RailsConf: Nick's Highlights from Lone Star Ruby Conf
I recently attended and spoke at Lone Star RubyConf 2010. I took notes on anything technical I thought would be useful to bring back and use day-to-day at SmartLogic. Keep in mind there were many excellent talks that aren't on this list, it's just a snippet of things I wanted to look into more.
Day one
Adam Keys - Rails' Next Top Model: Using ActiveModel and ActiveRelation
- Rails 3 - ActiveSupport::Concern
- Accessors + Concern cleans up code
- New encryption classes for secure keys and encrypted data transfer
- ActiveModel::Validator for non AR validations
- validates_with MyValidator
- ActiveModel::Serialization for hydra?
- serialization: require ‘attributes’ and ‘attributes=’
- serializable_hash => to_json, to_xml, from_json, from_xml
- ActiveRelation (AREL)
Jesse Crouch - Building fast, lightweight data-driven apps using the Infochimps API
Infochimps API to create linkedin’ 2nd degree network with twitter data. Check it out at http://trst.me
Aman Gupta - Debugging Ruby: Understanding and Troubleshooting the VM and your Application
Slides: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/635/debugging_ruby-lsrc.pdf
- lsof -nPp : get open files for a specific pid
- strace: observe functions being called. Can see reads and writes between processes, like rails hitting mysql
- compile ruby w/ --enable-pthreads (not by default in debian or in rvm)
- See http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/rubies/installing/ end of page for how to do this via RVM
- tcpdump for networking
- google perftools for ruby profiling
- pprof ruby => graphical output
- home_run for C based time parsing
- perftools.rb for ruby diagrams of usage time
- gdb.rb to executive ruby from gdb, when running ruby via gdb
- bleak house: ruby memory leak detector
- rack-perftools: rack middleware for perftools.rb
- google perftools for forking
Caleb Clausen – What every Ruby programmer should know about threads
- Thread safe objects: mutex, queue, sizequeue, condition variable
- Semaphores to signal between threads
- Mutex to lock and unlock resources
Jesse Wolgamott - Battle of NoSQL stars: Amazon's SDB vs Mongoid vs CouchDB vs RavenDB
- CouchDB is ACID, has great replication
- Mongo has great rails support
Day two
James Edward Gray II - Ruby in the Wild
- Logarithmic graphs!
- Rubyists like to do a lot of stuff from scratch
- "I've always been a fan of sqlite" - wha?
- For fun, scatch an itch, try something new
- "I try to make it a fun place [to work]"
- Greg Brown wearing a Boh hat for his interview
- Core of rake written in 30 mins
- Rake file list in place of Dir.glob for hydra? (FileList ?)
- File matching to compare input (source) and output (binary). Maybe for Sauron?
Chat with Scott Bellware
I had a great chat with Scott Bellware about Agile, Lean, and his own style of OO integration testing. He recommended this book:
The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development
Also, he sent me a link to how he does his OO testing scenarios:
http://github.com/sbellware/preview-signup
I flew back after lunch on day two, so I'll have to catch the rest in the videos!
Want to learn more about RailsConf, check out our other articles:
The Strength of the Rails Community, as seen at RailsConf