RailsConf 2021

Storytelling for Tech People

Remember the last conference talk that put you to sleep? It probably had a really catchy title, too. It's time to change that standard. It's time to learn how to turn our technical content into a beautiful story.

In this workshop you'll learn how to think differently about your topic; how to craft a story that will capture and impress your audience.

Debugging Your Brain

Sometimes your mind distorts reality, gets frustrated with shortcomings, or spirals out of control. Learn how to debug these by using research-backed psychology techniques.

The Secrets of Successful Mentors

How do the best mentors operate? What makes them so effective? In this workshop, we will explore some counter-intuitive techniques that great mentors use in helping their apprentices learn fast and achieve extraordinary results. Learn how to give just the right learning challenge and just the right time and how to give feedback in a way that will actually be heard!

We will explore how mentoring is fundamentally different than teaching. We will also look at some psychology and brain science to understand what makes learners tick and how they respond when we give them feedback.

Upgrading Rails: The Dual-Boot Way

Upgrading Rails is easy, right? Sure, as long as you are upgrading your patch version. A Rails upgrade project for a majestic monolith is not a trivial project. While upgrades have become easier with every new Rails version, your application has only become more complicated with every new dependency.

In this workshop you will learn a proven Rails upgrade process which relies on "dual booting" to quickly iterate and upgrade! You will leave this workshop with a new set of tools that will make your next upgrade project less daunting.

Believe in Rails Magic? Unlock the Powers of Rails

Poof! Before your eyes is a full-stack exercise tracking application utilizing rails forms. How did it get there? During this workshop, we're going to help you understand Rails magic! This workshop is perfect for Rails beginners who are looking to get a better understanding of the magic happening inside of Rails. We're going to teach how to build a full-stack rails exercise tracking application that allows the user to retrieve information from the database as well as add content to the database. You will also learn about mapping CRUD actions to HTTP verbs to RESTful routes. As well as following developer flow to implement routes, controller methods, and views for RESTful routes. Then, at the end of the workshop, everything will come together, and you will understand some of the amazing magic hidden inside of Rails!

Deploying your Rails Application to Kubernetes

Kubernetes has a lot of DevOps mindshare and is how shops like GitHub and Shopify are deploying their apps. But, what is Kubernetes? What does it mean for deploying your application? Do you need it?

In this workshop, we'll answer by migrating a small Rails application to Kubernetes. We'll build up the deployment tooling necessary to stand the application up on a small Kubernetes cluster.

We'll also explore the core concepts and considerations of adding Kubernetes to your deployment pipeline, including Kubernetes operations, preparing for ephemeral infrastructure, data storage, and more.

Hotwire: HTML over The Wire

Last December, the team behind Basecamp and Hey released Hotwire, a library for managing client side interactions by sending HTML to the client. Hotwire bundles the Stimulus JavaScript library with an expanded Turbo library which makes a wide range of client side interactions possible without writing any custom JavaScript. In this workshop, attendees will see first-hand how powerful the new library is by adding powerful interactions to a basic Rails view.

OAuth 2.0 Deconstructed

OAuth is an authorization standard that is both powerful and daunting to learn. Higher level libraries like OmniAuth can ease the process of implementing OAuth, but it can be difficult to debug or customize the code without first understanding OAuth at a lower level.

This workshop breaks down the OAuth standard from the very basic principles, covering the terminology in an easy to digest fashion. It goes over step-by-step code examples to implement OAuth from scratch for several providers, so you get the repetition necessary to work with OAuth on your own at any level of abstraction.

Effective Resumes for Tech

Transitioning into tech from another industry can sometimes feel like you're starting all over, but it doesn't have to be that way! Come armed with your resume, your cover letter, and a job posting you're interested in. We'll work through reframing your application materials to showcase the ways in which your previous experience is an asset to employers.

Writing Better Forms

Forms are the unsung hero of a web app. Without them, most of our sites wouldn't have any data or even users. But we don't talk about forms that much, other than to say that building forms is hard. We want our forms to look nice and be useful, but sometimes that feels impossible. Join me for a refresher course on forms. We'll walk through creating three types of forms, from basic to advanced. Along the way I'll teach you some tips and tricks to create forms that delight users without frustrating your developers. And it's all vanilla Rails and JS as well - no extra DSL or libraries required.

Intro to Test Driven Development: How to Safely Make Changes

Even small changes to large codebases can make everything come crashing down. When you make a change to an already working application, how are you to be sure everything is still working correctly? With Test Driven Development!

In this workshop, we will take a dive into the capybara gem to take the role of every user under the sun you can think of, and replicate their behavior. We will first cover vocabulary and create a small full-stack application, and then go into how to incorporate tests, to ensure our application is working the way we intend it to. Stretch goals include covering modularizat