Confreaks

"A Documentation Talk" sounds pretty boring, right? Wouldn't it be scandalously titillating if this talk's title included detailed analysis of the expectations and results of the talk itself? Jeez it's like someone's making an overt metaphor for h...

Jeff Casimir will lead a follow-up panel focusing on testing topics with Justin Searls, Cory Flanigan and Jim Holmes.

Selenium’s a wonderful tool for automating acceptance and functional tests; however, real-world implementations bring a lot of pain. I suffered all that pain, and more, as I piloted an effort that started out with Selenium IDE, moved through RC,...

As practitioners who comprise the Ruby software community, we have made great strides to establish testing as a best practice. We have done so in order to build quality into our processes and systems.

It seems, however, that we have a blind spo...

Cassandra is a highly scalable and fast database engine based on its column architecture. It's a powerful alternative to most RDMS systems. Adding it to Rails gives you a great way to get a scalable system with many rows that can grow to meet your...

As Ruby continues to mature as a language, its use in large scale (enterprise!) codebases is expanding - and the need to integrate into larger architectures is already here. It is tempting to build networks of APIs in order to integrate applicatio...

The Ruby community is obsessed with testing, supposedly. In my experience about four out of five applications have either zero or completely ineffective test coverage.

Have the courage to change it. Whether your own projects or recovering someo...

In under two months, my team: * Learned all about Rails 3.1, Backbone.js, CoffeeScript, Sass, and CouchDB * Wrote a new application that deploys open source stacks in the cloud * Created some stacks (e.g., Rails, Tomcat, BIRT) * Went to production...

At least since node.js everyone knows that real time HTTP responses are the next big thing. The secrets of handling incoming requests asynchronously with Ruby is not yet far spread among Rubyists, as the internals needed for such responses are nei...

Learn how to go inside out vs. outside in so you can tap into your intuition to make strong decisions and come up with innovative solutions. It might just help you invent the next big thing rather than being the next Groupon clone.

Many of us are familiar with the old adage about writing code "for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute" (thanks, Abelson and Sussman) - but it's easier said than done. The fields of object-oriented design, patterns, and s...

Ever wonder how software is designed and developed at GitHub? Are you curious about how new features are deployed to the site? (Hint: ask the robot.) Want to know why we don't have any managers and don't track vacation days?

This talk will expl...

You are happily writing new code for your system when all of a sudden the code is not behaving the way you thought it should. Perhaps you just created a failing test, and the code you wrote was expected to make the test pass ... but it doesn't. Wh...

You know how to raise and rescue exceptions. But do you know how they work, and how how to structure a robust error handling strategy for your app? Starting out with an in-depth walk-through of Ruby's Ruby's rich failure handling mechanisms -- inc...

People often think of design as something that helps solve problems, but design should actually prevent problems in the first place. While you may not be a designer, applying tenets of design thinking to your life and work will help you make bette...

REST is an architectural style for distributed systems. However, many implementations forget about the distributed part of REST and simply map CRUD operations to HTTP verbs in a monolithic application. We're gonna go further and learn why hypermed...

The effects of API design will likely live with your project for a long time, often beyond your tenure with the project. Yet good API design is very rarely discussed and often leads developers to the conclusion that good APIs are something that "w...

Michael Feathers will be giving the opening keynote this year at Rocky Mountain Ruby. Michael is well known in the software community for his work with XP/Agile, improving software development and working on large legacy codebases. Don't miss his ...

Ever have one of those days where you sit back at the end of the day and realize that you didn't get anything tangible done? Why do those days happen? Many times is it because we lack focus during the day to complete even the simplest of tasks. Ou...

A musical selection for your enjoyment.