WindyCityRails 2012 Lightning Talks

From WindyCityRails 2012

Notes

PowerEnum

by Arthur Shagall

• At same company as Mike Sandler (TMXCredit)
• ActiveRecord with slug lookup, basically
• Something[:foo] gives you an ActiveRecord instance

External Links

• Gem: power_enum

Build your next app using Meteor

by Yuriy Dybskiy

• Live coding, created a simple demo app in under 1 minute

External Links

• Meteor official site
• Demo App
• Slides
• Security in Meteor

PgPower: Rails Postrges for Power Users

by Mike Sandler

• At same company as Arthur Shagall (TMXCredit)
• Schema dumping becomes hard when doing migrations with raw SQL
• PgPower helps out; augments the migrations DSL

External Links

• Gem: pg_power
• Slides

Under the C: Ruby C Extensions

by Mike Laurence

Why?

• Low level C libs
• Faster

Why not?

• Documentation kinda sucks
• Intimidating
• etc

How much work for a C extension?

• extconf.rb, mkmf (happens as a part of the gem install)
• Ruby-to-C interface (Ruby provides a lib)
• Do some type conversion, etc

External Links

Slides

Coding Without Electricity

by Kyle Crum

• In Burma
• Very little technology penetration
• "Lemons and all that"
• "Libraries and books... weird"

Tips for life:

1. Do something scary hard
2. Fix the problem -- do what you need to and move on
3. Look up (from your computer)

---

Work Clean: Code Like a Chef

by Greg Baugues

• Trained chef by a friend he met in a apt complex
• Clean your space after you're done
• Writing down your list is the best way to get organized
• Done with his task: ctrl-w all the way down and then start on the next task
• Simple tools are better. 1 great knife.
• Execute well on simple ingredients => great result

Rules of 3

by David Demaree

• Refactoring vs prefactoring
• They're doing an i18n project
• Not sure how to approach well
• DRY vs too much abstraction -- DRY is just a guideline! (Repeating can be okay)
• Don't design for what you think you're going to need (YAGNI)
• The Rule of 3: 3 repetitions => maybe refactor
• Organizing code can be a blessingGi
• Don't make assumptions

External Links

• Slides

Lean Development

(his slides didn't work -- missed name, etc)

• vs Agile
• Lazy
• Lean is a part of little-a agile: courage, people, customers... but kanban
• Lean -- work efficiently
• Lean is "pull"; waterfall, scrumm is "push"
• seattle.newcoffee.org (sp?)

It's About Time

by Benjamin Fleischer

• UTC
• Date formats...
• require 'time' and you get more methods
• RFCs
• @avdi says use iso8601: human readable, machine sortable
• Gotchas: DST, localized times, leap seconds, different parsing in Ruby 1.8 / 1.9 (maybe strptime)
• Don't scheudle cronjobs between 1 and 3 am -- time may not exist

http://gist.github.com/3668333

Scalable Configuration

by Tim Galeckas

• They've had probs with configuration (staging vs prod, etc)
• He made a gem called hierarchical_config https://github.com/timgaleckas/hierarchical_config
• Scalable is:
  • In source control...
  • Should be seen outside of where it's used
  • Not changeable while running
  • Declarative (they use YAML)
  • Can be overridden (for passwords, etc)

What I learned in real-life software development

by Marshall Shen

• Went to University of Iowa :)
• Not like a class...
• Professor: assignment -> code -> defined solution
• Now: more time doing customer stuff, figuring out what you need to do. Takes discipline.
• Keep getting better...