Dave Thomas: Opening Keynote

Dave Thomas is an internationally recognized expert Rubyist. He is a cornerstone of the Ruby community, and is personally responsible for many of its innovative directions and initiatives.

Dave is a co-founder of the Pragmatic Programmers and the Pragmatic Bookshelf. He helped write the now-famous Agile Manifesto. He is the author of many books, including the best sellers The Pragmatic Programmer, Agile Web Development with Rails and Programming Ruby. Dave's blog can be found at PragDave.

Blake Mizerany: First Day Closing Keynote

About Blake: Blake has been into ruby since way back in 2001, and is the creator of Sinatra, the popular ruby microframework. Blake spends his days at Heroku, where he makes mind-blowing features out of ruby and erlang, and often says “you’re doing it all wrong”.

He speaks regularly at ruby events and in conjunction maintains a completely indiscernible beard-shaving schedule.

Dr. Nic Williams: Conference Closing Keynote - Why RailsInstaller? Didn't Rails Win Already?

The path to becoming a "Top Gun" of Ruby on Rails starts with first being interested in airplanes, flying really fast, and making smart-assed jokes like "There's two Os in 'Goose', boys." The achievements and glory are only if you come in first, "No points for second place."

At the end of Top Gun, Maverick gets the girl and becomes a Top Gun instructor. Time to teach. Time to share the wisdom. Time to create more fighter pilots.

That's where we are now with Rails community. We have thousands of Top Gun Rails developers, but we need another 100,000 or 1,000,000 amateur pilots. We need to continue to bring developers and designers into the Ruby on Rails community. RailsInstaller started as a mission to help Windows developers get started in Rails. It's now much bigger. Can we get Ruby on Rails onto every developer's machine?

About Dr. Nic: Dr Nic is Vice President of Technology at Engine Yard and is responsible for its large Open Source program. He has been presenting at International Conferences since 2007.

He is also Australian and thinks he is funny. Rumor has it that the real reason for his recent move to Engine Yard HQ in California was to further his fledgeling comedy career.

Wesley Beary: fog or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Cloud

Cloud computing scared the crap out of me - the quirks and nightmares of provisioning cloud computing, dns, storage, ... on AWS, Terremark, Rackspace, ... - I mean, where do you even start?

Since I couldn't find a good answer, I undertook the (probably insane) task of creating one. fog gives you a place to start by creating abstractions that work across many different providers, greatly reducing the barrier to entry (and the cost of switching later). The abstractions are built on top of solid wrappers for each api. So if the high level stuff doesn't cut it you can dig in and get the job done. On top of that, mocks are available to simulate what clouds will do for development and testing (saving you time and money).

You'll get a whirlwind tour of basic through advanced as we create the building blocks of a highly distributed (multi-cloud) system with some simple Ruby scripts that work nearly verbatim from provider to provider. Get your feet wet working with cloud resources or just make it easier on yourself as your usage gets more complex, either way fog makes it easy to get what you need from the cloud.

About Wesley: geemus (aka Wesley Beary) is an avid Rubyist and Open source enthusiast. He spends his days developing fog at Engine Yard and spends much (probably too much) of his free time working on other open source projects.

Aaron Bedra: Rails + Clojure Sitting in a Tree

Rails has become an incredible tool for designing and building web applications and has quickly become a dominating framework amongst premier developers. Clojure is an up and coming language that has a lot to offer. While Rails is a fantastic framework and Ruby is an incredible language, problems often creep up that are outside of the common sweet spot for both. Take a look at how to leverage Clojure to solve these problems and change the way you think about web applications.

About Aaron: Aaron Bedra is a principal at Relevance, Inc. (http://thinkrelevance.com) where he works as a technical lead, speaker, and author. Aaron's current focus is Enterprise Systems Integration using Clojure and JRuby. He is the maintainer of the Ruby code coverage analysis tool, RCov, and is a contributor to many open source projects including the Clojure language, Clojure Contrib, Compojure, and Ruby on Rails. Aaron is the author of the Rails Security Audit Peepcode.

Dave Bock: Building Semantic CSS with Compass and SASS

Compass is a tool that can help you build cleaner, better structured, and less error-prone CSS. Semantic CSS is a technique where your CSS vocabulary describes *WHAT* things are on your page, rather than *WHERE* they are. Together, this tool and this concept can radically improve the structure of your html.

With compass, your CSS is written in a CSS superset called SCSS which can include variables, math, and method calls that evaluate to CSS. The end result is pure CSS - so you don't need to worry about anything 'funny' on the browser side. This lets us write cleaner CSS that documents the intent of our design, not just the 'end result'.

About Dave: David is a principal consultant at CodeSherpas, a consultancy he founded in 2007. David currently consults as a software engineer, project manager, and team mentor for commercial and government clients, bringing his expertise to bear on their difficult technological and management problems.

In January 2006, Mr. Bock was honored by being awarded the title of Java Champion by a panel of esteemed leaders in the Java Community in a program sponsored by Sun. There are approximately 100 active Java Champions worldwide. David has also served on several JCP panels, including the Specification of the Java 6 Platform and the Java Module System.

Jeff Casimir: Fat Models Aren't Enough

"Fat Models, Skinny Controllers" they scream. Pushing your logic down to the model layer is a key step to improve testability, maintainability, and code quality. But many developers now have "junk drawer" models that don't realize these goals. Having a fat model isn't enough! In this session we'll explore techniques for improving your models including:

• Extracting code into libraries and gems
• Encapsulating logic into processor objects
• Using the presenter pattern
• Deciding between class and instance methods
• Guidelines to judge code quality and complexity

When you leave this session you'll be dying to refactor!

About Jeff: I've been teaching programming to everyone from middle-schoolers to enterprise programmers for the past 8 years. I started Jumpstart Lab in 2009 and love helping people up their development skills.

Trotter Cashion: Raphaël and You, Get the UI You Deserve!

- Presentation Slides

Contrary to what Adobe might tell you, Flash is not required for beautiful user interfaces. The Raphaël JavaScript library uses SVG and VML to create highly interactive interfaces that are compatible with all major browsers, even IE back to version 6. Better yet, the elements Raphaël creates are just a normal part of the DOM, and you can use jQuery and other frameworks to attach event handlers to them. In this talk, we'll discuss the Raphaël API, how to attach event handlers to its elements with JavaScript, and some of the interesting UI tricks you can pull off with Raphaël. Prepare to have your mind blown as you see how interactive Raphaël can make your site, all without leaving the comfort of JavaScript.

About Trotter: During the day, Trotter Cashion is co-founder of Mashion, a best-practices focused Ruby and Javascript consulting company in Philadelphia. At night, he can usually be found hacking on various open source projects, writing books (he's contributed chapters to The Rails Way and Service-Oriented Design with Ruby and Rails), or drinking a beer and talking about code. In the past, he's worked on streamlining financial communications with Algorithmics, streaming personal videos over the internet for Motionbox, developing a CMS for the New York Jets, and writing an open source OpenID server for VeriSign.

Scott Chacon: Git: It's All About the Trees, Baby

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Git is the version control system most of us use every day. However, there are some strangenesses to it. Raise your hand if you really understand the 'reset' command. When it comes down to it, this is one of the most interesting, fundamental and amazing commands that Git has, yet nearly everybody is afraid of it. This is just bad marketing. This talk will de-mystify the 'reset' command so that you are not only comfortable using it, but can do new and interesting things with it and in doing so will arrive at a better understanding of the entire Git system. We will explore the Three Trees of Git (HEAD, index, work tree) and all the cool and mind-bending fun you can have with them.

About Scott: Scott Chacon is a Git evangelist and developer working at GitHub. He is the author of the Pro Git book by Apress, the Git Internals Peepcode PDF, as well as the maintainer of the Git homepage Git homepage and the Git Community Book.

Scott is not an actor on Mad Men, and refuses to participate in Karaoke.

Jerry Cheung: Rails with Node.js - A Reese's Moment

We all know Rails is great for making traditional web apps. But adding real-time features to a Rails app can drive up complexity and eat up precious resources from the rest of your app. In this talk, we take a tour of what Node.js is, and what it's good for. We'll also go through some common web app features where Node.js fits in alongside Rails.

• real-time dashboards and analytics
• push notifications
• file uploaders
• form validators

About Jerry: Jerry loves creating software. He started experimenting with Ruby on Rails in 2007 and has been hooked ever since. He works primarily as a Rails engineer at Intridea, but also dabbles in Mac development with MacRuby.

When he’s not coding, Jerry might be out running, brewing beer, or enjoying a BBQ and getting a serious sunburn.

David Copeland: Make Awesome Command Line Applications in Ruby

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Tired of maintaining your one-off script that has now become someone's job to execute? Wishing you could create polished applications on the command line similar to git or cucumber? In my talk, I'll talk about what makes a command line application "awesome", and why you should care. I'll talk about what makes Ruby particularly suited to this task over mainstays like bash and Perl. We'll compare and contrast several Ruby libraries that can make even your lowliest automation script a polished, maintainable, and predictable application.

About David: Dave Copeland is a veteran software developer with over 15 years of professional development experience, starting on UNIX and C, moving into Java, and now using Java, Ruby, and Scala on a daily basis for energy-efficiency startup OPOWER in Washington, DC. He lives in the command line and firmly believes in getting things done quickly, not making a mess, and leaving things better than how he found them.

Chad Fowler and Rich Kilmer: So You Think You Need a Rewrite?

Your application is slowing down and you can't seem to speed it up. The code is a mess, and changes are taking longer and longer. You're afraid to release new features for fear of introducing bugs throughout the system. The marketing and sales teams are frustrated by how long new features are taking to release. All signs seem to point to the dreaded Big Rewrite.

Big Rewrites are dangerous projects. The decision to rewrite shouldn't be taken lightly. In this session, we will walk through the pros and cons of Rewrites and give real world examples of Rewrite strategies that work and that fail. From the first hint of a need for a rewrite, through the migration and deployment of the reincarnated system, we'll share our victories, sorrows, joy, and pain.

By the end of the session we hope you'll have a better idea of how to approach The Big Rewrite the next time it rears its never-welcomed head and have a framework which increases your likelihood of success.

About Rich: Rich is a co-founder of InfoEther, a company focused on applying Ruby in business. He is also a leading contributor in the Ruby open-source community. He co-founded and is a current board member of Ruby Central, a non-profit promoting Ruby. Prior to InfoEther, Rich founded and served as CTO of Roku Technologies, one of the first peer-to-peer solutions companies and an early adopter of Java. In his 20 years as a software technologist, he has been a sales engineer, designer, consultant and a systems security manager in the U.S. Air Force at the Pentagon. He is an internationally known speaker at software technology conferences.

About Chad: Chad Fowler is an internationally known software developer, trainer, manager, speaker, and musician. Over the past decade he has worked with some of the world's largest companies and most admired software developers. He loves to program computers and, as part of his role as CTO of InfoEther, Inc., spends much of his time solving hard problems for customers in the Ruby language. He is co-organizer of RubyConf, RailsConf, and RailsConf Europe and author or co-author of a number of popular software books, including the recently released "The Passionate Programmer: Creating a Remarkable Career in Software Development".

Avdi Grimm: Confident Code (Photo ©2010 REP3)

Are your methods timid? Do they constantly second-guess themselves, checking for nil values, errors, and unexpected input?

Even the cleanest Ruby codebases can become littered over time with nil checks, error handling, and other interruptions which steal attention away from the essential purpose of the code. This talk will discuss strategies for writing your Ruby classes and methods in a confident, straightforward style; without sacrificing functionality or robustness. In the process, we'll cover concepts and techniques points including:

• The narrative style of method construction
• The four parts of a method
• Three strategies for dealing with uncertain input
• Massaging input with coercion and the Decorator pattern
• Lightweight preconditions
• Exterminating nils from your code
• The chaining and iterative styles of method construction
• Eliminating conditionals with the Special Case and Null Object patterns
• Isolating errors with the Bouncer and Checked Method patterns

About Avdi: Avdi Grimm has been hacking Ruby code for 10 years, and is still loving it. He is chief aeronaut at ShipRise LLC, a consultancy specializing in sustainable software development and in helping geographically dispersed teams work more effectively. He lives in Southern Pennsylvania with his wife and four children, and in his copious spare time blogs and podcasts at http://wideteams.com and http://avdi.org/devblog.

Nick Gauthier: KnowSQL: Database Tricks to Make Your Life Easier

- Presentation Slides

Relational databases have been around for decades, and there's a vast amount of untapped power sitting right at our fingertips. The problem is that messing with SQL can be difficult and confusing. This talk, make up of 6 discrete chapters, shows how you can use a little dash of database in your app to make working in Rails easier and faster.

Chapters 1 and 2 are beginner chapters and focus on indexing and database integrity. Chapters 3 and 4 are intermediate and focus on full text search and geospatial queries. Chapters 5 and 6 are advanced and cover custom queries via AREL, aggregation, joins, and a big bag of miscellaneous tricks.

About Nick: Nick Gauthier is a Ruby on Rails performance junkie. Last year he focused on ways to speed up Rails test suites, and now he's focusing on speeding up your application in production. He's been using Rails since 2.0 dropped and Linux long enough to remember slackware and the 2.4 kernel. He's the creator and maintainer of the test-performance gem Hydra.

Jim Gay and Patrick Peak: Content Management for Rubyists: The shrinking distance between websites and web applications

The interest and market for open source content management systems (CMS) has grown immensely in the past few years. As these solutions (primarily PHP based) gather more developers/builders/designers, they become an increasingly safe choice for clients to use for building their sites. Solutions like Wordpress and Drupal support a growing ecosystem of modules that allow non-programmers to build dynamic sites without the need for much custom programming. As websites gain more functionality, the divide between risky bespoke/custom web applications and CMS powered websites is shrinking.

In this talk, we will discuss the state of the CMS market, what advantages Ruby has for building content driven websites (especially Rails 3), and why reinventing the CMS wheel can be a costly mistake for your clients. We will also cover some of the architecture/design decisions that went into creating Radiant and BrowserCMS, client perceptions of project risk, and speculate on how Ruby can compete with PHP based CMS solutions for market share.

About Patrick: Patrick Peak is the Project lead for BrowserCMS, a Rails based content management system and the CTO of BrowserMedia, a full service interactive agency near DC. With 10 years of experience in the web industry, his current professional interests include making sense of content management systems and a drive to make software usable for non-geeks. He is also the co-author of Hibernate Quickly, an introduction to the Java ORM tool, by Manning Publishing.

About Jim: Jim is the Lead Developer for RadiantCMS and is a prolific contributor to it and many open-source projects. At Saturn Flyer LLC he’s built numerous Radiant sites, custom applications, and award winning graphic design. Jim has been a co-host of the Ruby 5 podcast and has been professionally building Ruby and Rails applications since 2006.

Jason Harwig: HTML5, Past and Present

- Presentation Slides

For years web professionals have been using a doctype of XHTML 1.0. That spec was released in January of 2000, more than a decade ago, and HTML4 was 3 years before that. HTML5 is the next version of HTML, and still in W3C's status of Working Draft. The term HTML5 has become adopted by industry, but their definitions don't always match the spec. Does that even matter? Can web developers begin adopting the (draft) standard now?

This talk will answer those questions and pick apart the past to see how HTML5 became a standard, and why it has taken so long. We'll also dive into some of the new features, focusing on the capabilities available today. Finally, we'll take a look to see what the future of front-end web development might be like.

About Jason: Jason Harwig's full-time job is a senior software engineer at Near Infinity Corporation, an enterprise software development and consulting services company headquartered in Reston, Virginia. In his spare time he runs Pine Point Software LLC, writing Mac, and iPhone in Cocoa/Objective-C.

His interests include Cocoa, JavaScript, OpenGL and user-interface design.

David Keener: Creating Killer Business Models

You've created some really great software, but is it sufficient to form the basis of a viable business? What's your business model? How can you describe your business model and effectively communicate your vision to others? How can other people evaluate your business model and determine whether your vision and business strategies have merit? In this talk, I'll provide a conceptual basis for defining, documenting and evaluating business models. I'll also use real-world examples to show how these concepts can be effectively applied to help build actual businesses.

Ryan McGeary: One Man Lightning Talks

- Presentation Slides

To celebrate the NovaRUG's 50th meeting, they opened to the floor to lightning talks. As an added incentive, the highest voted lightning talk was to be given a speaking slot at RubyNation 2011. I guess bringing my friends and family paid off that day. In the spirit of that event, I will attempt to give back-to-back lightning talks on a wide range of topics, including:

• CoffeeScript: Exposing the Good Parts of JavaScript with Better Syntax
• Why Your Commit Messages Suck
• Managing Deployment Environments with Git
• Bundler for Applications; RVM Gemsets for ???
• How We Use MongoDB at BusyConf
• HTML5 Application Caching

Like a one-man-band, this talk will entertain with fast paced and varied content, keeping the audience engaged and entertained. Also like a one-man-band, it will provide the opportunity to witness disaster.

About Ryan: Ryan McGeary is a freelance software consultant, business starter, speaker, and amateur triathlete. Ryan is the owner of McGeary Consulting Group, a software development and consulting firm in Northern Virginia. He is also a partner and co-founder of BusyConf, a conference organizing web application. Ryan specializes in web application development and enjoys leveraging new tools and frameworks for his day to day development efforts. You can keep up with Ryan at his website and by following him on Twitter.

Keavy McMinn: Must. Try. Harder.

Are you pushing yourself with the right force, in the right direction, to achieve what you want, what makes you happy, what you're capable of?

Based on her experience of training for Ironman distance triathlons, Keavy will discuss the preparation involved in pushing herself towards her own mental and physical limits, and the effects this has had on other areas of her work and life.

The talk will explore some attitudes and processes in the practice and performance of sport that are critical in reaching your full potential. It will look at how these approaches can also benefit the journey not just of personal development, but career development. It won't be about achieving some grand vision of mastery, but rather on pursuing outcomes that are true to the individual; on making informed, conscious decisions about what to focus your energy on; and maintaining the drive to get there.

This talk aims to inspire people to try harder.

About Keavy: Keavy works developing software, delivering private Ruby/Rails training and speaking at conferences.

As an independent consultant, over the last decade, she has enjoyed pairing up with some of the top development shops across Europe and the U.S. Since the summer of 2010 she has been part of the renowned team at InfoEther.

Like many of her fellow Irishmen, Keavy enjoys telling a good story. Unlike many, she trains for Ironman triathlons and is not a fan of whiskey. Cosmo, anyone?

Luigi Montanez: Search-Friendly Web Development

• - Presentation on Slideshare

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, has gotten a bad reputation over the years. SEO experts seem like nothing more than snake oil salesmen and spammers. But we as Ruby web developers ignore search engines at our own peril. For the average site, over half of all traffic will come in through search engines: Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. While developing web apps, we need to keep searchability close to the top of our priorities.

Implementing best practices when it comes to search is just as important as practicing TDD and keeping code DRY -- it should be a core competency for professional web developers. This talk will cover how search engines work, how to work with search engines, and how to develop your Ruby web apps with search engines in mind.

About Luigi: Luigi is a Ruby developer with the Sunlight Labs: a non-profit organization focused on opening up government data, and then creating tools and apps around that data. He has been a Rubyist since 2006.

Dane Morgridge: From .NET to Rails

There seem to be a lot of .NET developers taking a solid look at Ruby on Rails recently (and some are jumping ship on .NET) and I have to wonder if the reason is ASP.NET MVC. There are a lot of similarities between the two and in this session I will give an intro to Ruby on Rails from a ASP.NET MVC developers prospective and how they are similar. I took my first look at Rails several years ago, but it was after working with ASP.NET MVC, that I really "discovered" what Rails had to offer. I will share my learning process from ASP.NET MVC to Rails and how working with Rails has helped me be a better overall developer.

About Dane: Dane Morgridge has been a developer for 10+ years and has worked with numerous technologies in this time. His current passions are Entity Framework, Ruby on Rails & C++. He is currently a Microsoft MVP for Data Platform Development and an ASPInsider. He works mostly with C# and Ruby on Rails, but is also a big fan of whatever new technology he happens to come across. In addition to software development, he is the host of the Community Megaphone Podcast and also enjoys dabbling in graphic design, video special effects and hockey. When not with his family he is usually learning some new technology or working on some side projects. He is currently working as a Senior Software Engineer at RDA Corporation. He can be reached through http://www.danemorgridge.com or @danemorgridge on Twitter.

Mutchler, Burket, Weaver, and Zaveri: GuardRails: A (Nearly) Painless Solution to Insecure Web Applications

With web applications continuing to grow in popularity and frameworks becoming simpler to use, creating a web application is easier than ever. While building an application may be straightforward, ensuring that it is secure requires both a deep understanding of subtle security vulnerabilities as well as tedious and careful insertion of security checks. We propose GuardRails, an open source source-to-source tool for Ruby on Rails applications that adds extra layers of security to web applications with only minimal effort from the developer. GuardRails works by attaching security policies to the data itself. These policies are automatically enforced throughout the application, without the need for the developer to write large amounts of code. Our system helps prevent against a variety of security vulnerabilities from CrossSite Scripting to faulty access controls without requiring the developer to have a sophisticated knowledge of web security.

About the Speakers: Jonathan Burket, Patrick Mutchler, Michael Weaver, and Muzzammil Zaveri are all members of a team of researchers working under the direction of Prof. David Evans at UVa. They have been tasked with research regarding a secure web application framework. GuardRails is one of the products of their research.

Joe O'Brien: Ruby on Android

With the advent of JRuby many doors have been opened that were not before for Ruby. One particular place is the android platform. Using Ruby, we can easily leverage the Android platform and API's to create incredible applications. Since we are using Ruby, testing becomes a trivial exercise. The application Ruboto began as a Ruby Summer of Code program and has exploded onto the scene. With the assistance of some very simple generators you are given a framework from which to understand and build your first Android application. In this program we will show the basics of how it is built and then build an actual application that can be deployed to the market place. All of this, and tests too.

About Joe: Joe is a father, business owner, speaker and developer. In 2006 he co-founded EdgeCase, a leading Ruby and Ruby on Rails training and consulting company. They have had a tremendous amount of success helping companies as large as GAP and AT&T Interactive as well as those startups still in the inception stage. Through a partnership with the Pragmatic Programmers, he has been giving training for well over three years on testing and development with Ruby on Rails. He is a speaker and has spoken at conferences ranging from RailsConf to numerous regional conferences and countless user groups.

Russ Olsen: JRuby in Production

Most Rubyists know that JRuby is the implementation of our favorite little language that runs on the Java VM. JRuby is 99.99% compatible with the traditional MRI implementation and is rapidly closing in on complete 1.9 compliance. But what is it like to use JRuby in a real application?

Drawing on several years of real-world experience with JRuby based solutions, Russ will discuss using JRuby in production applications. Why pick JRuby over one of the other Ruby implementations? What are the real world pitfalls of using JRuby and how do you avoid them? Russ will also look at how you can put JRuby to work in some unexpected ways and point out some things that you can do to ensure that it all keeps running.

About Russ: Russ Olsen is the author of Design Patterns in Ruby as well as the upcoming book Eloquent Ruby.

Mat Schaffer: Ruby on the Phone

- Presentation Slides

It's not quite phreaking, but hooking your Rails app up to a phone number can be a lot of fun and/or profit. There are couple APIs available that let you do this and you only pay for what you use. In this talk we'll do a deep dive on integrating with Twilio, a telephony API provider. The features include making and receiving calls, recording and transcribing voice mail and handling SMS.

We'll cover the basics of handling call flow, some of the gotcha's that come up, how to work with TwiML (the Twilio Markup Language) and some approaches to testing Twilio using tools like Artifice. By the end of the talk, attendees will have all the basics to get started and know where to find more as they dig deeper.

About Mat: Mat Schaffer is a full stack web developer with a passion for effective process and clean code. He spent the last decade working on high-traffic web applications and optimizing developer productivity at Comcast. Now he's bringing that experience to bear on companies across the country as co-founder of Mashion. He's also an regular contributor to open source and organizes the Philadelphia Ruby Group, Philly.rb. When he's not coding he can be found playing music, rock climbing or squeezing a giggle out of his son.

Ben Scofield: Thinking Small

- Presentation Slides

Once upon a time, huge dinosaurs roamed the earth. If you looked carefully, though, you could see a whole other world teeming about their feet -- small, agile mammals. As it turned out, those small mammals survived events that wiped out their huge neighbors.

We can learn a lot from (pre)history. As it turns out, the day of the monolithic application is rapidly passing. The future lies in large numbers of small, interconnected applications. In this talk, we'll look at why this strategy works, how to decompose large applications into small, independent ones, and how to make sure they all work together as effectively as possible.

About Ben: Ben Scofield has built applications large and (more recently) small, as a developer in the enterprise, as a consultant with Viget Labs, and most recently as a developer advocate at Heroku. He's coded, spoken, written, and organized his way around the Ruby community for the past six years.

Christopher Sexton: The Basics of RubyGems

This talk will delve into the mystical world of RubyGems, starting with the basics and staying there. This will be an opinionated and pragmatic look at how to use the standard ruby packaging system. Starting with nothing but an empty directory, Christopher will walk through the creation of a gem, demonstrating how to test, build and publish that shiny new gem.

Christopher will discuss tools he uses, and why. The ever changing opinions on how to manage the libraries. Touchy topics like generating the gemspec or manually editing it, and conventions such as naming the commands, module and requiring rubygems.

About Christopher: Christopher is a principal software engineer at ZipList, and before that Symantec. He began programming Ruby in 2007, and in addition to maintaining internal gems at work he released several utility Gems as open source, which can be found on github.com. He is up on the web at Codeography.

Chris Williams: The JavaScript Renaissance

There are few (if any) languages that force “open source” as much as JavaScript. JavaScript has seen a meteoric rise in interest, excitement, energy, and unfortunately hype in the past 3 years. It has become one of the fastest interpreted programming languages available, mainly to due to vested interest from companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Mozilla. It has broken out of the browser with node.js and is rapidly captivating the top server-side development minds. It has new features on the way with ES-Harmony, many of which are available through new clothes like CoffeeScript. This is a survey of everything awesome that is currently going on in the world of JavaScript, none of the hype just a baseline survey.

About Chris: Chris Williams is the curator of JSConf and VP of OurParents. He is the producer of the deep nerdcore focused podcasts, JSConf Live and Minute With Series. He has made it his mission to change how JavaScript is viewed by search engines and improve the growth and sustainability of software development communities at large. More commonly known, internetwise, by the handle of voodootikigod, he has been known to fancy a good beer.

What Do You Have to Say?

The RubyNation wants to hear your lightning talk!. Whatever you want to talk, rave, or rant about, this is your chance. We don't care what it is, just as long as it is of interest to the Ruby community and relatively short (like, 5 minutes max). So, what do you have to say?