Keynotes, Sessions, Workshops, and Sponsored Parties
Workshops
It can be difficult to connect the dots between what you learn at a conference and practical application. Attend one of our workshops to bridge that gap with hands-on practice and learning.
Unlike our regular sessions, workshops vary in length: from 90 minutes up to 3 hours. The length of a particular workshop will be indicated on our schedule.
If you plan on attending any of our Workshop sessions, please take a moment to register using the links emailed to you in your pre-conf attendee email.
Getting started with mobile app development is now easier than ever, thanks to recent advancements in the RubyMotion community. In this session, you will learn about RedPotion, a framework known as the "Rails of iOS development", learn how to build a "mobile-friendly" API, and how to consume that API from a mobile app.
Want to split up your Rails app into pieces but not sure where to begin? Wish you could share controller code among microservices but don't know how? Do you work on lots of projects and have boilerplate Rails code repeated in each?
Rails Engines may be your answer.
By building a simple Rails engine together, we will better understand how this app-within-an-app architecture can help you write more modular code, which can be gemified and reused across multiple projects.
Building successful products that customers really want and love is very hard. In fact, most product efforts fail!
In this workshop I introduce you to the Product Discovery Canvas; it applies relevant elements of Collaborative Chartering, Customer Discovery, User Story Mapping, Pretotyping and Lean Startup for product discovery and product validation. The canvas starts with techniques for narrowing ‘product ideas’ to the ‘ideal product’. It ends with techniques for you to inexpensively answer the question, “If you build it, will people buy it and use it?” or “Should you build it at all?”
Software development means letting an idea flow from your mind through your fingers into concise, expressive, flawless code - if you're Tony Stark. The rest of us have to spend a lot of time fixing bugs. This workshop will give participants the chance to practice using the tools and techniques Ruby and Rails make available to identify and fix broken code, and to develop a mindset that keeps discovering bugs from being a soul-crushing experience.
In this workshop, you'll go from 'rails new' to a fully functioning Rails app on Google Cloud Platform. We’ll connect to hosted MySQL, Google authentication, and other Google Cloud Platform services to build a scalable non-trivial application.
Too often, silos show up in engineering teams. This destroys both the formal Agile development process as well as the informal "develop with Agility". Great agile teams are often blended. Traditional hierarchies go away and "pods" organize around problems. The experience of a great product is everyone's responsibility and in this workshop, we'll learn some basic tools and techniques to enable anyone to contribute to a product's design.
We all use web servers. We kind of understand how they work, but few people have actually looked at what it takes to implement even a basic, functional web server. Ruby makes it easy to build a simple web server, and there is considerable value in delving deeply enough into the issues networking and the basics of the HTTP protocol to be able to write something with just enough capability to serve static files, handle a few common error cases, and maybe even be able to serve Rails application requests.
Building a REST API is easy, but building an API that is designed to last - well that's another story. In this workshop we'll cover everything needed to design and build an API that is flexible enough to evolve over time, including design best practices, a dive into hypermedia (and the specs out there), and a look at community tools designed to make the entire process (this includes testing and documentation) more efficient. Each participant will also receive a complimentary copy of "Undisturbed REST," the book we'll use during this workshop.
You've got code in your Rails app. You'd want it outside of your app, fast. Perhaps it should go in another app, or you'd like to open source it on GitHub, or you just know it deserves a better home elsewhere.
We'll go over practical, real-world examples to get your code out of your Rails app and into something more generic, extendable, and reusable. And we'll do it quickly!
Lucky you, it's time to upgrade Rails versions! I know, you just upgraded your app a few years ago, but it's time again. The good news is that you've got a team of "professionals" to help make the process a bit smoother. In this workshop we will work through upgrading an existing Rails 4 application to run on Rails 5 together. We will highlight some common pitfalls and if you finish early there's time at the end to kickstart your own app upgrade. Why suffer alone? Join us for this Rails upgrading workshop!
Rails is amazing, but Ruby isn't always the easiest tool to get set up for local development. Vagrant continues to be a great tool for automated and reproducible development environments, but it often falls short of real production scenarios. Otto, the successor to Vagrant, encompasses the entire workflow managing local development environments, infrastructure creation, and application deployment in just three easy commands. You can have the Heroku-like workflow while maintaining full control over the stack, without all the overhead. Come meet Otto!
Surrealism is an artistic practice in which mundane but dissimilar ideas are juxtaposed to create surprising or nonsensical ideas. This has interesting results when applied to startup culture. In this workshop, rather than finding a market niche which can be exploited for fame, revenue, or power, we will be using our skills as Rails developers to create products with no practical use whatsoever. We will use a variation of the surrealist game Exquisite Corpse to create collaborative Rails apps, then present them to one another in a mockery of venture capitalism.