Add an eventSessions at RailsConf 2012 about Ruby on Rails with slides
Monday 23rd April 2012
-
Using Backbone.js with Rails: Patterns from the Wild
by Sarah Mei
Backbone.js is a flexible, lightweight tool for structuring the JavaScript in a modern web application. It goes great with Rails! But beware - "flexible and lightweight" are code words for "you build your own plumbing." Backbone is new enough that we haven't established strong patterns for that plumbing yet, so different Backbone codebases look very different, and when you're new to the idea of structuring your JavaScript, it can be tough to tell where the win is.
So in this talk I'll demystify Backbone. I'll show several very different ways I've used it on real Rails apps. You'll get a feel for the circumstances when Backbone makes sense, and moreover, when each of the different approaches to Backbone make sense.
-
Getting Down To Earth: Geospatial Analysis With Rails
by Daniel Azuma
It is no secret that location has become ubiquitous. Mobile GPS, available data sets, and easy-to-use mapping services have brought geospatial information within reach of web developers. Location already plays a significant role in many of the major services such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google, not to mention legions of startups.
However, for those of us implementing more than the most trivial features, it is also true that location is challenging. A significant learning curve awaits us, involving spatial databases, coordinate systems, interchange formats, and plenty of math. Our Ruby-based tools lag a bit behind those available to our Java- and Python-oriented colleagues, and effective documentation is scarce.
This presentation aims to jump-start Rails developers hoping to go beyond putting a few pushpins on a Google Map. Rather than spending a lot of time explaining the many concepts involved, we'll bypass the learning curve and jump straight into walking through code for a few nontrivial applications. The hope is that the conceptual knowledge will come naturally as a result of seeing it in action, but pointers to online resources will also be provided to fill in any gaps.
A thorough understanding of Ruby, Rails, ActiveRecord, and SQL will be assumed. No prior knowledge of GIS or computational geometry will be required, though it may be helpful.
-
Practical Machine Learning and Rails
by Andrew Cantino and Ryan Stout
Many people know that machine learning techniques can facilitate learning from, and adapting to, noisy, real-world data, but aren't sure how to begin using them. Starting with two real-world examples, we will introduce you to some libraries that bring machine learning techniques to your Rails applications. We will then dive into the art of feature design, one of the first practical roadblocks that many people encounter when applying machine learning. Feature design is the challenging, subtle, and often trail-and-error process of selecting and transforming the data you provide for your learning algorithm, and it is often the hardest part of using these techniques. Our goal is for you to come out of this talk with the tools necessary to think about machine learning and how to apply it to your problems.
-
Rails Engines Patterns
by Andy Maleh
This talk covers a successful utilization of Rails Engines to share features that cut across the layers of MVC in different Rails 3 projects. Rails Engines thus provide the best of both worlds: improved productivity by reusing MVC code (including assets like Javascript, CSS, and Images) and better flexibility by allowing different applications to customize behavior as needed without reliance on application-dependent conditionals. Rails Engine patterns will be provided to guide developers on how to leverage Rails Engines' reusability and flexibility without sacrificing maintainability.
Outline:
- Basics of Rails Engines
- Rails Engine Patterns
- Improved Productivity Tips
- Summary of Benefits and Trade-Offs
Attendees should walk away with an overview of Rails Engines and guidelines on how to utilize them effectively.
-
RoRoRoomba - Ruby on Rails on Roomba
RoR makes an excellent framework for off-the-beaten-path type of projects, like hacking Roombas and other robots. In this presentation, I'll demonstrate how our soon to be robot overlords will be happy when we gift them with RoR and a connection to the internet. The presentation will include working examples and demonstrations of:
- communicating with an Arduino chip via Ruby
- tethered serial and wireless bluetooth control of a Roomba via Ruby and Arduino
- two-way communication with our robot friends over the web using Ruby on Rails and popular web services
- useful applications of robots controlled over the web
- 3 RoRoR pitfalls to watch-out for
- live performance of "Chiron Beta Prime" by Jonathan Coulton*
The presentation will close with an argument for why hacking on fun, often eccentric, projects in your spare time is essential for staying motivated, habitual improvement, and tangential learning -- i.e., being a real pragmatic programmer.
*not included, perhaps
-
How Rails helps make cooking more fun in Japan
With more than a million user submitted recipes and an active user base of 15 million monthly unique users, cookpad.com is the world's largest recipe website, and an essential tool for the 50% of all Japanese women in their 20's and 30's who use the site regularly.
The Cookpad.com service is built on Rails and is running entirely on AWS in Tokyo, where more than 30 engineers are working in small agile teams to bring more value to users every day.
As you know, Japan had a huge earthquake and tsunami last year, and some of those affected didn't have cooking facilities, water or basic foods for long time. Many Cookpad users immediately uploaded simple recipes that could be made without the basics in adverse conditions, and helped those in hardship immensely allowing them to enjoy food with their families at that difficult time.
In this session, I'll talk about the COOKPAD way of creating services and the technologies behind them, and how we improve peoples lives through cooking every day.
-
Realtime web applications with streaming REST
by Brad Gessler
As more people collaborate on the web with your applications, its not enough to just persist data to the database; it needs to be pushed out to your users web browsers so that they're always working with the freshest data.
In this session, Brad will show how to build a real-time layer on top of an existing Rails application's authorization and resource logic so that you can build on top of the hard work already invested in your Rails application.
Topics that will be discussed include:
- Why I didn't choose Socket.IO
- Stream application resources into Backbone.js models to keep data fresh
- Hook into ActiveRecord to push representations of data into a message queue
- Message queue naming conventions public/private resource streams
- Exposing message queues to HTTP
- Securing streams with existing application authorization logic
- Considerations for streaming in a production environment
-
RVM & Essential Rails Development Tools
Working with Rails often means switching between several Ruby versions back and forth which is made almost seamless by RVM. It also involves several simple command line tools like Pry, Guard, and Pow and that will make your development life so much easier.
-
Securing your site
Rails makes it very easy to rapidly develop web applications, but doesn’t always make it so simple to deploy or secure them.
This talk is going to focus on best practices to secure your rails application, learnt through multiple high profile projects and penetration tests. The talk will be practical and show that this isn’t necessarily hard if thought about from the start.
We’ll also touch on getting the right balance of security without it getting in the way of the users.
Tuesday 24th April 2012
-
Preparing for Rapid Growth - Tips for Enabling Your Rails App and Team to Grow Quickly
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
-
Presenters and Decorators: A Code Tour
by Mike Moore
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.
-
Let's make the web faster - tips from trenches @ Google
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.
-
Ten Things You Didn't Know Rails Could Do
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.
-
Digging Deep with ActiveSupport::Notifications
by Matt Sanders
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
-
Securing the Rails
by Aaron Bedra
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.
-
Using Rails without Rails
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.
-
Zero downtime deploys for Rails apps
by Pedro Belo
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.
-
Powerful Interfaces
by Caike Souza
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.
Wednesday 25th April 2012
-
It’s Not in Production Unless it’s Monitored
In the 21st century successful teams are data-driven. We’ll present a complete introduction to everything you need to start monitoring your service at every level from business drivers to per-request metrics in Rails/Rack, down to server memory/cpu. Provides a high-level overview of the fundamental components that comprise a holistic monitoring system and then drills into real-world examples with tools like ActiveSupport::Notifications, statsd/rack-statsd, and CollectD. Also covers best practices for active alerting on custom monitoring data.
-
Rails: The Next Five Years
by Yehuda Katz
When Ruby on Rails burst onto the scene in 2004, it excited web developers by showing that you could build next generation apps quickly and efficiently. Rails was one of the first frameworks to embrace Ajax, giving everyone the power to do partial page updates and whiz-bang effects in a conventional, effortless way.
In 2007, the Rails team embraced RESTful conventions, making API development a no-brainer for new applications. Because RESTful JSON is so easy in Rails, Rails applications tend to implement APIs on balance.
Then it was time to polish. Both the 2.0 and 3.0 releases cleaned up the code-base and found ways to take emerging conventions and make them easier to use.
But now, like in 2004, another revolution is brewing. Increasingly, developers are moving their view layer from the server into the client, using RESTful JSON and client-side templating to increase responsiveness and bring applicable aspects of desktop applications to the web.
Like last time, not every application needs to jump head-first into this new world. But just as in 2004, Rails has an opportunity to embrace the future, and bring its ruthless insistence on convention over configuration to bear on this problem.
Rails already has the plumbing to be a fantastic conventional JSON server. The question is: will we take the challenge, or will we desperately cling to the past, hoping that the future will never come?
-
Redis Application Patterns in Rails
Redis is a darling of the NoSQL crowd and for good reasons. It's easy to setup and has blazing fast performance. In this talk, drawn on real production experience and real code straight out of the DueProps codebase, Obie will introduce and demonstrate key Redis application patterns vital to today's Rails developer. Emphasis will be placed on real-world constraints and how to leverage Redis to improve scaling and performance over plain-vanilla ActiveRecord applications.
Concepts covered:
- Adding Redis-based flags and other properties to ActiveRecord objects
- Event tracking with Redis sets
- Graphing relationships between (User) objects with Redis sets
- Time-ordered activity feeds with Redis sorted sets
- Applying security restrictions to display of activity feeds with intersection of Redis sorted sets
- Aggregating group activity feeds with union of Redis sorted sets
- Applying Redis sorted sets to scoring and leaderboard programming
- Integrating Redis with Rspec and Cucumber
- Debugging tactics for when things go wrong or are unclear
-
Chanko - How Cookpad safely releases multiple feature prototypes for test segments of their 15 million engaged users
by Kenta Murata
Chanko provides a simple framework for rapidly and safely prototyping new features in your production Rails app, and exposing these prototypes to specified segments of your user base.
With Chanko, you can release many concurrent features and independently manage which users see them. If there are errors with any chanko, it will be automatially removed, without impacting your site.
Chanko was extracted from Cookpad.com where the team uses it daily to test new features live, in production, on the largest Rails site in Japan which serves 500 million page views a month to a user based of over 15 million highly engaged uses.
-
Complex Made Simple: Sleep Better with TorqueBox
by Lance Ball
Even the simplest of Rails applications can eventually grow into a twisted mess of complexity. At some point you will need a background task, or a long-running service, or a scheduled job, or all of the above and more. All of these little bits of functionality added to an application ad hoc can keep you up at night with cold sweats and nightmares. But it doesn't have to be that way.
In this presentation, we will examine a complex Rails application - complexity that is eventually common to most modern Rails apps: background tasks, scheduled jobs, WebSockets, long-running services, caching and more. We will look at the challenges inherent in these features for both development and deployment. Then we'll look to TorqueBox for simple solutions to these complex problems. You'll never have that long-runing service using the wrong Ruby code again; no more environment variable nightmares in your cron jobs. You can sleep better now.
TorqueBox is a Ruby application server that is built on JRuby and JBoss AS7. It provides asynchronous messaging, scheduled jobs, long-running processes, caching, simple deployment, and much more. TorqueBox is designed to bring the power, scalability and stability of these time-tested JavaEE services to Ruby applications through a simple and expressive Ruby interface.