Dear Ruby Friends,

The Cascadia region (Vancouver BC, Seattle WA, Portland OR, et al) has a rich history of Ruby activity. But for a number of reasons, there’s never been a regional Ruby conference here. We think that’s silly, so we’re putting one together. It’s going to be awesome.

We want you to be a part of it. Get registered today and we’ll see you in -208 days.

Location

Bell Harbor Convention Center 2211 Alaskan Way, Pier 66 Seattle, WA 98121 Bell Harbor Convention Center Directions Google Map

Bell Harbor Convention Center

Keynote Speakers

Platinum Sponsor

InfoSpace

InfoSpace

Gold Sponsors

Silver Sponsors

Session Speakers

  • Haris Amin harisamin.tumblr.com @harisamin

    Haris Amin started hacking/developing software ‘professionally’ after completing his undergrad studies in physics/math. He is currently part of the Dailyburn team where he works alongside his colleagues building quality products that help people maintain a healthy lifestyle. He resides in New York City, where he spends most of his after-hours checking out live jazz music, hanging out with other developers/hackers, and participating in various hackfests around the city. Haris claims to have coined the term ‘flauntepreneur’ — someone who builds/hacks on projects just to ‘flaunt’ it to his fellow hacker friends. Not so surprisingly, he is also an obsessive github troll. Haris is constantly regarded by his peers as an evangelist for all things he likes. Ruby trumps that list.

    Haris Amin

    The Enumerable Module or How I fell in Love with Ruby

    We will discuss my personal and humble beginnings in ruby being a young college grad, entering the world of ‘professional’ software development. The Array class in Ruby immediately fascinated me. Soon, the Hash class would join its company. I finally found the granddaddy of them all, the Enumerable module.

    We will explore how the Enumerable module empowers some of our favorite Ruby types (Array, Hash). We will then also take a brief look at the Standard Lib Set class (introduced in 1.9) that further shows the beauty of the Enumerable module to create data structures in Ruby. Finally, we'll see a naive implementation of another data structure using the Enumerable module.

    The purpose of this talk is to share and encourage others (especially people new to Ruby) to explore core classes and Ruby. Spend time staring at methods in our classes and dare to tinker. I guarantee that doing so will be a start of a fruitful and passionate love affair with Ruby!

  • Gary Bernhardt destroyallsoftware.com @garybernhardt

    Gary Bernhardt is a creator and destroyer of software compelled to understand both sides of heated software debates: Vim and Emacs; Python and Ruby; Git and Mercurial. He runs Destroy All Software, which publishes advanced screencasts for serious developers covering Unix, Ruby, OO design, and TDD.

    Gary Bernhardt

    The Unix Chainsaw

    Unix blurs the lines between your file system, network, version control, editor, tests, and programming language. This gives it power to answer important questions: Did my rebase break any specs in the rewritten commits? Which of my classes are referenced the most, making them risky when the system changes? Do my spec files run correctly in isolation?

    This talk will cover intermediate-to-advanced use of Unix to answer questions like these. The end goal is to start thinking of the entire operating system-not just the editor-as a development environment.

  • Ryan Davis blog.zenspider.com

    Ryan Davis has been using Ruby since 2000 and is a founding member of the Seattle Ruby Brigade, the ass-kickingest ruby brigade (per-capita). His background includes QA, automation, language and tool development, object databases, and smalltalk. In ruby/rails, he has worked on developer productivity and test automation tools such as heckle, hoe, ParseTree, ruby2c, ruby2ruby, RubyInline, ZenTest, minitest, and more.

    Ryan Davis

    Size Doesn't Matter, or: The ins and outs of Minitest

    Minitest is awesome. It's more powerful than test/unit, faster than cucumber, and able to leap over nothing. I'll go into detail of all the goodies that minitest provides and talk a bit about its design rationale and why it rocks.

  • Ian Dees @undees

    By day, Ian Dees slings code, tests, and puns at a Portland-area test equipment manufacturer. By night, he dons a cape and keeps watch as Sidekick Man, protecting the city from closet monsters. Ian is the author of Scripted GUI Testing With Ruby and co-author of Using JRuby, both published by the Pragmatic Programmers.

    Ian Dees

    Playfulness at Work: a Real Serious Message(tm) with Ruby as the Medium

    “Playfulness at Work” — does that mean “bringing play into the workplace” or “the way playfulness works?” Both, actually. Seven years after _why wrote “Wearing Ruby Slippers to Work,” it’s time to don the entire Ruby-encrusted tuxedo and storm the workplace. We’ll discuss ways to keep work playful (and as a side effect do better work), including:

    • Dealing with crusty data formats and protocols in a lighthearted way
    • Scripting other people’s software (whether they know it or not)
    • Sharing your code with co-workers without annoying them
    • Deploying your programs to honest-to-goodness paying customers

    And because no Ruby discussion is complete without a bit of armchair sociology, we’ll do some hand-waving about the importance of play to the mind and to the team.

  • Corey Donohoe atmos.org @atmos

    Developer at GitHub.

    Corey Donohoe

    Shipping at the Speed of Life

    It will cover how we often times have 2-3 different branches running simultaneously in production, how we use continuous integration, and why continuous deployment isn’t ideal for our workflow. I’ll cover the metrics and automation pieces we have written in Ruby that help us make all of these things happen. The talk will hopefully get people to think about whether they’re deploying as efficiently as possible and what changes they can make to help their organization ship better.

  • Mando Escamilla mando.org @mandoescamilla

    Father and developer

    Mando Escamilla

    How Community Saved My Life

    We all know what to do when our software isn’t working: but what do we do when our life isn’t working? This is the quick story of how my own life almost killed me and the people that saved me.

  • Avdi Grimm avdi.org @avdi

    Avdi Grimm has been hacking Ruby code for 10 years, and is still loving it. He is chief aeronaut at ShipRise, 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.

    Avdi Grimm

    Confident Code

    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
  • Geoffrey Grosenbach blog.peepcode.com @topfunky

    Senior Visionary of The Topfunky Corporation. Host of the Ruby on Rails Podcast. Maker of PeepCode screencasts.

    Geoffrey Grosenbach

    Code and Creativity

    How does one start with nothing and make something? When we write computer programs, we start with only our thoughts. One can improve one’s skills and write better programs by using techniques well known to creative artists: scratchpads, prototypes, thought streams, side projects.

  • Aja Hammerly @kushali

    Ruby developer; passionate about good code, education and combining those to improve learning.

    Aja Hammerly

    Powerful (but Easy) Data Visualization with the Graph Gem

    Many projects involve large datasets. While humans have evolved to be master pattern matchers, trying to find patterns and potential issues by looking at database rows and xml is hard. Creating diagrams is helpful but manually creating them is time consuming and prone to error.

    The graph gem makes it quick and easy to create visualizations. I’ll show how to use Nokogiri and graph to get data out of an XML file and into a format where you can see relationships and patterns. I’ll also demonstrate some of the advanced features of graph including clustering and color coding.

  • Rich Kilmer richkilmer.blogs.com @rich_kilmer

    VP R&D LivingSocial, RubyCentral board member, Ruby/RailsConf

    Rich Kilmer

    To Be Announced

    It’s a secret. Sssshhhhhhh.

  • Sam Livingston-Gray livingston-gray.com @geeksam

    Sam Livingston-Gray has been turning money into code since 1998. He started out writing untestable Access VBA code, but learned { :tdd => 2004, :smalltalk => 2005, :ruby => 2006 }, and he feels much better now, thank you. Sam lives, works, and dines in Portland, Oregon.

    Sam Livingston-Gray

    Think Like (a) Git

    Git has a famously steep learning curve.

    Once people achieve some level of Git enlightenment, they tend to make statements of the form 'Git gets a lot easier once you realize X' -- but that doesn't do much to help people staring up that steep slope.

    When you're just getting started, something as straightforward as a merge can be terrifying. It can take a long time for people to really become comfortable branching and merging and stashing, let alone rebasing or cherry-picking.

    This talk aims to provide two things:

    • a very gentle introduction to graph theory, and
    • a simple strategy for safely experimenting with Git operations,

    so that people can build comfort and confidence with this incredibly useful tool.

  • Jim Remsik pcrd.me/jremsikjr @jremsikjr

    “Big Tiger” has several years of government-sector, full life-cycle business process automation projects under his belt before joining the Ruby community via Hashrocket in 2007. Years of experience in leading a maintenance team means he has answered to angry customers and the developers, project leads, and clients responsible. A simple philosophy of building simple software that works as expected emerged from that experience. You will find him speaking at user groups, conferences, and board rooms on everything from agile development tools and techniques to deep technical dives into Ruby or other best in breed technologies.

    Jim Remsik

    60 to 0 MPH in 2.5 Seconds: A Retrospective

    This talk will be a story of my experience crashing a full size stock car into the blunt end of a concrete wall. This is a true story that happened to me at Columbus 151 Speedway in Columbus, WI. It occurred in a recurring event, which has been featured on Ripley’s Believe It or Not, called the Back-up Race where up to 12 cars race backwards around 1/4 mi. asphalt oval at speeds up to 65 MPH.

    If you want to research this you can visit my YouTube channel.

    The analogy to be communicated is the risk involved in what we do today and how to protect yourself and when to live on the edge.

    We’ll cover:

    • Which precautions to take (and skip)
    • What to do in moments of peril
    • How to handle to aftermath
  • Dylan Stamat @dylst

    Dylan Stamat is the CTO at ELC Technologies, a Rails and Mobile development firm based in Portland, Oregon. Dylan has been involved with implementing large scale Java and Ruby systems for Fortune 500 companies as well as managing their internal and external teams. He helped bootstrap RightCart, RightScale, RightSignature and is actively involved in helping entrepreneurs and startups succeed.

    Dylan Stamat

    David and Goliath, Ruby and the Enterprise

    Ruby and Rails has already found itself in the code bases of Fortune 2000 companies, but it can take a lot of time and effort (and convincing), to get there. This talk will provide a lot of examples and stories of some of the battles we’ve fought in the space. My talk will go through:

    • The current landscape of Ruby and Rails in the Enterprise.
    • The common roadblocks that one will face when introducing Ruby/Rails into existing large scale systems.
    • Solutions and approaches to the roadblocks that we’ve found that have worked.
    • Enterprise Architecture examples, and how we fit Ruby/Rails into the fold.

    Attendees of this talk will walk out feeling more comfortable moving Ruby/Rails into the Enterprise space. If we are prepared when approaching these opportunities, we’ll all benefit from a continuing influx of Ruby/Rails job offerings, and, the advancement and investment of both Ruby as a language and Rails as a framework.

Bronze Sponsors