Speakers
We have a great list of speakers for RubyNation 2010, including well-known Rubyists such as Dave Thomas, Jim Wierich, Aman Gupta, Nick Sieger, Russ Olsen, Jeremy McAnally, Joe O'Brien, Gregg Pollack, Joe Damato, and Nathaniel Talbott. Whatever your interests, we'll have you covered at RubyNation 2010.
SpeakerRate
SpeakerRate ratings are available at the RubyNation SpeakerRate page for all of the RubyNation talks.
Keynote Presentation: Dave Thomas
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.
For the past two years, Dave has been a featured speaker at our kick-off events held in conjunction with the Northern Virginia Ruby Users Group, but he has never actually spoken at our conference! We are really looking forward to correcting that.
Jeff Barr
Amazon Web Services - The Latest Developments (Slides) : Amazon Web Services Senior Evangelist Jeff Barr will discuss the latest developments in AWS including the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and the Amazon Relational Database Service. Jeff will show how these services can be used to build powerful and highly scalable applications in the cloud.
Jeff will introduce the EC2 Gem to instantiate EC2 objects (instances, IP addresses, and disk volumes), and then connect them to each other, all through code, driving home a really important fact about the cloud -- that it is fully programmable and that a set of powerful APIs sits at the base of the stack.
About the Speaker: Jeff Barr is focused on furthering awareness of web services and inspiring developers to create innovative applications using Amazon Web Services. Barr meets regularly with developers throughout the U.S. and abroad to introduce Amazon Web Services' expanding platform and showcase businesses that currently utilize the program's services. He is the author of Host Your Web Site in the Cloud to be published in March 2010 by SitePoint.
Barr joined Amazon in August 2002 as a Senior Software Developer on the Associates team and has a longstanding interest in web services and programmatic information interchange. He has held development and management positions at Microsoft, KnowNow, eByz, Akopia, was a co-founder of Visix Software, and holds a degree in Computer Science from the American University in Washington, DC. Jeff is also the principal voice behind the AWS Blog.
Kyle Banker
MongoDB: The Way and its Power (Slides) : MongoDB seems like a great idea. But when it comes to building an application, we may start to miss all those patterns familiar to us from relational databases. Where are my joins? How do I handle polymorphic associations? Here, we'll examine a dozen ideas for working the MongoDB way, including plenty of code examples. These techniques will highlight the unique features of the database, among them atomic updates, map/reduce, and the notion of embedded documents. We'll also consider the hard questions, including how to achieve durability, plan for scale, and reassure our relational-database-oriented brethren of the viability of a document database like MongoDB. You'll come away with a good sense for the surprises and joys of building apps in MongoDB.
About the Speaker: Kyle Banker works at 10gen, where he maintains the MongoDB Ruby Driver and supports the Ruby developer community. Previously, Kyle built e-commerce and social networking applications, and he once thrived as teacher of languages and literature.
Paul Barry
Block, Procs and Lambdas, Oh My! Functional Programming in Ruby (Slides) : Despite being an object-oriented language, Ruby contains functional programming features as well. This talk will cover what those features are, provide an in-depth look into how they work, and present examples of how to use them. Paul will also compare Ruby to other functional programming languages such as Clojure, Haskell, Erlang, Smalltalk, JavaScript and Scala to show you how you can incorporate techniques commonly used in those languages to improve your Ruby code.
About the Speaker: Paul Barry is a Software Developer from Baltimore, MD. Paul has over 10 years experience developing web applications in a variety of languages and frameworks, including Java, Perl, PHP and of course, Ruby on Rails. Paul has been a speaker at ActsAsConf and RubyNation and is a regular attendee and speaker at DC and Baltimore programming user groups. He blogs about Ruby, Programming and a variety of other topics at http://paulbarry.com/.
Michael Bleigh
Persistence Smoothie - Blending SQL and NoSQL in Ruby Applications (Slides) : With such a vibrant and emerging economy of new persistence options for web applications it can be diffcult to know when and how to use them in your applications. Worse yet, you don't want to lose mountains of existing infrastructure and support for RDBMS systems in Rails. What's a developer to do? Blend it! Learn new techniques for using multiple persistence engines in a single application.
About the Speaker: Michael Bleigh is the Creative Director and Open Source Activist at Intridea, Inc. He has created a number of popular Ruby open-source projects and plugins and has spoken at RailsConf, RailsConf Europe, and Confoo.ca.
David Bock
Modeling Workflow in Ruby on Rails with StonePath (Slides) : "Workflow" is a generic concept that can mean different things to different people - a book author is going to think of workflow a lot differently than a photographer processing images. Whether you are implementing a simple shopping cart or building a complex system to track the review of legal documents, there are abstract concepts of states, transitions, actions, actors, assignments, tasking, concurrency, sequences, and dependencies we can use.
Based on his experience in Federal and Local Governments as well as legal compliance applications for the enterprise, David has created the StonePath Project, a Ruby gem that allows you to model state-and-task-based workflow. In this talk, David will talk about this modeling methodology, the code to implement it, and how it has been used successfully in applications for the U.S. State Department, The Washington D.C. School System, and several Fortune 500 companies. You will leave this talk about to use the StonePath gem for your own workflow modeling needs.
About the Speaker: David is a Principal Consultant at CodeSherpas, a consultancy specializing in Java and Ruby software development. He is the past President of the Northern Virginia Java Users Group, a founder of the Northern Virginia Ruby User Group, an Editor for O'Reilly, and a technical reviewer for over 20 software engineering books. David is a frequent speaker on Java, Ruby, Software Engineering, and Project Management.
Jeff Casimir
How to Teach Anything to Anyone, Even Your Dev Team (Slides) : Michael Jordan will never be an effective NBA coach. He was the greatest player ever, but being great at something is a fundamentally different skill set than being able to coach others to greatness.
The Ruby community moves too quickly for any of us to be an expert in everything. We all need to be both teachers and learners, coaches and players.
Being a great programmer won't make you a great coach. As programmers and managers, you can multiply your impact by raising the game of those around you. Like basketball, there are just a few techniques that you need to be great - then it takes practice. In this session we'll crunch years of education study and practice into three principles you can deploy tomorrow.
In this session we'll explore each concept then work through examples applying them to the typical development shop. Attendees will leave with the understanding and framework to be great teachers.
About the Speaker: After majoring in Computer Systems Engineering Jeff joined Teach for America and began a career in education. He taught high school Computer Science for four years before moving into school administration. As a Vice Principal, he was responsible for evaluating and hiring new teachers, observing and coaching existing teachers, and defining much of the school's academic process.
Jeff is also a Ruby developer and loves discussing the art of building development teams and shops. Jeff believes that effective teaching strategies can take these teams to the next level.
Joe Damato and Aman Gupta
Garbage Collection and the Ruby Heap (Slides) : Everything in Ruby is an object, but what is a ruby object? What does it look like? Where does it live? How is it born and when does it die?
This talk will cover the implementation of the object heap and garbage collector in Ruby 1.8, with a focus on tools and techniques to understand memory usage, find reference leaks, and improve the performance of your ruby applications. We'll also highlight common tricks for improving the performance of ruby code running under MRI by reducing the memory overhead. Finally we'll look ahead to ruby 1.9 and jruby and talk about how they fix some of these issues in MRI.
About the Speakers: Joe Damato is a systems hacker who focuses on the low level implications of Ruby including I/O, performance, testing, and scaling. He maintains a blog where he releases code, patches to the Ruby interpreter, and his thoughts about low level systems programming. He has submitted a few patches to Ruby core, the most interesting of which are several bug-fixes and speed boosts to the threading implementation in Ruby 1.8 and a Fibers implementation for Ruby 1.8 that he worked on with Aman. He also added libdl and libunwind support to ltrace allowing tracing of function calls to ruby gems.
Aman Gupta is a serial entrepreneur, ruby hacker and a recent winner of a Ruby Heroes award. He currently maintains the EventMachine project and various other gems that help build high-performance distributed and asynchronous systems in ruby, including em-mysql, em-spec, jsSocket and amqp.
Most recently, Aman has been hacking on performance improvements to MRI, releasing several patches to ruby and perftools.rb, a sampling profiler for ruby code based on google-perftools.
Corey Donohoe
Mock Aren't Stubs, and Fakes Are Better (Slides) : Rubyists love testing. The testing landscape is always evolving and changing. As a rubyist we have the opportunity to lead by example in this space. Corey proposes that as library developers we should be providing environments that give people every excuse to explore and develop through testing. This can be accomplished through fakes.
Corey will cover the approach taken at Engine Yard for library development as well as the other common routes that people take when trying to create or integrate with an existing service. They have found that they have tests that are more clear and less brittle by providing fakes.
About the Speaker: Corey is Engine Yard's oldest technical employee and currently maintains a large part of the internal application infrastructure used by Engine Yard employees and customers.
Damon Feldman
Ruby and the XML Database : Ruby provides a variety of powerful tools (Builder, LibXML, ReXML, etc.) for creating and parsing XML data. Unfortunately, this power doesn't translate to the databases we typically use for storing our XML data. These databases simply weren't designed to handle XML and therefore it becomes very cumbersome (at best) to manage our XML storage with these tools. This mismatch of capabilities can cripple our ability to work effectively with our XML data within Ruby. This talk focuses on removing that capability mismatch by combining Ruby with an XML database. An important part of this integration is ensuring that the tools and frameworks that we currently use, such as Rails, continue to be usable. During this talk we will present extensive code samples as we explore:
- What is an XML database?
- How does an xml database enhance my existing Ruby xml capabilities?
- How do we connect to an XML database from Ruby?
- Integration with Rails
- The use of ActiveModel for compatibility with Rails 3.0
About the Speaker: Damon Feldman is a Senior Consultant with Mark Logic, a vendor of an XML Server that runs XQuery code. Prior to working with XQuery, he worked for years in object-oriented systems, including Smalltalk, Java and Ruby. He also holds a doctorate in computer science from Tulane University, where he studied programming languages with a focus on functional and logic languages.
Neal Ford
Rails in the Large: How Agility Allows Us to Build One of the World's Biggest Rails App (Slides) : While others have been debating whether Rails can scale to enterprise levels, we've been demonstrating it. ThoughtWorks is running one of the largest Rails projects in the world, for an Enterprise. This session discusses tactics, techniques, best practices, and other things we've learned from scaling rails development. I discuss infrastructure, testing, messaging, optimization, performance, and the results of lots of lessons learned, including killer rock-scissors-paper tricks to help you avoid babysitting the view tests!
About the Speaker: Neal is Software Architect and Meme Wrangler at ThoughtWorks, a global IT consultancy with an exclusive focus on end-to-end software development and delivery. He is the designer/developer of applications, instructional materials, magazine articles, courseware, video/DVD presentations, and author and/or editor of 6 books. He also speaks at lots of conferences.
Nick Gauthier
Grease Your Suite - Tips and Techniques for Faster Testing: (Slides, SpeakerRate) : Continuous integration is a great way to keep your code base clean and well tested, but if the suite takes too long to run developers lose their constant feedback loop. We'll explore methods of speeding up your test suite from cheap 5-minute operating system tweaks to external tools that will run your tests on multiple cores and servers. You won't believe how fast we run our tests.
About the Speaker: Nick Gauthier is a developer and technical lead at SmartLogic Solutions, a Baltimore web development company. He's been using linux on the desktop for almost a decade now, and started coding rails two years ago. He's an active attendee and occasional speaker at Bmore on Rails. He's developed a number of performance-obsessed ruby gems, like slow-actions and multitest.
David Keener
Leveraging Rails to Build FaceBook Applications: (Slides) : This presentation is a distillation of some of the practical tactics that Dave's development team at MetroStar Systems has used to create highly successful FaceBook applications using Rails, including real-life systems like PollCast and Iran Voices. FaceBook is the world's largest social network, with over 350 million members.
About the Speaker: David is a solutions architect for MetroStar Systems, a fast-growing consulting firm providing services to government agencies, non-profits organizations and the commercial sector. Dave has over 23 years of experience, specializing in Ruby, Rails, Java and social media. He is a frequent public speaker, and is involved in the NovaRUG, NovaJUG and DCRUG user groups. David is a member of the RubyNation Steering Committee. His RubyNation responsibilities also include video production this year, for both the videotaping of conference sessions and the production of a television documentary about the conference. He also blogs regularly on Internet-related subjects at KeenerTech.
Jeff Kunkle
Git Guts: (Slides, SpeakerRate): Does Git seem like a pinch of familiar version control concepts combined with a whole lot of black magic? If you're new to distributed version control systems the thought of how Git pulls off it's incredible speed and effortless branching can be intimidating. However, if you pull back the covers long enough to understand what's going on inside, you'll find there's nothing to fear.
This talk looks at the fundamental concepts of Git, exposing its brilliant simplicity with descriptions of the various object types, references, and branches. This talk isn't going to cover the laundry list of Git commands, but it should leave you feeling surprisingly confident about using Git.
About the Speaker: Jeff is the Chief Technology Officer at Near Infinity corporation, a small software development, training, and consulting-services company based in Reston, Virginia. He has spent the past eight years leading Agile-focused development teams and creating web-based systems and applications. The majority of his programming experience lies in Ruby/Rails, Java and Groovy/Grails, with Objective-C as a personal spare-time learning pursuit.
Jon Larkowski
Pure RSpec (Slides) : Go beyond the well-worn fundamentals of RSpec. No more will you simply set a bunch of instance variables in before-each blocks. We'll explore the latest (and apparently not-super-well-known) features of RSpec. And not just technical syntax, but also the higher-level patterns and refactorings implied. Topics include: let, subject, its, expect, shared examples, shoulda matchers, stub_chain, unstub, spork, rspactor, and integration testing.
About the Speaker: Jon "Lark" Larkowski is employee number one or two at Hashrocket, depending on how you count. He holds an Electrical Engineering/Computer Science degree from University of Wisconsin-Madison. Jon co-founded RubyJax: Jacksonville, Florida's best and only Ruby user group. He heroically escaped a bleak, dystopian world of .Net, grey cubicles and demoralizing waterfall methodologies, and now luxuriates beachside under palms, enjoying agile project management and extreme Rails development. Jon hails from scenic Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, home of speedy Cray Supercomputers and refreshing Leinenkugel's beer. Lately, he's into the easier kinds of yoga, the heavier brands of Scandinavian progressive metal, and the spinnier style of ping pong.
Derrek Long
Common and Useful Software Learnings From a Long Living Rails Application (Slides) : At TaxiMagic we've been working on the same rails application for 3 years. As such we've tried nearly everything rails has to offer. I'll go over what has worked for us and what hasn't, and additionally I'll slide in some "to do's", including using ruby's flexibility to easily build "driver" classes, when single table inheritance works and when it doesn't, using acts_as_state_machine, when not to be DRY, using look up models and associated caching, understanding database issues (null/not null, indexes, unique, indexes, limit, etc.), using named scopes, employing queuing/backgrounding/croning, and using web services/APIs.
About the Speaker: Derrek Long is a software architect at Ridecharge, where he develops the TaxiMagic and RideCharge web sites. Before RideCharge, he worked as a senior software engineer at TicketMaster for 6 years.
Jeremy McAnally
Rails 3: Living in the Future (Slides) : There's a lot of Rails 2.x series code floating around. This talk is a practical walkthrough of how to upgrade an app to Rails 3 and a look at some of the features one can use to improve existing codebases.
About the Speaker: Jeremy McAnally has been developing applications with Ruby and Rails for a little over five years, but before that he tortured himself with PHP, C#, Python, VB, and other instruments of destruction. After finding the light, he worked with Ruby for a while and penned "Mr. Neighborly's Humble Little Ruby Book" (soon to be published by No Starch). Since then he has continued writing software, books (such as "Ruby in Practice"), open-source code (such as dcov, context, and more), presentations for numerous Ruby conferences and user groups, blogs at omgbloglol, and basically done anything he can to sharpen his Ruby (and Rails)-Fu. He likes good food, good times, and a mean game of Wii Sports Resort Tennis.
Dave McVicar
Building a Social Video Contest Platform in Ruby on Rails (Slides) : This presentation explores the technical...and social...challenges inherent in building and operating a social network application, the Department of State's ExchangesConnect Online Video Contest, for an international audience. On the technical front, the presentation exposes how technical challenges were solved, from handling video uploads to streaming videos on demand. Then the presentation goes beyond the technical, to show how users interact with the features of social applications, for both good and ill. This section covers practical aspects such as reviewing videos before they go live, sub-contests, managing foreign-language content, handling "cheaters" who attempt to sway the rating system and influencing the behavior of users to achieve desired objectives.
About the Speaker: Dave McVicar is a Senior Solutions Architect for MetroStar Systems, Inc., a developer of Social Networking Solutions for Government clients. Dave has been developing software for nearly forty years and has led engineers in the Agile development of more than ten Ruby on Rails web applications. In his life before Rails, Dave designed high-speed check processing and archival systems for the international banking community. In his seven years at AOL, Dave was a product innovator and Ruby on Rails evangelist, and launched circaVie and Pixnay (now part of bebo.com). Dave's current Rails work is in the area of contest platforms that engage social networking communities.
Joe O'Brien and Jim Wierich
Tales of the Resistance; A Dialog on the Ruby Insurgency: Seamus sits at his desk putting the final touches on his Ruby script for reconciling invoices when he hears his boss' footsteps.
He's not doing anything wrong, Ian is a reasonable man, but he knows that Ruby isn't officially sanctioned by the committee for software standardization and furniture placement.
Will he get in trouble?
Ruby has been so useful that he's decided that now is the time he's going to take a stand. Last week he talked to Conner at the pub after the Ruby Brigade and they came up with a strategy for Ruby adoption.
Will he succeed? Stay tuned for tales of the resistance
About the Speaker: Joe is a father, speaker, author and developer. Before helping found EdgeCase, LLC, Joe was a developer with ThoughtWorks and spent much of his time working with large J2EE and .NET systems for Fortune 500 companies. He has spent his career as a developer, project manager, and everything in between. Joe is a passionate member of the open source community. He co-founded the Columbus Ruby Brigade and helped organize the Chicago Area Ruby Users Group. His passions are Agile Development in the Enterprise, Ruby, and demonstrating to the Fortune 500 the elegance and power of this incredible language.
Russ Olsen
Looking Inside Your Ruby Implementation (Slides) : Ever wonder how it all works? How Matz sat down with nothing but a C compiler and an editor and ended up with Ruby? How the JRuby guys are making the JVM livable again? In this talk, Russ Olsen will take you on a quick tour of the Ruby 1.9 C implementation as well as the Java behind JRuby. During this talk Russ will demo how to use both gdb and Eclipse to watch the gears and cogs spinning as your Ruby program runs.
About the Speaker: Russ Olsen's career spans three decades, during which he has written everything from graphics device drivers to document management applications. These days, Russ diligently codes away at GIS systems, web service security and process automation solutions with both J2EE and Rails. Russ spends a lot of his otherwise free time talking and writing about programming, especially Ruby and Clojure. Russ is the author of Design Patterns In Ruby and the Technology As If People Mattered blog. Russ' technical pontifications have been translated into six languages and Russ has spoken at various conferences including Paris On Rails, Developer Day, RubyNation and the VTM Professional Ruby Conference. Russ is currently hard at work on another book about Ruby.
Gregg Pollack
Deciphering Yehuda (Slides, SpeakerRate) : Yehuda Katz has done some great Ruby refactoring for Rails 3 over the past year, but do you really understand what he's done? In this talk, Gregg Pollack will attempt to examine Yehuda's work, identify and deconstruct each programming technique that he's applied, and then teach them in a way that everyone can understand.
Some of the techniques to be discussed will include: Method Compilation vs Method Missing, Decoupling Components, Embracing Rack, alias_method_chain vs super, Abstract Classes, and Componentization.
Attendees should walk away with a greater understanding of some advanced Ruby design patterns and a better insight into the internals of Rails 3.
About the Speaker: Gregg Pollack is a well-known leader in the Ruby and Rails communities. Gregg works at Envy Labs, where he produces a podcast, creates educational screencasts, and develops websites with Rails. He is a founder and current member of the Rails Activists, a set of committed volunteers devoted to increasing the adoption of Rails. Gregg also organizes the Orlando Ruby Users Group, and is also sometimes known as the Ruby on Rails guy in the "Rails vs" commercials or the "C" in MVC.
Brian Sam-Bodden
Component-Oriented Web Applications in Ruby (Slides) : Trellis is a component-based, event-driven Web micro-framework that provides a DSL to describe web applications in terms of pages, components and events. It combines the best features of desktop application development and modern MVC frameworks like Rails and Sinatra. Trellis pushes the complexity of building web applications onto components allowing you to build simple lightweight applications or complex, feature-rich applications.
About the Speaker: Brian Sam-Bodden is a developer, author and speaker that has spent over fifteen years building software in variety of languages. In the last four years his concentration has been on the Ruby programming language and the Ruby on Rails framework (although he still gets paid to do Java when no one is watching). Brian heads Integrallis, a Ruby/Groovy/Java shop with offices in Columbus, Ohio and Scottsdale, Arizona.
Nick Sieger
Rails: The Killer Java Web Stack: Most people know that Rails is the original productive web application framework that all the others copied, and most know that it has been runnable on the Java Virtual Machine for years via JRuby. What a lot of people don't know is how to properly integrate Rails and Java; that is, how to incrementally introduce Rails into your legacy Java environment and leverage its strengths without ditching your Java infrastructure.
Finally, all the pieces are in place to make Rails development and deployment in a polyglot Java environment possible. Rails 3 brings all the goodness of Rails in bite-size, composable chunks. Ant and Maven are becoming more Ruby- and Rake-savvy, so you don't have to give up your build infrastructure. Multiple database possibilities await, so you don't necessarily have to switch to ActiveRecord. Use Ruby and Rails where it hurts the most to give your project more flexibility!
In this session Nick will make recommendations on some of the best ways to making Rails and Java play nicely together using JRuby, and run through some demos of the more practical ways to get things done. Most exciting, you'll get a preview of the quickly-evolving JRuby on Rails stack.
About the Speaker: Nick Sieger is an engineer at Engine Yard, working on JRuby and leading the effort to make the Java Virtual Machine a robust yet easy-to-use deployment platform for Rails and Ruby web applications. He created and co-maintains the JDBC adapter for ActiveRecord that JRuby on Rails uses for database connectivity, as well as the Warbler tool and JRuby-Rack library for dealing with Java application server deployment.
Nathaniel Talbott
Developing Customers (Slides) : Startups don't fail because they lack a product; they fail because they lack customers and a proven financial model." So says Steve Blank, entrepreneur, Stanford professor, and author of the excellent "Four Steps to the Epiphany". And he's right: if you look at the startup graveyard, you'll find it cluttered with lots of great products that no one would pay for.
As a developer this is a pretty discouraging realization. As makers, our skills center around creating a product, not around finding a market. So how do we take our maker skills and apply them to what Steve calls the "Customer Development Process"? That's exactly what this talk will explore, including a crash course in Customer Development and a roadmap any developer can follow to make sure they're building a product that is actually viable.
If you have an entrepreneurial bone in your body you won't want to miss it!
About the Speaker: Nathaniel runs Spreedly, Terralien, and has an entrepreneurial itch that just won't go away. Beware, it may be contagious!
John Trupiano
I Don't Trust Your Code - And How Can We Fix That?: (Slides, SpeakerRate): The focus of this talk is about developing interoperable code bases that will be used by the community. With the recent explosion in the number of gems being released, it's more important than ever to understand how your design decisions can create problems for your users. You will learn about the RubyGems runtime environment and how it handles versioning and manipulates the load path. We'll explore the implications this has on gem consumers and authors. I'll explain best practices for file structure, code structure, versioning, documentation and distribution of gems.
About the Speaker: John owns the rails consulting firm SmartLogic based in Baltimore, MD. He is highly involved in the Baltimore technology and business communities. He's the vocal and spiritual leader of their local Ruby users group Bmore on Rails. He is the co-creator of the Maryland Tech Crawl, a technology show and tell event showcasing the mid-Atlantic’s up and coming entrepreneurs. He is the creator and maintainer of the popular RubyGems timecop and rack-rewrite. Additionally he has contributed to rails, capistrano, gemcutter, shoulda, and factory_girl.
Glenn Vanderburg
Enabling the Enterprise: There is a kind of software development called "Enterprise Software Development." It's aimed at the problems of large corporate enterprises. It has its own tools, methods, and architectures.
And it doesn't work. Not even for large corporate enterprises.
Enterprises have been told that they have unique problems that smaller groups don't have. But do they really? And if they do, are they really the problems that enterprise tools are designed to solve? In this talk, Glenn will explain why the real problem of enterprise software development is "Enterprise Software Development."
About the Speaker: Glenn Vanderburg is a principal at Relevance, Inc. He has worked in enterprises of all sizes, using tools that range from the ridiculous to the sublime. This year, he's spending his days wrangling Ruby and Clojure.
Jim Weirich
Solid Ruby (Slides) : The 5 SOLID design principles (the Single Responsibility Principle, the Open/Closed Principle, the Liskov Substitution Principle, the Interface Segregation Principle and the Dependency Inversion Principle) form a great foundation for understanding good Object Oriented design. But the SOLID principles were originally conceived with statically typed OO languages, such as C++ and Java, in mind. How well do these principles hold up when the implementation language is Ruby? Are the principles just as pertinent as they were in Java, or does the dynamic nature of Ruby change what we mean by good design? In this presentation we will examine the SOLID principles to understand their core purpose, and then run them through the "Ruby Filter" to see if any of these core principles survive. By understanding these principles, we become better Ruby programmers.
About the Speaker: Jim Weirich is the Chief Scientist for EdgeCase LLC, a Rails development firm located in Columbus Ohio. Jim has over twenty-five years of experience in software development. He has worked with real-time data systems for testing jet engines, networking software for information systems, and image processing software for the financial industry. Jim is active in the Ruby community and has contributed to several Ruby projects, including the Rake build system and the RubyGems package software.
Andrea O. K. Wright
Ruby is from Mars, Functional Languages are from Venus: Integrating Ruby with Erlang, Scala and F# (Slides) : We won't just look at how to use projects that bridge Ruby and functional languages, we'll walk through the lower-level code that allows the inter-language communication to happen.
We'll explore different approaches to language interoperability ranging from accessing libraries through universal protocols to embedding foreign syntax in a host source file.
We'll also discuss techniques for ensuring that your polyglot applications won't read like bad translations and behave in unexpected ways.
About the Speaker: Andrea O. K. Wright specializes in Ruby technology for Chariot Solutions, a consulting firm based in Fort Washington, PA. A 15-year IT industry veteran, she has presented about advanced classloading concepts and annotation processing at JavaOne and topics ranging from developing games in Ruby to thread safety at national and regional Ruby conferences including RubyConf and RailsConf. She enjoyed introducing elementary school age children to Ruby String manipulation at CodeMash 2009 with her "Playing with Strings" session. She has also been the Ruby content chair for the Philly Emerging Tech Conference.
Lightning Talks!
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 (say, 5 minutes max). Your lightning talk can be fun, like "X is awesome! It changed my life!", a call to arms, like "Help us build Y. The world needs it!", a plea, like "Let's put an end to the scourge of Z.". You've heard of opinionated software, well this is opinionated talking. So, let's hear yours. Oh, and please keep it no worse than PG-13 rated.
Ruby Marketplace
Need a Ruby or Rails job? Need Ruby or Rails developers? Stop by the Ruby Marketplace and tell us all about it. Maybe you can find your dream job, or find that one awesome rubyist who can make your project soar. During this special session we will open the microphone to employers and potential employees.
Last year the Ruby Marketplace at RubyNation was responsible for several people getting Ruby work. That is something of which we are immensely proud, and we want to build on that this year. So, help us give the economy a Ruby Stimulus! Tell your HR department to get cracking on a short announcement! If you got a job to tell, we wannna hear about it!
