March 23-24, 2012
Reston, VA

Russ Olsen Presents "Eloquent Explanations"

We're pleased to announce that Russ Olsen will present "Eloquent Explanations".

Have you ever thought about how much of software engineering involves explaining things? We stick comments in our program to explain why we added X to Y, we type up README files to explain the program, we write proposals to explain why the program should be funded and we spend the afternoon explaining the whole thing to the new guy so that we can move on to something new. A decent explanation can be the difference between success and obscurity: Would there be a RubyNation if there had been no 15 minutes build-a-blog screencast for Rails?

In this talk Russ Olsen will run through the things that you can do to craft explanations that are clear, engaging and perhaps even a bit funny. Russ will do his best to be clear, engaging and perhaps a bit funny.

Russ Olsen (@russolsen) likes to think that technology is there to solve problems for people, not the other way around.

Russ started his career doing that other kind of engineering, the sort that involves electricity, gears and getting dirty. Pretty rapidly the wonder of computer programming lured Russ away, which probably explains why most of his fingers are still intact today. Since turning to coding, Russ has worked on everything from 3D design and image processing software to database query engines and workflow systems. Russ first discovered Ruby back in 2000 when he went looking for a simple programming language to teach to his son. The seven year old lost interest, but Russ never did and he has been building increasingly sophisticated systems in Ruby ever since.

These days Russ spends a fair bit of time promoting Ruby via public speaking and is a RubyNation founder. Russ has also written extensively about Ruby in the form of two highly regarded books: The first, Design Patterns in Ruby was published in 2008 and is a complete reworking of the classic Gang of Four patterns for a modern dynamic programming language. Russ's second book Eloquent Ruby is a guide to writing idiomatic Ruby. Russ also has been secretly enamored with parentheses since a very early age and lately has been dabbling in Clojure.

Russ is a Software Architect for Relevance (http://thinkrelevance.com)

Posted February 16, 2012

Patrick Peak to Present "Plays Well with Others: Building Mountable Apps"

We're happy to announce that Patrick Peak will present "Plays Well with Others: Building Mountable Apps".

Rails 3.1 introduced Mountable Apps and Engine, a great way for developers to build and reuse functionality between applications. Engines can be as simple as adding a model, or a complex as an entire content management system. Now using the Asset Pipeline, even javascript and css files can be packaged and shared, making projects cleaner and more maintainable than ever before.

This talk will cover how developers can create their own engines, to add new controllers/models/views, rake tasks and/or generators. It will cover how engines can interact with Rails having their own initializers and middleware. Finally, based on our experiences converting BrowserCMS and its entire module ecosystem to work as mountable engines, this talk will cover how to make engines that are designed to work together, extend each other engine’s behavior and make it easy for developers to upgrade when you release new versions.

Patrick Peak is the project lead for BrowserCMS, an open source Rails CMS and the CTO of BrowserMedia, a full service interactive agency near DC. His current focus in on promoting Rails for content management. He is the co-author of Hibernate Quickly, published by Manning.

Posted February 16, 2012

Kickoff Keynote: Justin Gehtland

We're thrilled to announce Justin Gehtland as our kickoff keynote speaker. Justin will present "Thinking Differently About Data".

Justin Gehtland is a technologist, business guy, writer, and connector. Justin is also the chairman of Relevance, which he founded with Stuart Halloway in 2003.

Justin's focus has been, variously, on development, execution, business development, management, and now exploring new opportunities for the Relevance team. He is the co-author of 8 technical books, a long-time speaker and pundit, and a true believer in sustainable capitalism.

Posted February 15, 2012

Roy Tomeij Presents "Modular and Reusable Front-End Code with HTML5, Sass and CoffeeScript"

We're pleased to announce that Roy Tomeij will present "Modular and Reusable Front-End Code with HTML5, Sass and CoffeeScript".

Keeping your front-end code clean is hard. Before you know it you’re suffering from CSS specificity issues and not-really-generic partials. Find out how to keep things tidy using the HTML5 document outline and modular Sass and CoffeeScript, for truly reusable code.

Roy Tomeij is a co-founder of 80beans and SliceCraft in Amsterdam, where he takes care of front-end architecture using an agile approach. He loves front-end meta languages like Haml, Sass & CoffeeScript because they are DRY, produce quick results & lead to better maintainable code. With nearly seven years of professional front-end experience in Rails projects, he knows how to effectively combine the two.

Posted February 14, 2012

Mitchell Hashimoto Presents "Rack Middleware as a General Purpose Abstraction"

Another great presentation! Mitchell Hashimoto will present "Rack Middleware as a General Purpose Abstraction".

We’ve all seen monolithic Rails models: pages and pages of methods all dumped into one class. Inevitably, someone starts moving things around just to feel better about the line count, but this doesn’t make any real difference to the overall structure of the code. How can we reify actions on an object and simplify our classes?

In this talk I'll speak about using the concept of “middleware†(in the way Rack uses “middlewareâ€) as a general purpose abstraction for improving the organization, testability, and maintainability of complex pieces of code. I’ll talk about my first hand experience of using middleware to power Vagrant (http://vagrantup.com), and we’ll use these ideas to simplify an existing application.

Mitchell Hashimoto is an operations engineer at Kiip and is passionate about all things open source. Mitchell is one of the creators and maintainer of Vagrant, a tool for creating and distributing virtualized development environments. Vagrant is used by thousands of developers worldwide and many large companies including Mozilla, Tumblr, LivingSocial, and more. For four years he was a web developer for a Ruby on Rails studio, and for the past year he has been an operations engineer for a start-up company in San Francisco, CA.

Posted February 13, 2012

Ticket Update: We Are Two-Thirds Full!

We are about two-thirds full at this point, maybe a few more considering sponsor tickets. Looks like tickets are selling slightly better than last year. We expect to be sold out before the regular priced ticket period expires in a couple of weeks (March 6). Get your tickets today.

Posted February 11, 2012

Thoughtbot's Ben Orestein will present "What should Rubyists steal from Clojure and Haskell?"

We're thrilled to announce that Thoughtbot's Ben Orestein will present "What should Rubyists steal from Clojure and Haskell?".

Ruby is a great little language, but that doesn't mean it got everything right. This talk will be a tour of the best features from Clojure and Haskell that you can't find in Ruby. The goal isn't to try to convert you to these languages, but to expand your knowledge of the best ideas in programming language design. We'll also see how understanding the rationale behind these features can help you write better Ruby.

If concepts like anaphora, destructuring binds, and monads aren't familiar to you, prepare to learn some powerful concepts. And don't worry: this won't be some voice-from-the-clouds, ivory tower tutorial. Just a pragmatic guy teaching cool ideas with simple examples. No neckbeard required.

Ben has spoken in several countries and in multiple languages, in venues varying from tiny conference rooms to giant lecture halls. He's known for his fervent vim evangelism, code-heavy talks, and bizarre third-person grammatical tendencies.

When not demanding that everyone remap caps lock to escape, Ben writes code at thoughtbot, occasionally correctly.

Posted February 10, 2012

David Copeland presents "Don't Fear the Threads: Simply Your Life with JRuby"

We're pleased to announce that David Copeland will present "Don't Fear the Threads: Simply Your Life with JRuby".

Evented is the new hotness. It simplifies concurrent programming. Right? Not always. Tools like EventMachine and Node are fast, but are they always the right tool? And do they make your code easy to understand and modify?

Enter JRuby, the super-charged Ruby implementation that has all of Java’s strengths, and none of its weaknesses. Among its strengths is a fully-armed and operational threading model that, a long with a few simple built-in libraries, can make concurrent code easy to write, easy to understand, easy to maintain, and just as performant as the evented version.

Why limit yourself to one way of solving problems? This talk will arm you with an alternative for handling concurrency: JRuby and Threads.

Dave has been a programmer for over 15 years, has written Java, Scala, and Ruby code, most recently for LivingSocial. Dave’s first assignment at LivingSocial: find a way to process more credit cards faster. When an event-driven solution proved untenable, he applied his many years of experience with multi-threading on the JVM, along with his solid grasp of command-line app development (as detailed in his book “Building Awesome Command-Line Applications in Rubyâ€) and crafted a solution. Dave is constantly focused on doing things right, working clean, and keeping things running.

Posted February 09, 2012

Brian Sam-Bodden presents "A Road to Mobile Web Development: Sinatra, Spine.js and jQuery Mobile"

We're thrilled to have Brian Sam-Bodden back this year to present "A Road to Mobile Web Development: Sinatra, Spine.js and jQuery Mobile".

Ruby is powerful server-side language with great collection of libraries and frameworks but to create a full mobile offering, Ruby developers need to become masters of many a craft. In this talk we'll walk through the design and development of a full stack HTML5 mobile application using Sinatra to create a robust RESTful API, Spine.js to bring MVC order to the client and jQuery Mobile to style and structure the application for the mobile world.

Brian (@bsbodden) is a developer, author and speaker that has spent over fifteen years building software in a variety of languages. In the last five years his concentration has been on the Ruby programming language and the Ruby on Rails framework (although he still gets paid to do Java when no one is watching). Brian founded Integrallis, a consultancy based out of Phoenix, Arizona

Posted February 08, 2012

Aleksander DÄ…browski will present "Building API: Sinatra, Node.js or Else"

We're very happy to announce that Aleksander DÄ…browski will present "Building API: Sinatra, Node.js or Else".

In this talk, Aleksander will confront Node.js vs Sinatra as a tool to build external API for Rails application. He will focus on pros and cos of sharing code with main application, performance and scalabilty. He’ll also take a look at other solutions, maybe secret ingredient is somewhere else?

Aleksander Dąbrowski is a Ruby developer and advocate. He has worked in a variety of start-ups and in a marketing agency. He co-organises Warsaw’s Ruby User Group. Aleks is also the author of rubysfera.pl, the leading Polish blog focused on Ruby and Rails. He likes to speak at Ruby developer events and is very passionate about sharing his knowledge with others. Along with using and contributing to open source software (recently mostly travis-ci.org), Aleks particularly enjoys deleting ugly code, and in his spare time repairs cars.

Posted February 07, 2012

Peter Bell will present "Lean Startups With Ruby and Rails"

We're happy to announce that Peter Bell will present "Lean Startups With Ruby and Rails".

The Lean Startup was an awesome manifesto, but how does it work in practice? How do you implement cohort analytics and A/B splits? How much testing is "enough"? How can Metrics Driven Development help you to prioritize features? What about feature toggles, canary testing and and an application immune system? In this session we'll look at practical approaches to implementing lean startups using Ruby and Rails.

Peter Bell is CTO of Skinnio - a lean startup in NYC based out of DogPatch labs. He's been living the lean startup life full time since June and has consulted for hundreds of startups since 2002. He teaches regularly at General Assembly - a startup hub in NYC and is writing a book for Addison Wesley on agile software development. He's been published in IEEE Software, Dr. Dobbs, IBM developerWorks and Information Week and has rebuilt skinnio from the ground up five times in the last nine months.

Posted February 06, 2012

John Athayde Presents "The Rails View: The Junk Drawer Grows Up"

We're happy to announce that John Athayde will present "The Rails View: The Junk Drawer Grows Up".

Rails 3.1 introduced us to the asset pipeline. Learn the power of SCSS and how to clean up your views with the proper use of helpers, semantic markup, presenters, and just good old fashioned ERB and HTML. We'll touch on a broad variety of topics and not attack too many sacred cows.

John Athayde is a UI/UX/Design type who comes from an architecture (of the building variety) background. He's been in the Rails community since 2006 and has broad experience in e-commerce and running creative teams. He is currently leading the design and view development on Internal Tools at LivingSocial. Prior to LivingSocial he was the Design guy at InfoEther and ran Hyphenated People, a UI/UX Consultancy with Amy Hoy. He also runs Meticulous, a design and film company, in his free time.

Posted February 06, 2012

Baltimore's Chris Strom to Present "You Ain't SPDY"

We're happy to announce that Chris Strom will present "You Ain't SPDY".

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 lost bandwidth and increase the robustness of your sites at the same time.

Chris is the author of The SPDY Book and Dart for Hipsters. He is also the co-author of Recipes with Backbone. He organizes the B'more on Rails user group. Chris is a relentless public learner as evidenced by over 700 blog posts. He is currently a contributor on both the Ruby SPDY gem as well as the node-spdy package.

Posted February 05, 2012

Andrew Glover Presents "Asynchronous Processing, Messaging, and Redis with Resque"

We're pleased to announce that Andrew Glover will present "Asynchronous Processing, Messaging, and Redis with Resque". Andrew is the CTO of App47, where he gets to play with iOS, Android, Ruby, Rails, Heroku, AWS, MongoDB and everything else that is cool these days. He carries around an iPhone, iPad, and HTC Droid phone and in his free time hacks on Node.js.

Resque is a Ruby framework for intuitively defining and monitoring distributed background jobs stored in Redis. With Resque, you can easily off load long running tasks (much like DelayedJob); plus, because Resque leverages Redis as a queuing system, you can easily implement a distributed, point to point messaging system. What’s more, because Resque’s job format is simple JSON, it’s possible to build polyglot job implementations. In this talk, Andrew will show you how easily it is to get started with Resque by defining and executing background tasks, and then he'll show you how to leverage Resque as a messaging system with polyglot queue readers.

Posted February 03, 2012

Jeff Casimir Presents "Getting Addicted to SOA"

We're happy to announce that Jeff Casimir will be back with us once again with "Getting Addicted to SOA". Jeff is an excellent presenter, who draws from a wealth of teaching experience, as a former high school computer science teacher and principal, and from many years as a professional Ruby and Rails instructor at Jumpstart Lab, including now training at LivingSocial's famous Hungry Academy. For the past several years, Jeff has been traveling the world preaching the good word of Ruby and Rails. He loves talking about architecture/patterns.

Look at the themes of APIs, client-side Javascript frameworks, more features at the database level – it all adds up to building components that can be managed, developed, and reused independently. Breaking big apps into small apps is the next trend.

This is not propaganda about how one gem or Rails feature is going to change your life. What we’re talking about is bigger than a library: it’s architecture.

In this session, Jeff will walk through the theory and code, starting with an application and extracting authentication into a separate app. Once it’s out, that authentication service can support multiple applications, like 37Signals does with their ID service shared by Basecamp, Campfire, and Highrise.

Do you need centralized authentication? Maybe not. But the practice of extracting it into an external service will make it easier to develop/maintain both the primary application and the authentication system itself. Use this approach to pull out one component of your app and you’ll be addicted to Service-Oriented Architecture.

Posted January 31, 2012

Closing Keynote: Corey Haines

We're thrilled to announce Corey Haines as our closing keynote speaker.

After 12 years of coding for money, Corey Haines said enough and went on a year-long, journeyman pair-programming tour. Traveling the world, pair-programming for room and board, he spent his time teaching, learning and just living as a knowledge-cross-pollinating, little, software craftsmanship bee. For the past three years, Corey has focused his attention on helping developers improve their fundamental software design skills through the use of focused-practice events, such as coderetreat, a series that has recently grown into a world-wide phenomenon as the Global Day of Coderetreat.

Posted January 25, 2012

Scott Davis Presents "Sass and Compass Unleash Your Stylesheets"

We're proud to announce that compass core team member and sass contributor Scott Davis will evangelize on their proper use with "Sass and Compass Unleash Your Stylesheets".

Do you not fully understand scss or sass? Do you hate making stylesheets as a developer. Do you not understand sprites? Using compass standalone or with the rails asset pipeline can increase your productivity and make CSS enjoyable! Because spending 30% of your development time on styles should never happen, it is Scott's mission to make that a thing of the past.

Scott is a UX engineer for the Space Telescope Science Institute, which runs the science programs for the Hubble Space Telescope and the upcoming Webb Space Telescope. Most of his work centers on HubbleSite.org, public website for the Hubble Telescope.

Scott has spent the past eight years developing web applications, most recently the HubbleSite's redesign. His focus is the creation of elegant, well-engineered, robust code that is as simple to read as it is to use.

Scott lives on a 200-acre farm in Maryland, where he enjoys excessive amounts of farming and the fact that his nearest neighbor is a cow.

Posted January 25, 2012

Steve Klabnik Presents "Designing Hypermedia APIs"

We're is proud to announce that Steve Klabnik will present "Designing Hypermedia APIs", explaining how to design your APIs so that they truly embrace the web and HTTP.

Steve is a Ruby Hero, software craftsman, and an aspiring digital humanities scholar. He spends most of his time contributing to Open Source projects, and maintains both Hackety Hack and Shoes. Steve is also writing a book on REST called Get Some REST. Otherwise, Steve travels the globe speaking at conferences from Los Angeles to Kiev.

Steve writes regularly on his blog, and can be found on twitter.

Posted January 24, 2012

Sandi Metz will present "Give Me a Lever: The Story of Inheritance"

Awesome. Reluctant author and obsessive programmer Sandi Metz will speak at RubyNation 2012. Sandi will present "Give Me a Lever: The Story of Inheritance", a presentation freshly pulled from the pages of her upcoming book, "Practical Object Oriented Design in Ruby".

Sandi Metz has 30 years of experience working on projects that survived to grow and change. During the daytime she writes software at Duke University, in the evening, builds bicycles, and in the wee dark hours of the early morning is finishes the final chapters of the book.

Sandi rants when she has time on her blog, and can be followed on twitter. She also speaks at conferences when she can, such as at our neighbors to the north, GoRuCo.

Posted January 20, 2012

Entrepreneur Mike Subelsky to Present "Coding for Uncertainty"

We are happy to announce that entrepreneur Mike Subelsky will speak at RubyNation 2012. Mike will present "Coding for Uncertainty: How to Design Maintainable, Flexible Code for a Startup Application".

Mike Subelsky is a Baltimore-based entrepreneur, programmer, and devops guy. His tools of choice are Ruby and JavaScript but he considers himself a jack-of-all-trades. In 2007, he co-founded a web startup called OtherInbox.com, which was just acquired by ReturnPath. Currently, he is pursuing new as-yet-unannounced ventures (he promises "something new and very cool").

Mike is a big believer in Baltimore's innovation community of artists, technologists, thinkers, and strivers of all types. That belief has powered his efforts in co-founding the Baltimore Improv Group, Ignite Baltimore, the Baltimore Hackathon, and other activities.

Mike writes regularly on his blog, and can be followed on twitter.

Posted January 12, 2012

2012 Early Bird Tickets are for Sale Now.

We have Early Bird tickets up for sale now. To register just visit our registration page. The Early Bird tickets will be available until the end of this month, or until we sell out of them (there are only 50 early tickets).

Last year we sold out completely one month before the conference and we expect this year to be sold out, too. We didn't even run a waiting list last year. So when the tickets are gone, they're gone. We have received a lot of great proposals, so rest assured that RubyNation 2012 will be one you don't want to miss.

Posted January 06, 2012

2012 Keynote: Jim Weirich

Since tickets will be on sale within 24 hours, it is past time to announce some speakers! So, let's start at the top, with keynoter Jim Weirich!

Jim is the Chief Scientist for EdgeCase LLC, an excellent Rails consultancy in Columbus, Ohio. You can follow him on twitter @jimweirich or read his blog, "{ |one, step, back| }"

He has spoken at RubyNation before, with two talks in 2010. Jim's SOLID Ruby video almost broke the will of our video production crew that year, with its 110+ slides! We were doing them the hard way back then by making a jpg file out of each slide! How the hell did he get over 110 slides into a 40 minute presentation anyway? But Jim is a master, so the old rules don't apply to his presentations. He made it look easy, it was awesome, and now that is one of our favorite RubyNation videos.

Jim will be in town teaching a Rails course with Dave Thomas conveniently scheduled just before RubyNation! Jim is an excellent teacher, and has loads of Ruby and Rails knowledge (Dave, too. Duh.). So take that course if you want to learn the right way, from the experts.

We'll be releasing speaker information regularly from now until early February. So, check back with us frequently for updates!

Posted January 06, 2012

Our 2012 Call for Presentation Proposals is Open!

Want to speak at RubyNation? Then we want to hear from you! Submit a presentation proposal! RubyNation will be held on March 23-24, 2012 in Reston, VA.

Presentations should focus on helping our attendees by teaching from your experiences. The audience is primarily practicing rubyists (of all levels), so talks should lean towards the technical side. All Ruby related topics will be considered (JavaScript, HTML5, Big Data, Agile, Start-Ups, too). Each presentation should be 40 minutes long, including time for questions and discussion.

Keep in mind that our audience will be fully-engaged members of the DC Area Ruby developer’s community. Your presentation should appeal to them. Presentations should be loaded with code and technical content. We are engineers. We want to be entertained, amazed, and have fun. Proposals containing marketing-based content will be sniffed out and booted!

Submit as many proposals as you want. More than one helps you get selected because we sometimes get similar talks from different people. If you only submit one, and it duplicates Jim Weirich’s talk then you will probably get cut. Panels or multi-presenter proposals are fine. Speakers will receive free admission to the conference and the speakers party/dinner the night before RubyNation, and the opportunity to address a large audience of talented and influential rubyists!

We plan to videotape all the presentations, and make the videos available online for free. If that isn’t OK, just let us know in your proposal notes.

Please submit your proposal by 11:59:59 PM ET on Wed, Feb 1st, 2012. We reserve the right to accept and announce a few proposals before that time, but not too many. We’ll decide that as we go along.

If you have any questions, please feel free to email us at proposals at rubynation.org. Your presentation is important to us, we want to help make it as good as possible.

We look forward to seeing some great proposals!

Posted December 15, 2011