Chef
• Enabling Continuous Deployment - Capistrano and caphub
• Failing gracefully - Fault-tolerant load balancing with ldirectord

• How developers get their code running in production
• Staging environments
• Continuous Integration - Jenkins, Green Screen
• Staying on topic: Deploying changes when they're ready

• Getting rid of the over-the-wall mentality - Dev & Ops working together
• Enabling developers to do it themselves
• Pair programing infrastructure automation
• Keeping the process light and the communication flowing

Ruby on Rails claims to be "optimized for programmer happiness and sustainable productivity." I strongly disagree with the latter assertion. In this talk I will channel my half decade of industry Rails experience into expounding this position and providing constructive feedback as to what needs to change---in both the framework and the community---before we can support this claim. I'll also cover practical techniques you can use to be sustainably productive on your own projects in the meantime.