Great Lakes Ruby Bash

Rubyists are proportionally well-represented as inventors of new tools and libraries, being not so much victims of not-invented-here syndrome as they are keen on creating neat new things. When it comes to solving problems at the application level, using well-known and long-lived tools open up the possibilities for building awesome, useful software. JRuby brings us as Ruby-loving app developers into a much larger world of options and approaches, from integrating the battle-tested Hibernate ORM into Rails 3, working directly with Neo4j to model your application in a graph database, or saving pain by encapsulating an IBM mainframe RPG queue behind an elegant RESTful web service. These benefits make it worth exploring the techniques of operating in the world of the JVM’s Ruby implementation, such as basic interop, tooling, and tackling native gems.

In this talk, I will aim to address some issues about the low number of women in the field. I will base my discussion on current research trends, mainly from the field of Psychology, to discuss why there aren’t more female programmers and what can be done to successfully recruit/retain more women. I will provide real-world examples of what women experience and pair those with simple solutions that men (and women) can employ to decrease the gender imbalance.

This four person skit will demonstrate the interaction of team members on an agile development team as they use cucumber to create and use acceptance tests to build a web application. During this skit we will hear from the Product Owner, the User Interface designer, the Developer, and of course the Acceptance Tester. Be ready for a good mix of laughs and learning.

Communication is undeniably one of the most important facets of the software development process. How often do we focus on learning ways to communicate better with our pairs, our teams, our clients?

This talk will address the issue of communication, and suggest practical, implementable ways to foster clearer more effective verbal and written exchange.

My hope is to share insight and experience to encourage and inspire everyone involved in the software process to build stronger, more positive relationships, for the benefit of all.

As ruby developers, we’ve been dragged toward richer web apps, sometimes kicking and screaming. But now it’s time to embrace rich web development: we are now in a position to make our client side code as beautiful and maintainable as our server side ruby code. Coffeescript gives us a beautiful syntax for writing javascript that causes noise to fade away and let our intent shine through. Backbone is an elegant MVC framework that provides just enough structure and guides our client side code towards the kind of clean, reusable codebase we are used to from rails. Combining these two with the usual disciplines of Test Driven Development, we really can build client side code we can be proud of. In this session I’ll share my experience building real applications with a coffeescript/backone front end and a ruby on rails back end. You’ll see how all these excellent technologies seamlessly fit together to let us do great things.

If you’re writing code that looks like User.all.reject(), you’re doing it wrong. Don’t worry though, we’ve all done it before. ActiveRecord makes it all too easy to introduce code that is far from performant, and after awhile, we tend to forget that underneath the pretty API, we’re still producing SQL. In this talk, we’ll peel back the API so that we can see some of the common mistakes I see when dealing with ActiveRecord statements, and more importantly, how you can fix them.

Several years ago, Rails took the web development world by storm, capturing the imagination of developers everywhere, and effectively putting Ruby on the map for a legion of passionate software developers. But this outstanding ambassador for the Ruby programming language has not gained as much traction in the realm of large corporate, ""enterprisey"" software projects as we might have hoped, thus hampering our ambitions for world domination!

That’s ok; Ruby is so awesome, it will not be denied. Today we’re seeing more inroads for Ruby into enterprise software in the form of testing frameworks like Cucumber and RSpec. Because of the flexibility and power of the Ruby programming language, these testing frameworks are finding a home in corporate enterprise software projects, many of which do not even feature a typical user interface or workflow.

I’d like to talk about my recent experiences in adapting Ruby tools to the testing needs in previously hard-to-reach areas:

• How can we test asynchronous systems using Cucumber?
• How does testing web service interactions differ from testing user interfaces?
• Is Cucumber any good for testing ETL processes?
• How can we do testing in the applet desert (no Watir anywhere)?
• Ack! I have to test an aging legacy monster written in a melange of ancient voodoo (e.g. shell, Cobol, Perl, Oracle/PLSQL)!!! Can Ruby help?

The power of Ruby and the vibrancy of the Ruby community are the fundamental reasons that Ruby is a phenomenal choice for testing systems which nobody thought to test before. Add in JRuby, and, well, shut the front door. Ruby just rocks for testing weird mutant enterprise applications.