Gregg Pollack Presents "Deciphering Yehuda"
Gregg Pollack will present "Deciphering Yehuda" at RubyNation.
Yehuda Katz has done some great Ruby refactoring for Rails 3 over the past year, but do you really understand what he's done? In this talk, Gregg Pollack will attempt to examine Yehuda's work, identify and deconstruct each programming technique that he's applied, and then teach them in a way that everyone can understand.
Some of the techniques to be discussed will include: Method Compilation vs Method Missing, Decoupling Components, Embracing Rack, alias_method_chain vs super, Abstract Classes, and Componentization.
Attendees should walk away with a greater understanding of some advanced Ruby design patterns and a better insight into the internals of Rails 3.
Posted by Gray Herter: February 07, 2010
Speaker Selection Slowed by Snow!
Ok, snow and some laziness. I am not quite done contacting everyone. And with the big storm coming, I am not sure I will finish that before the end of tomorrow. So, I am extending the notifications/confirmations for one week, until the 12th. That should allow for plenty of time to work out the details with all of the speakers, and contact everyone who submitted.
The good news is that we are arranging for many more speakers this year than last. We will have more than 20, for sure. The bad news is that we did receive over 60 proposals, so there is no way to accept them all of course, even though almost all of them were very good proposals. I should also take this time to thank everyone who did submit a proposal. This year will rock because of it.
Posted by Gray Herter: February 04, 2010
Jim Weirich presents "SOLID Ruby"
It is our pleasure to announce that Jim Weirich will present "SOLID Ruby" at this year's RubyNation.
The 5 SOLID design principles (the Single Responsibility Principle, the Open/Closed Principle, the Liskov Substitution Principle, the Interface Segregation Principle and the Dependency Inversion Principle) form a great foundation for understanding good Object Oriented design. But the SOLID principles were originally conceived with statically typed OO languages, such as C++ and Java, in mind. How well do these principles hold up when the implementation language is Ruby? Are the principles just as pertinent as they were in Java, or does the dynamic nature of Ruby change what we mean by good design? In this presentation we will examine the SOLID principles to understand their core purpose, and then run them through the "Ruby Filter" to see if any of these core principles survive. By understanding these principles, we become better Ruby programmers.
Jim Weirich is the Chief Scientist for EdgeCase LLC, a Rails development firm located in Columbus Ohio. Jim has over twenty-five years of experience in software development. He has worked with real-time data systems for testing jet engines, networking software for information systems, and image processing software for the financial industry. Jim is active in the Ruby community and has contributed to several Ruby projects, including the Rake build system and the RubyGems package software.
Posted by Gray Herter: February 04, 2010
Paul Barry will Present "Blocks, Procs and Lambdas, Oh My! Functional Programming in Ruby"
We are very proud to announce that Paul Barry will present "Blocks, Procs and Lambdas, Oh My! Functional Programming in Ruby" at this year's RubyNation.
Despite being an object-oriented language, Ruby contains functional programming features as well. This talk will cover what those features are, provide an in-depth look into how they work, and present examples of how to use them. Paul will also compare Ruby to other functional programming languages such as Clojure, Haskell, Erlang, Smalltalk, JavaScript and Scala to show you how you can incorporate techniques commonly used in those languages to improve your Ruby code.
Paul Barry is a Software Developer from Baltimore, MD. Paul has over 10 years experience developing web applications in a variety of languages and frameworks, including Java, Perl, PHP and of course, Ruby on Rails. Paul has been a speaker at ActsAsConf and RubyNation and is a regular attendee and speaker at DC and Baltimore programming user groups. He blogs about Ruby, Programming and a variety of other topics at paulbarry.com.
Posted by Gray Herter: February 01, 2010
Nick Sieger presents "Rails: The Killer Java Web Stack"
We are very proud to announce that Nick Sieger of Engine Yard's JRuby team will present "Rails: The Killer Java Web Stack" at RubyNation.
Most people know that Rails is the original productive web application framework that all the others copied, and most know that it has been runnable on the Java Virtual Machine for years via JRuby. What a lot of people don't know is how to properly integrate Rails and Java; that is, how to incrementally introduce Rails into your legacy Java environment and leverage its strengths without ditching your Java infrastructure.
Finally, all the pieces are in place to make Rails development and deployment in a polyglot Java environment possible. Rails 3 brings all the goodness of Rails in bite-size, composable chunks. Ant and Maven are becoming more Ruby- and Rake-savvy, so you don't have to give up your build infrastructure. Multiple database possibilities await, so you don't necessarily have to switch to ActiveRecord. Use Ruby and Rails where it hurts the most to give your project more flexibility!
In this session Nick will make recommendations on some of the best ways to making Rails and Java play nicely together using JRuby, and run through some demos of the more practical ways to get things done. Most exciting, you'll get a preview of the quickly-evolving JRuby on Rails stack.
Nick Sieger is an engineer at Engine Yard, working on JRuby and leading the effort to make the Java Virtual Machine a robust yet easy-to-use deployment platform for Rails and Ruby web applications. He created and co-maintains the JDBC adapter for ActiveRecord that JRuby on Rails uses for database connectivity, as well as the Warbler tool and JRuby-Rack library for dealing with Java application server deployment.
Posted by Gray Herter: January 29, 2010
Call for Presentations is Closed
We received lots of great proposals this year. Thanks for submitting them, and helping us create a great conference. We hope to get through them all this week and notify people on or before February 5th of the selections.
Posted by Gray Herter: January 25, 2010
More Tickets Posted
I just released the Early Bird tickets. We will keep those available until March 1, or until they are all gone (until we are sold out, that is).
Posted by Gray Herter: January 22, 2010
More Tickets Coming Soon.
We sold out of the Super Early Bird variety already. I will give the magic spreadsheet one more look tonight and put up the rest of the tickets after that.
Posted by Gray Herter: January 21, 2010
Added Some More Super Early Bird Tickets
We were down to one Super Early Bird ticket left, so I added 10 more. It didn't seem fair to let these run out on the day of the DC Ruby group meeting! After those are gone we will switch over to the next level, which should be $40 or so more (unless the magic spreadsheets says something different once I give it the latest figures)!
Posted by Gray Herter: January 14, 2010
Still Need Those Proposals, Folks!
Speak to us! We have received a bunch of great proposals, but here is always room for one more - yours! We want to out do last year, so help us out.
And if you are local to DC, and not a world-famous rubyist, don't worry. We are a regional conference, serving the broader DC area, so especially if you live around here, please submit a talk proposal. We purposely try to have a good mix of interesting local speakers, in with the bigger names. Honestly, often the locals are better anyway! So, submit that proposal and speak to the nation!
Call for presentations runs until January 22nd, so you have time. Just email your proposal to 'proposals at rubynation.org'.
Posted by Gray Herter: December 10, 2009
Cyber Monday Tickets Available!
In the spirit of Cyber Monday we are leaking a few Super Early Bird tickets. These are the lowest priced tickets you can get. So if you know you are going, get one now, while they last!
Posted by Gray Herter: November 30, 2009
Dec 2 NovaRUG: Debugging Ruby by Aman Gupta
RubyNation is sponsoring the next NovaRUG meeting.
Topic: Debugging Ruby: Understanding and Troubleshooting the VM and Your Application by Aman Gupta
When at Where: Dec 2nd from 6:30 PM - 9 PM at FGM, 12021 Sunset Hills Rd, Suite 400, Reston, VA 20175
Pizza and sodas at 6:30. Presentations start at 7 PM
Register: NovaRUG Blog
Description: A new presentation consisting of content from Aman's threading talk, which he has presented at various Ruby conferences, and add some newer stuff about ruby-level debugging.
Speaker: Aman Gupta is a serial entrepreneur, ruby hacker and a recent winner of a Ruby Heroes award. He currently maintains the EventMachine project and various other gems that help build high-performance distributed and asynchronous systems in ruby, including em-mysql, em-spec, jsSocket and amqp.
Most recently, Aman has been hacking on performance improvements to MRI, releasing several patches to ruby and perftools.rb, a sampling profiler for ruby code based on google-perftools.
Posted by Gray Herter: November 27, 2009
RubyNation Welcomes Gregg Pollack
We are very happy to announce that Gregg Pollack will speak at RubyNation 2010.
Gregg is a well-known leader in the Ruby and Rails communities.
He works at
Envy Labs,
where he produces a
podcast,
creates
educational screencasts,
and develops websites with Rails.
He is a founder and current member of the Rails Activists,
a set of committed volunteers devoted to increasing the adoption of Rails.
Gregg also organizes the
Orlando Ruby Users Group,
and is also sometimes known as the Ruby on Rails guy in the
"Rails vs"
commercials or the
"C" in MVC.
Posted by Gray Herter: November 25, 2009
Sponsors Wanted!
Lead the Ruby Nation! Become a sponsor of the premier Ruby and Rails conference in the Nation’s Capital. Put your message before a large audience of engaged and interested Rubyists, influential thought leaders, who can bring your product or services into their organizations.
RubyNation is a two-day, dual-track technical conference held in Reston, Virginia held April 9-10, 2010 at the Reston Sheraton Hotel. The estimated attendance for the conference is 200 people (170 last year). The conference schedule features presentations from well-known professionals in the Ruby and Rails community, including featured speakers such as Dave Thomas. In addition, there will be approximately twenty other 45-minute technical talks and panel discussions.
In our third year, the RubyNation Conference will again bring the community’s top speakers and leaders together with motivated and excited attendees for an unforgettable conference experience. At RubyNation, we debate and discuss the latest trends, techniques, and tools in Ruby development, design, deployment, business and marketing. We are not a commercial conference. Staffed by committed volunteers, RubyNation is produced and presented by the National Capital Region’s Ruby and Rails Developers Community, as a non-profit event to promote Ruby, and encourage collaboration across the community.
Posted by Gray Herter: November 23, 2009
Announcing Dave Thomas Keynote Presentation
We are very proud to announce that Dave Thomas will present a keynote talk at RubyNation this year.
Dave Thomas is an internationally recognized expert Rubyist. He is a cornerstone of the Ruby community, and is personally responsible for many of its innovative directions and initiatives. Dave is a co-founder of the Pragmatic Programmers and the Pragmatic Bookshelf. He helped write the now-famous Agile Manifesto. He is the author of many books, including the best sellers The Pragmatic Programmer, Agile Web Development with Rails and Programming Ruby.
For the past two years, Dave has been a featured speaker at our kick off events held in conjunction with the Northern Virginia Ruby Users Group, but he has never actually spoken at our conference! We are really looking forward to correcting that.
Posted by Gray Herter: November 17, 2009
Speak to the Nation, the RubyNation! Call for Presentations is Open.
Want to speak at RubyNation? Then submit a presentation proposal!
Presentations should focus on helping attendees by teaching from your experiences. The audience is primarily practicing rubyists (of all levels!), so talks should lean towards the technical side. All Ruby related topics will be considered. Each presentation should be 45 minutes long. Submit your proposal to 'proposals at rubynation.org' with the following information:
* Your name, phone number and email address
* A brief speaker bio, including photo (optional)
* Presentation title
* Abstract (<200 words)
* Target audience (beginner, intermediate, advanced)
Speakers will receive free admission to the conference, and the opportunity to address a large audience of talented and influential rubyists!
We need your proposal by Jan 22th. We will let you know on or before Feb 5th if your proposal has been accepted.
We look forward to seeing some great proposals!
Posted by Karen Gillison: November 17, 2009
Mark the Date for RubyNation 2010!
It's official! RubyNation 2010 will be held on April 9th and 10th at the Sheraton in Reston, Virginia. We will feature two tracks (we have two rooms reserved). We also plan to do the training day again on the 8th of April. So, mark the dates on your calendar. You don't want to miss out!
Posted by Gray Herter: October 23, 2009
RubyNation Photos
A variety of photos from RubyNation 2009 are now available on Flickr, compliments of Dave Bock, Geoff Adams (the techie who also solved our WIFI woes at the conference) and Don Anderson. The photos are divided into two sets. Set 1 includes photos by Dave Bock and Geoff Adams. Dave Bock's photos cover Friday and the first half of Saturday. From mid-day Saturday on, all photos were taken by Geoff Adams. The link below points to the best photos, no near-duplicates, with at least one photo of every speaker.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/davebock/sets/72157619708506242/
Set 2 includes all of the photos taken by Don Anderson, covering the first half of Friday and the last few hours of Saturday.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dkeener2010/sets/72157622235729503/
As stated by Dave Bock, "All photos are released under an attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Creative Commons license for the world, with the RubyNation non-profit having commercial rights. If you want the hi-res originals, just ask."
Posted by David Keener: June 14, 2009
Presentation Links
We're trying to collect links to the various RubyNation presentations, if the presentations are available online.
- Bringing Content Management to Rails
Paul Barry - Paralysis to Static Analysis: Upgrading Rcov
Aaron Bedra - Building Native Mobile Apps in Rhodes
Adam Blum - Concurrent Programming with Ruby and Tuple Spaces
Luc Castera - Learning to Write Better Code & Love Refactoring
Mark Cornick - Miscellaneous Notes from Chad Fowler's Keynote
Chad Fowler - Creating a World-Class RESTful Web Services API
David Keener - TDD in the Real World
Timothy Morton - "Comics" is Hard: Domain Modeling Challenges
Ben Scofield - JRuby on Rails: Living the Dream?
Arild Shirazi
Posted by David Keener: June 13, 2009
Give a Lightning Talk!
The RubyNation wants to hear your lightning talk! Whatever you want to talk, rave, or rant about, this is your chance. We don't care what it is, just as long as it is of interest to the Ruby community and relatively short (like 10 minutes max). Your lightning talk can be fun, like "X is awesome! It changed me as a person!", a call to arms, like "Help us build Y. The world needs it!", a plea, like "Let's put an end to the scourge of Z.". You've heard of opinionated software, well this is opinionated talking. So, let's hear yours. Oh, and please keep it no worse than PG-13 rated.
We will have two sessions devoted to lightning talks, so your chances of getting heard are good.
You can register your lightning talk at the conference when you check in (or anytime really, at our front desk). But if you know what it is now, let us know now, so we can start the list (we already know of three of them). Send your talk description to 'proposals at rubynation.org' with the following information:
- Your name
- Presentation title and short description
Posted by Gray Herter: June 01, 2009
RubyNation thanks FGM!
Thanks to FGM! FGM has long been a supporter of the Ruby community in Northern Virginia, hosting NovaRUG meetings every month, providing sodas and a great, giant meeting room. FGM has signed on for a second year to support RubyNation with a sponsorship. FGM is also going to send a bunch of people to the conference, including presenter Russ Olsen and me, who work there. Thanks.
Here is the elevator speech: "FGM, Inc., is an information technology company delivering sophisticated, customized solutions that improve business efficiency across the enterprise. As a trusted partner of the Department of Defense, U.S. Government civilian and international agencies, and businesses throughout the world, FGM is an agile provider of technical solutions that enable mission-critical operations and decision-making. FGM's solutions help customers improve their business performance through information technology transformation services focusing on architecture, information management, systems integration, and integrated solutions."
Posted by Gray Herter: May 02, 2009
Welcome Back Conference Sponsor EngineYard!
Engine Yard focuses on Ruby on Rails application deployments and operations support, so you can focus on developing your application and business. Customers have started during development and grown to millions of users without stress along the way. Start with one slice, grow to 16 slices, then to a dedicated cluster in our data center or yours--all without changing your code. Engine Yard supports the Ruby community, by sponsoring the development of Rails, Merb, Rubinius, and other open source projects. We're here 24/7, by phone, at (866) 518-YARD or email, at info@engineyard.com.
Posted by Gray Herter: April 10, 2009