Confreaks

Forget about JRuby. MacRuby? Forget it. Forget even Rubinius. As cool as each of them is, they are old. Like, you know, for adults. Introducing the real future of Ruby: KidsRuby… because the future is about the kids!

KidsRuby was born as a fresh approach to the most impor...

Rubyists love testing, and test-driven-development is becoming the way to write code. But, do we do this with our command-line tools? How do you write a test that your awesome application cleans up its temp files? How does one make a failing test for a missing command-line opt...

There are lots of reasons to understand distributed systems. Among them are the facts that the principles can improve your site's availability, performance, and even maintainability. We'll talk about principles, patterns, and pitfalls to watch out for when writing your first d...

Interfaces are not created equal. Upon reaching the summit of a releasable product it is easy to lose sight of where you started. The disconnect grows as you explore how to build a bridge from internals to end users. Developing interfaces for others is one of the hardest thing...

Look at your Rails unit test suite. Now look at mine. Now look at yours again. Mine are sub-second. Yours aren't. Having a slow unit test suite can hinder an effective test-first or test-driven approach to development. As you add tests, the suite starts to slow down to the poi...

CouchDB is an increasingly common member of the Ruby developer’s toolset. Its flexible model, low footprint, REST interface, and wide library support make it a natural choice for many web, mobile, command-line, and desktop Ruby apps. As community manager at Cloudant, I can t...

In this talk, José Valim will share what he has learned about Ruby through writing a small programming language. He will discuss the basic structure of a programming language, suggest improvements and debate about Ruby's parser, object model, methods, iterators and blocks.

The Go programming language, invented at Google, brings a novel new approach to parallel programming. With a strong focus on developer productivity and software readability, Go shares a lot of design philosophy with Ruby while targeting a different set of problems. Though the ...

Programming languages must be implemented in Java or C, everybody knows this. Sure, a prototype in Ruby, but that would be unusable. After all, Ruby is made for web development, right? Hard tasks, like implementing a compiler, have to happen in far more manly languages. But wa...

We're facing a tidal wave of rescue projects. So many developers dive into writing Rails applications without building a real foundation in Ruby. Instead we focus on the new whiz-bang features of Rails or the hot gem of the week—missing the awesomeness right in front of us....

Let’s face it. CSS is dumb. There is no such thing as a DRY CSS file and stylesheets are often the biggest blemish in an otherwise beautifully coded app. Sass is the future of stylesheets. Rails 3.1 includes it by default and the W3C is adding concepts from Sass to CSS itsel...

Demand for richer, more interactive mobile web applications requires tools and frameworks that are as intuitive and simple to use as Rails. These new applications are built with JavaScript but still require server backends. While there are many new JavaScript frameworks, only ...

I work for a mobile payments company called Square. Square has a great development culture driven by a lot of smart people. Part of that culture includes acknowledging failures, figuring out what should have been done differently when failures occur, and learning how to fail l...

What's a Ruby conference without lightning talks? And more importantly, who would want to find out?

Framework development comes with a whole different set of tradeoffs than application development. While code in applications is usually in service of a consumer-facing feature, framework code is by definition used by other developers writing unknown code. That means a heighten...

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...

Goliath is an open source, event-driven I/O framework, much like node.js or Tornado, except that Goliath is based on EventMachine, features a Ruby API, and most importantly, does away with the asynchronous "callback muck" by utilizing Ruby 1.9's Fibers to preserve the nice syn...