Peter Bell will present "Lean Startups With Ruby and Rails"
We're happy to announce that Peter Bell will present "Lean Startups With Ruby and Rails".
The Lean Startup was an awesome manifesto, but how does it work in practice? How do you implement cohort analytics and A/B splits? How much testing is "enough"? How can Metrics Driven Development help you to prioritize features? What about feature toggles, canary testing and and an application immune system? In this session we'll look at practical approaches to implementing lean startups using Ruby and Rails.
Peter Bell is CTO of Skinnio - a lean startup in NYC based out of DogPatch labs. He's been living the lean startup life full time since June and has consulted for hundreds of startups since 2002. He teaches regularly at General Assembly - a startup hub in NYC and is writing a book for Addison Wesley on agile software development. He's been published in IEEE Software, Dr. Dobbs, IBM developerWorks and Information Week and has rebuilt skinnio from the ground up five times in the last nine months.
Posted by Gray Herter: February 06, 2012
John Athayde Presents "The Rails View: The Junk Drawer Grows Up"
We're happy to announce that John Athayde will present "The Rails View: The Junk Drawer Grows Up".
Rails 3.1 introduced us to the asset pipeline. Learn the power of SCSS and how to clean up your views with the proper use of helpers, semantic markup, presenters, and just good old fashioned ERB and HTML. We'll touch on a broad variety of topics and not attack too many sacred cows.
John Athayde is a UI/UX/Design type who comes from an architecture (of the building variety) background. He's been in the Rails community since 2006 and has broad experience in e-commerce and running creative teams. He is currently leading the design and view development on Internal Tools at LivingSocial. Prior to LivingSocial he was the Design guy at InfoEther and ran Hyphenated People, a UI/UX Consultancy with Amy Hoy. He also runs Meticulous, a design and film company, in his free time.
Posted by Gray Herter: February 06, 2012
Baltimore's Chris Strom to Present "You Ain't SPDY"
We're happy to announce that Chris Strom will present "You Ain't SPDY".
You package your assets. You use CSS sprites. You serve up everything with gzip compression. You obsess over Yslow recommendations. But you are still not SPDY.
Fundamental limitations in HTTP and TCP/IP still add up to 60% overhead to your site. Find out how to reclaim that lost bandwidth and increase the robustness of your sites at the same time.
Chris is the author of The SPDY Book and Dart for Hipsters. He is also the co-author of Recipes with Backbone. He organizes the B'more on Rails user group. Chris is a relentless public learner as evidenced by over 700 blog posts. He is currently a contributor on both the Ruby SPDY gem as well as the node-spdy package.
Posted by Gray Herter: February 05, 2012
Andrew Glover Presents "Asynchronous Processing, Messaging, and Redis with Resque"
We're pleased to announce that Andrew Glover will present "Asynchronous Processing, Messaging, and Redis with Resque". Andrew is the CTO of App47, where he gets to play with iOS, Android, Ruby, Rails, Heroku, AWS, MongoDB and everything else that is cool these days. He carries around an iPhone, iPad, and HTC Droid phone and in his free time hacks on Node.js.
Resque is a Ruby framework for intuitively defining and monitoring distributed background jobs stored in Redis. With Resque, you can easily off load long running tasks (much like DelayedJob); plus, because Resque leverages Redis as a queuing system, you can easily implement a distributed, point to point messaging system. What’s more, because Resque’s job format is simple JSON, it’s possible to build polyglot job implementations. In this talk, Andrew will show you how easily it is to get started with Resque by defining and executing background tasks, and then he'll show you how to leverage Resque as a messaging system with polyglot queue readers.
Posted by Gray Herter: February 03, 2012
Jeff Casimir Presents "Getting Addicted to SOA"
We're happy to announce that Jeff Casimir will be back with us once again with "Getting Addicted to SOA". Jeff is an excellent presenter, who draws from a wealth of teaching experience, as a former high school computer science teacher and principal, and from many years as a professional Ruby and Rails instructor at Jumpstart Lab, including now training at LivingSocial's famous Hungry Academy.
For the past several years, Jeff has been traveling the world preaching the good word of Ruby and Rails. He loves talking about architecture/patterns.
Look at the themes of APIs, client-side Javascript frameworks, more features at the database level – it all adds up to building components that can be managed, developed, and reused independently. Breaking big apps into small apps is the next trend.
This is not propaganda about how one gem or Rails feature is going to change your life. What we’re talking about is bigger than a library: it’s architecture.
In this session, Jeff will walk through the theory and code, starting with an application and extracting authentication into a separate app. Once it’s out, that authentication service can support multiple applications, like 37Signals does with their ID service shared by Basecamp, Campfire, and Highrise.
Do you need centralized authentication? Maybe not. But the practice of extracting it into an external service will make it easier to develop/maintain both the primary application and the authentication system itself. Use this approach to pull out one component of your app and you’ll be addicted to Service-Oriented Architecture.
Posted by Gray Herter: January 31, 2012
Closing Keynote: Corey Haines
We're trilled to announce Corey Haines as our closing keynote speaker.
After 12 years of coding for money, Corey Haines said enough and went on a year-long, journeyman pair-programming tour. Traveling the world, pair-programming for room and board, he spent his time teaching, learning and just living as a knowledge-cross-pollinating, little, software craftsmanship bee. For the past three years, Corey has focused his attention on helping developers improve their fundamental software design skills through the use of focused-practice events, such as coderetreat, a series that has recently grown into a world-wide phenomenon as the Global Day of Coderetreat.
Posted by Gray Herter: January 25, 2012
Scott Davis Presents "Sass and Compass Unleash Your Stylesheets"
We're proud to announce that compass core team member and sass contributor Scott Davis will evangelize on their proper use with "Sass and Compass Unleash Your Stylesheets".
Do you not fully understand scss or sass? Do you hate making stylesheets as a developer. Do you not understand sprites? Using compass standalone or with the rails asset pipeline can increase your productivity and make CSS enjoyable! Because spending 30% of your development time on styles should never happen, it is Scott's mission to make that a thing of the past.
Scott is a UX engineer for the Space Telescope Science Institute, which runs the science programs for the Hubble Space Telescope and the upcoming Webb Space Telescope. Most of his work centers on HubbleSite.org, public website for the Hubble Telescope.
Scott has spent the past eight years developing web applications, most recently the HubbleSite's redesign. His focus is the creation of elegant, well-engineered, robust code that is as simple to read as it is to use.
Scott lives on a 200-acre farm in Maryland, where he enjoys excessive amounts of farming and the fact that his nearest neighbor is a cow.
Posted by Gray Herter: January 25, 2012
Steve Klabnik Presents "Designing Hypermedia APIs"
We're is proud to announce that Steve Klabnik will present "Designing Hypermedia APIs", explaining how to design your APIs so that they truly embrace the web and HTTP.
Steve is a Ruby Hero, software craftsman, and an aspiring digital humanities scholar. He spends most of his time contributing to Open Source projects, and maintains both Hackety Hack and Shoes. Steve is also writing a book on REST called Get Some REST. Otherwise, Steve travels the globe speaking at conferences from Los Angeles to Kiev.
Steve writes regularly on his blog, and can be found on twitter.
Posted by Gray Herter: January 24, 2012
Sandi Metz will present "Give Me a Lever: The Story of Inheritance"
Awesome. Reluctant author and obsessive programmer Sandi Metz will speak at RubyNation 2012. Sandi will present "Give Me a Lever: The Story of Inheritance", a presentation freshly pulled from the pages of her upcoming book, "Practical Object Oriented Design in Ruby".
Sandi Metz has 30 years of experience working on projects that survived to grow and change. During the daytime she writes software at Duke University, in the evening, builds bicycles, and in the wee dark hours of the early morning is finishes the final chapters of the book.
Sandi rants when she has time on her blog, and can be followed on twitter. She also speaks at conferences when she can, such as at our neighbors to the north, GoRuCo.
Posted by Gray Herter: January 20, 2012
Entrepreneur Mike Subelsky to Present "Coding for Uncertainty"
We are happy to announce that entrepreneur Mike Subelsky will speak at RubyNation 2012. Mike will present "Coding for Uncertainty: How to Design Maintainable, Flexible Code for a Startup Application".
Mike Subelsky is a Baltimore-based entrepreneur, programmer, and devops guy. His tools of choice are Ruby and JavaScript but he considers himself a jack-of-all-trades. In 2007, he co-founded a web startup called OtherInbox.com, which was just acquired by ReturnPath. Currently, he is pursuing new as-yet-unannounced ventures (he promises "something new and very cool").
Mike is a big believer in Baltimore's innovation community of artists, technologists, thinkers, and strivers of all types. That belief has powered his efforts in co-founding the Baltimore Improv Group, Ignite Baltimore, the Baltimore Hackathon, and other activities.
Mike writes regularly on his blog, and can be followed on twitter.
Posted by Gray Herter: January 12, 2012
2012 Early Bird Tickets are for Sale Now.
We have Early Bird tickets up for sale now. To register just visit our registration page. The Early Bird tickets will be available until the end of this month, or until we sell out of them (there are only 50 early tickets).
Last year we sold out completely one month before the conference and we expect this year to be sold out, too. We didn't even run a waiting list last year. So when the tickets are gone, they're gone. We have received a lot of great proposals, so rest assured that RubyNation 2012 will be one you don't want to miss.
Posted by Gray Herter: January 06, 2012
2012 Keynote: Jim Weirich
Since tickets will be on sale within 24 hours, it is past time to announce some speakers! So, let's start at the top, with keynoter Jim Weirich!
Jim is the Chief Scientist for EdgeCase LLC, an excellent Rails consultancy in Columbus, Ohio. You can follow him on twitter @jimweirich or read his blog, "{ |one, step, back| }"
He has spoken at RubyNation before, with two talks in 2010. Jim's SOLID Ruby video almost broke the will of our video production crew that year, with its 110+ slides! We were doing them the hard way back then by making a jpg file out of each slide! How the hell did he get over 110 slides into a 40 minute presentation anyway? But Jim is a master, so the old rules don't apply to his presentations. He made it look easy, it was awesome, and now that is one of our favorite RubyNation videos.
Jim will be in town teaching a Rails course with Dave Thomas conveniently scheduled just before RubyNation! Jim is an excellent teacher, and has loads of Ruby and Rails knowledge (Dave, too. Duh.). So take that course if you want to learn the right way, from the experts.
We'll be releasing speaker information regularly from now until early February. So, check back with us frequently for updates!
Posted by Gray Herter: January 06, 2012
Our 2012 Call for Presentation Proposals is Open!
Want to speak at RubyNation? Then we want to hear from you! Submit a presentation proposal! RubyNation will be held on March 23-24, 2012 in Reston, VA.
Presentations should focus on helping our attendees by teaching from your experiences. The audience is primarily practicing rubyists (of all levels), so talks should lean towards the technical side. All Ruby related topics will be considered (JavaScript, HTML5, Big Data, Agile, Start-Ups, too). Each presentation should be 40 minutes long, including time for questions and discussion.
Keep in mind that our audience will be fully-engaged members of the DC Area Ruby developer’s community. Your presentation should appeal to them. Presentations should be loaded with code and technical content. We are engineers. We want to be entertained, amazed, and have fun. Proposals containing marketing-based content will be sniffed out and booted!
Submit as many proposals as you want. More than one helps you get selected because we sometimes get similar talks from different people. If you only submit one, and it duplicates Jim Weirich’s talk then you will probably get cut. Panels or multi-presenter proposals are fine. Speakers will receive free admission to the conference and the speakers party/dinner the night before RubyNation, and the opportunity to address a large audience of talented and influential rubyists!
We plan to videotape all the presentations, and make the videos available online for free. If that isn’t OK, just let us know in your proposal notes.
Please submit your proposal by 11:59:59 PM ET on Wed, Feb 1st, 2012. We reserve the right to accept and announce a few proposals before that time, but not too many. We’ll decide that as we go along.
If you have any questions, please feel free to email us at proposals at rubynation.org. Your presentation is important to us, we want to help make it as good as possible.
We look forward to seeing some great proposals!
Posted by Gray Herter: December 15, 2011