Sessions at RailsConf 2012 matching your filters

Every young company expects to grow quickly, but is your engineering team really ready for it? In 3 years, iTriage went from a kitchen table to one of the leading mobile consumer healthcare apps with over 5 million downloads. Staying ahead of this growth didn't just mean hiring more Rails engineers.

Patrick will discuss what iTriage did (and continues to do) to stay ahead of our growth, including:

• Technical architecture, including use of Rails Engines to enable a modular, RESTful service-based design
• Enabling high quality iPhone, Android and Web apps
• Development and release management processes
• Recruiting and hiring approaches

Presenter and Decorators are design approaches that can be used in Rails applications outside of the standard Models, Views and Controllers. These approaches are becoming more and more popular as teams search for new ways to identify and manage the complexity within their applications.

In this session Mike Moore will defined the Presenter and Decorator approaches using simple and clear terminology. Common design problems in Rails applications will be shown using real-life code examples and refactored toward Presenters and Decorators. Code will be improved and strengthened by identifying and respecting the dependencies within large applications.

Google loves speed, and we want to make the entire web faster - yes, that includes your Rails app! We'll explore what we've learned from running our own services at scale, as well as cover the research, projects, and open sourced tools we've developed in the process.

We'll start at the top with website optimization best practices, take a look at what the browser and HTML5 can do for us, take a detour into the optimizations for the mobile web, and finally dive deep into the SPDY and TCP protocol optimizations.

We'll cover a lot of ground, so bring a coffee. By the end of the session, you should have a good checklist to help you optimize your own site.

Rails is huge. Even if you have worked with it for a long time, it's unlikely that you have stumbled across everything yet.

Do you really know what all of the built-in Rake tasks do? Have you seen all of the methods ActiveSupport makes available to you? Are you aware of all the queries ActiveRecord is capable of?

In this talk, I'll dig into the extras of Rails and see if I can't turn up some features that you don't see all of the time, but that might just be handy to know about anyway. I'll make sure you come out of this able to impress your friends at the hackfest.

Rails 3 and above includes a powerful instrumentation system, ActiveSupport::Notifications, which can be used to track performance and event information for all aspects of your application. Notifications are light-weight, easy to setup, and can be consumed by multiple subscribers (logs, audit trails, consolidated metrics, other parts of your application).

In this session we’ll start with the basics of ActiveSupport::Notifications and work our way to powerful advanced use cases. Topics we’ll explore include:

• How to set up and use notifications
• Logging what you want from any tier of your system
• How to capture and aggregate performance/business data for the metrics you care about most
• Conditional monitoring in production: flag on and off data by system or customer to get to the root of problems more quickly
• Using ActiveSupport::Notifications in non-Rails applications and your own libraries

Building safe web applications isn’t always easy. The good news is that Rails provides a lot of features that will help you along the way. Aaron will walk you through the common mistakes made by web developers, and how to account for them while working with Rails. He will also walk you through some tools you can use to make securing your applications much much easier.

Rails got much more modular after 3.0 rewrite. But do you know how to use specific rails elements outside Rails? What if you would like to use ActionView with some other library (like webmachine)? Have you ever needed to render view with layouts outside of the rails stack? Or maybe you wanted to build some kind of system that fetches templates from database rather than from files? Router anyone? You know that you can use it outside rails too?

In this talk I will dive into Rails internals and will show you what's there and how you can use it outside rails.

Although I will focus on using those parts standalone, this knowledge will most likely help you also build your apps if you ever need something sophisticated that requires modification of regular rails behavior.

What does it take to deploy an application without any downtime?

More than most Ruby developers would expect, turns out; what is aggravated by the lack of documentation and other resources on this topic.

In this talk we'll dive into both development practices (hot compatibility, database migrations, caching) and deployment setup (Heroku, Unicorn, HAProxy), covering everything you need to know in order to ship code without affecting a single customer.

In this talk we will explore the best practices in using interfaces as the foundation for designing object oriented applications in Ruby and Rails. We will talk about some of the techniques that make it possible to write loosely coupled components that can be easily extended to respond to requirement changes.