WindyCityRails 2012 Lightning Talks - myronmarston/conferences GitHub Wiki

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

Build your next app using Meteor

by Yuriy Dybskiy

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

External Links

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

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

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...