Keynote

Ben Scofield is the Technology Director for Viget Labs, where he uses his experience working with startups like Squidoo and ODEO and his expertise in Ruby, Rails, and other technologies to help new businesses get on the right track. He's spoken at numerous conferences around the country and world, co-chaired RailsConf in 2010, and runs the DevNation series of local conferences around the US. He blogs at http://benscofield.com and tweets as @bscofield.

Keynote

Glenn Vanderburg is Chief Scientist at InfoEther, a development and consulting firm specializing in high-productivity platforms, tools and methods. He has 25 years of experience as a professional developer in enterprises large and small, and he is passionate about advancing the state of the art of software development.

There's A Wheel For That Already – Hidden "gems" in the Ruby Standard Library

Ruby is an amazing language with a great, innovative community, but so often we forget to look inside of Ruby's standard library before we start implementing something we need. Join me, as together we embark on a journey of wonder, exploring the numerous treasures in Ruby's vast standard library. From OpenStruct, Singleton, Forwardable to the wonderful FileUtils, we'll discuss ways these libraries can improve your code, and we'll investigate where they fall short. Let's go exploring!

Brian Hogan has been developing web sites and web applications since 1995 as both an independent consultant and as a developer at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. He provides high-quality small group or one-on-one training for developers on topics such as accessibility, Ruby on Rails, test-driven development, and graphic design concepts. He is the author of Web Design for Developers and HTML 5 and CSS 3 for Pragmatic Bookshelf.

You already use Closure

Closure, especially used through lambda, can be a powerful tool, which lies behind a lot of magic in Ruby (as well as other languages) Unfortunately, these tools are often misunderstood by those who didn't cut their teeth on Lisp or Haskell. This talk will show you where closure is used in innocent looking every-day ruby constructs you already use, where it appears in popular Ruby libraries and frameworks, and how to take better advantage of closure in your own code.

Justin Love's creed is, in part "To tease order from disorder. To make right what is wrong and make a visible difference in the lives of people I care about." Justin left a steady job in embedded software and IT support for the wild blue yonder. He is an analytical artist and martial artist who presents regularly at ChicagoRuby and JS.chi user groups.

Grease Your Suite: Speeding up long running test suites

In this talk we'll explore methods of speeding up the test suite so that developers can be confident about the code they've written before they share it with the team. We'll start with quick cheap fixes (like optimizing your operating system), examine methods of writing tests that reduce their run time, and finally we'll move to more involved methods of multi-tasking your test suite to run on all the cores in your workstation and even to setting up a distributed testing cloud to run all your tests in parallel. We'll show the evolution of a test suite from its full run time of 13m 15s down to a number you won't believe! With no change to application code, and no reduction of test coverage, and it's all run on the *same machine*.

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 and a half 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 hydra, slow-actions, and multitest.

The Perpetual Novice

It takes time to learn, to progress through stages from novice through competency and proficiency to expertise. But expertise can be a goal and a trap. The goal of expertise is a difficult, or at least time-consuming and involved one to achieve. It requires work and practice. Changing systems from underneath someone working at expertise delays them at best, and usually invalidates a huge chunk of work. Continually changing systems keeps people at the novice level indefinitely, unable to get enough of a grasp on anything stable to proceed. The trap of expertise is removing yourself from the mindset of the beginner, forgetting what it's like to not have full knowledge of a system. Creating a barrier to entry. Confusing newcomers who could otherwise pick up on the details and more quickly be on their way to productivity, being a helpful member of the team.

Yossef Mendelssohn, co-conspirator in OG Consulting and progenitor of such wonderful flogic projects as autochronic, timely, and shmemeter. A member of the Ruby community that stands to the side as the vanguard drools over the new hotness. A fatigued cleanup artist slogging through the crap others leave behind.

Configuration Management in the Cloud with Chef

This session will cover the basics of using configuration management tools in the cloud. We will discuss infrastructure automation as a lynch pin for managing cloud-based infrastructures. Configuration management examples will be drawn from the Open Source Chef project. Chef is based on Ruby and all of the examples used in the presentation are based on Chef's Ruby DSL.

John M. Willis is currently the VP of Services at Opscode, Inc. John has worked in the IT management industry for 30 years. He began his professional career at Exxon as an IT infrastructure analyst. He is the founder of four successful startups over the past 20 years Willis is known internationally for his IT Management and Cloud blog and his recent DevopsCafe.com. He also has two podcast series on clouds called, "Cloud Cafe, and Droplets." Willis is also the co-host of Redmonk's IT Management Guys‚ podcast series.

A/B Testing for Developers

A/B testing doesn't have as much street cred as SEO or user experience these days, but it's just as effective a technique for boosting conversion rates and determining how your visitors use your web application. It seems simple: post two pages with the same goal, serve each page to your visitors an equal number of times, and measure the results. But the insight such simple tests can give into your visitors' intentions is enormous. In this presentation we'll walk through several examples of A/B testing in action, share some tips and tricks for using it effectively, and explore tools that make A/B testing with Ruby a snap.

Matthew Bass is a freelance software developer who has been enjoying the freedom of Ruby for many years now. He moonlights as an entrepreneur by "homesteading," building small revenue-generating applications. He introduced one such application, Teascript, at RailsConf in 2007. Aside from co-organizing the Ruby Meetup in his home town of Raleigh, North Carolina, he currently works with the awesome people at Terralien and volunteers his time for local charities.

Parsing Expressions in Ruby

Parsing expressions are a relatively new technique for creating parsers (and even interpreters) simply and quickly. Several popular Ruby projects make use of parsing expression grammars to parse relatively complex grammars, including Rails' new mail gem and Less CSS. In short, parsing expressions are a very handy tool that programmers can use whenever they need to parse something that can't really be expressed using regular expressions. The most popular library for creating parsing expression grammars in Ruby is currently Treetop. I tried to get into Treetop, but I found the codebase difficult to understand and a bit awkward. So I created my own library for parsing expressions called Citrus. I'd like to talk about both libraries, and spend more time on the idea of parsing expressions instead of touting a specific lib though.

Michael Jackson is an independent web developer living and working in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is passionate about good design on both the front and back end, and he believes in keeping it simple. He blogs at http://mjijackson.com/ and posts his random thoughts to Twitter as @mjijackson.

Coding in anger, or is that desperation?

I believe I've heard a saying that haven't really learned how to do something until you've done it in anger. Most times my anger is more like desperation. In this talk, I want to explore how me and my teams have approached crazy situations and we solved the problems with different levels of correctness. There will be code of course, but there will also be a real element of passion that I hope to share with other developers to do things that might not be in the comfort zone. I'm sure I'll share an f-bomb or two for old times sake.

Bryan Liles does a myriad of Ruby related tasks for his daytime job in a quaint little town near Baltimore, Maryland. He hasn't written any books, and doesn't maintain any major open source projects. Most of his time is spent helping others level up their awesomeness; trying to cause chaos with writings on his blog, http://smartic.us; or just being a great dad and husband. Some came to lead. Some come to be lead. Bryan comes to smash the status quo.

Refactoring in Practice

As the Ruby and Rails communities mature, legacy codebases, and the ability to work with legacy code has become a prevalent issue. Instead of dreading having to work with legacy code (and dreaming of "greener" pastures), I'll show how to embrace the code you have, improve it, and leave it better than you found it. To borrow from Michael Feathers, we'll focus on "working effectively with legacy code." This talk will focus solving difficult refactoring problems in a real world codebase. I will show actual code and demonstrate specific refactoring techniques to show how specific problems were solved. This is not a conceptual talk, and thus we will look at LOTS of real code. You've been warned!

Alex Sharp has been Lead Developer for OptimisDev since October 2009. Prior to joining OptimisDev, he co-founded Second Street Creative in 2006, a boutique web application development and design consultancy specializing in creative brand development and agile ruby application development. He is particularly interested in the NoSQL movement and mastering the art of refactoring. Among other open source contributions, Alex is the author of Bunyan and Papermill, two libraries for working with MongoDB. He currently lives in sunny Los Angeles, CA, blogs at alexjsharp.com and tweets as @ajsharp.