Contributing to Rails for the first time can be intimidating! What makes a good contribution? What does the review process look like? Why should I even bother in the first place? In this talk, we will answer all of these questions and more as we learn about contributing to the Rails framework. We will follow along with a real story of upstreaming a new feature, and learning about the hurdles encountered along the way, both expected and unexpected.

You have been working hard to meet a deadline and then you receive an email from your boss, asking you to take on a new project. You're at capacity with your time, resources, and focus, but you still feel obliged to say "yes". This scenario is common for most of us. We don't want to say "no" because we don't want to disappoint people or let them down. This is even a bigger problem when you start leading people. Saying no enables you to focus on what's important and prevent burnout. In this talk, you will take away tools and strategies to become more confident around saying no.

Join Brittany Martin (The Ruby on Rails Podcast), Jason Charnes (Remote Ruby) and Paul Bahr (Peachtree Sound) as they interview guests from the community on a live podcast. Guest #1: Aaron Patterson, Senior Staff Engineer at Shopify Guest #2: Irina Nazarova, CEO of Evil Martians Guest #3: Voted on by the community in an online poll Guest #4: Voted on by the community live at this session Audience questions and voting are welcome and encouraged!

Legacy code. Did you just shiver with dread? We know it when we see it, but we don't know how it got there, or why it looks like... this. What if we could change our relationship with legacy code, and shed the weight the name brings with it? What if legacy code disappeared? Throw away everything you've ever learned, embrace the mindset of Eternal Onboarding, and watch as our problems with "Legacy Code" melt away.

Nowadays, passwords are still our most common authentication method. However, they are not secure enough and have terrible UX. Therefore, big industry players in the FIDO Alliance like Google, Mozilla, Apple, Amazon (among others) collaborated together to find a solution. WebAuthn was born and eventually became a W3C standard enabling users to authenticate on the web using public-key cryptography together with biometrics. This talk will allow you to learn what WebAuthn is and how it works. You’ll also see how any Ruby app can easily get the level of authentication security and UX users deserve.

Building a world class engineering organization — learning from cave paintings and horsey land art by Shane Becker Human built things survive for a Very Long Time™ by one of two ways: materials or maintenance. What we can learn from Stonehenge, Lascaux cave paintings, Brewarrina Aboriginal Fish Traps, the White Horse of Uffington, Iranian windmills, and Japanese Shinto shrines? If we knew for certain that our Rails apps would be in use in ten years (or a hundred!), what would future us wish that we would've done now to build a better future?

Debugging is one of the most powerful and necessary tools in a developer's toolkit, and what better way to hone our Rails debugging skills than by using real-world examples from the Rails codebase itself? In this talk, we'll explore how using merged PRs from the Rails codebase can help improve your debugging skills, increase your familiarity with the framework, and build your confidence in navigating complex issues. By leveraging the wealth of knowledge and experience within the Rails community, you'll come away from this talk with a newfound appreciation for the power of collaboration and the importance of community-driven development.

Ruby puts the Ruby in “Ruby on Rails”! It’s the Ruby language that makes Rails flexible, powerful, and with a developer-friendly API. How does Rails take advantage of Ruby’s flexibility and metaprogramming to make it so useful? And how can you take advantage of those features in your Rails app? We’ll go over a few specific Ruby features, like how Rails uses Modules, or `define_method` or `instance_eval`. You’ll be able to use these features to make your app as powerful as Rails itself. Ruby Central