Missed keynote by Zed Shaw (will watch on Video on ConFreaks), but I saw David Brady talk about "Monkey Patching your Brain". And yes, he hacked our brain well! The talk was mostly about how to work harder without overthinking and how to form efficient effortless habits fast via the power of strong emotions. Favorite brain hack: "I get the feeling that when there's a big elephant in the room, I gotta go poke it in the eye!"
Next, Bobbie Wilson talks about visualization of git data via Grit, Protovis, MongoDB, and Map/Reduce algorithms. Grit is a package that gives you Ruby object oriented APIs for Git data. Protovis visualizes data via Javascript. MongoDB was used to store raw data obtained from Git before going over it with Map/Reduce to visualize it. He showed us how many commits Ruby had since its Repo inception as well as a graph of how it increased in frequency over time.
Next up, Wayne Seguin talks about the Ruby Community, covering the benefits it offers such as open-source projects, opportunities, education & mentorship, social interaction & communication, personal growth, satisfaction & happiness, and relationships & friendships.
After lunch break, people are giving lightning talks. David Henner just talked about his Rails E-Commerce solution, which offers quite a few unique features over other solutions, such as double-checked accounting and optimized image upload. The project is called ror-e.
Next, someone talks about remote pairing via tmux, a terminal multiplexer.
Next up, a developer from PivotalLabs talked about how to make it easy for people to contribute to open source, which summarizes to writing tests first, ensuring rake works, integrating contributor changes often, and keeping contributors happy by making eager ones members of the project direct committers.
Next, a guy from Chef, talks about tmux, a terminal multiplexer that enables remote pair programming with features such as simultaneous coding and screen splitting.
Next, a guy talks about VimGolf, a tool that counts every keystroke you perform with VIM to test how efficient you are in using its shortcuts (LOVE THE IDEA!). This goes beyond the "Avoid using the mouse" advice into "Avoid using inefficient shortcuts"! It is in fact a great tool for motivating developers to learn the best shortcuts as it ranks people via different VimGolf games on the site.
Next up, Zed Shaw is talking about his book "Learn Python The Hard Way", in which he tries to get as many non-programmers as possible to get into programming. He does so as he believes that these people will bring their own very different perspective to the field and thus help improve it in unpredictable ways.
Next, a developer talks about the kidsruby.com website inspired by Hackety Hack that helps kids get started withi Ruby programming. They need help with contributors with regards to the editor and system installers.
Next, a fedora wearing developer talks about Dubious, a project that allows running Mirah projects (Mirah is a statically typed version of Ruby formerly known as Duby) on Google App Engine.
Next talk is about "why do gems break and what you can do and don't about it". Causes for problems are:
1. Not declaring dependencies: use a clean RVM gemset to reveal missing dependencies.
2. declaring invalid, stale, old, or difficult to find dependencies: before packaging make sure what you are using is valid all the way down
3. declaring yourself as a dependency (cyclic dependency? BAD): use yourself as your testing framework!
4. not declaring absolute or minimal and maximal versions of dependencies: at least declare the versions you tested with.
5. tests broken: declare test frameworks as dependencies, including version. Declare development dependencies. Set tests not to run from the root of the project.
Next, Wayne Seguin talks about EngineYard's community commitment.
Next, a developer talks about how to generate class diagrams ( in SVG) from a Rails code base.
Next, Mike Moore talkes about Project "M". (Minaswan?). He's talking about the older Matz initiative of "Be Nice. Ruby developers are Nice! Bring niceness to the Ruby Community!"
After a quick break, longer talks resumed, and Joshua Timberman talked about Chef Cookbook Design Pattern. He starts by explaining how Chef's model compares to MVC where node specifications are the models, configured nodes are the view, and the controller is the recipe in pure Ruby.
Next, Wesley Beary presented "Fog OR: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Cloud".
What's the cloud?
-On demand (pay for what you use)
-Flexible (add and remove resources in minutes)
-Repeatable (code, test, repeat)
-Resilient (build better systems with transient resources)
Why worry?
-Option overload
-Expertise required
-Tool variety
-Standards slow
Solution?
Fog
Next, Nick Quaranto talks about Redis and how to make Ruby applications run faster.
Had a quick break, and then Chris Wychoff presented "Refactoring Monolithic Rails Apps with SOA" starting with how these apps were born as simple humble apps and then grew to behemoth applications. Recommendation is to separate responsibilities, handle them asynchronously, and make incremental steps. Gotchas include overly decomposed services,
Next up, Brian Helmkamp presented on "Service Oriented Design in Practice", focusing on Service Oriented Design as opposed to Service Oriented Architecture (anyone remembers difference between software design and software architecture? bonus points for you). Benefits of SOD are isolation, robustness, scalability, agility, interoperability, and reuse.
A very anticipated talk is next, which is "Securing Your Rails App" by Jim Weirich and Matt Yoho from EdgeCase (I did a craftsmanship swap with them last year).
Summary:
-Trust nothing
-Stay up to date on security patches
-Always scope your finds with proper privileges
-Whitelist properties/data being set
-Do a security audit
And that's a wrap! Day 1 ends with a HackFest sponsored by EngineYard.
Stay tuned for tomorrow as I will be presenting on "Whatever happened to desktop development in Glimmer?".
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