We have all experienced moments when our app does not work as expected: Failing validations, libraries raising exceptions, web services becoming unavailable. When this happens, our code ends up becoming defensive against potential failure and overall quality deteriorates. What if we could simplify the process and model our code as a succession of commands, with only success and error paths?

We'll work to refactor bloated logic. We'll extract and group code into meaningful objects called commands. These commands will then be chained to handle success/failure and pass data.

Learn to write in Elm, an exciting new front-end language that lets you to write predictable and productive functionality in the browser. Elm is a functional programming language that compiles to JavaScript and prohibits runtime crashes. After a brief introduction to syntax and semantics, we'll pair off and begin building our first Elm application: a cooperative starship shooter game... with Rails backend, of course! Topics to be covered include: the amazingly helpful compiler, how to construct your own types, WebSockets, JSON parsing, and functional programming concepts.

A smart man named Larry Wall once said the three virtues of a programmer are laziness, impatience and hubris. Well, if you're not using shell scripts to automate your work, then you're probably not being lazy to your full potential!

In this workshop you'll need no prior knowledge of shell programming other than a basic familiarity of how to use a terminal, and you'll come away with the knowledge needed to write some simple but effective functions and scripts. We'll also go over how to use some of the helpful UNIX tools like cat, head/tail, grep, sed, awk, xargs and more!

A major goal of refactoring is turning bad code into good code, but on what basis can we differentiate? There are countless opinions on the subject, but in this workshop, we'll assume a radical position: good code is that which allows our machines dignity in their work. With that assumption, we'll take a fresh (and memorable) look at refactoring.

Rails started with MySQL, which is awful, so we used it as a dumb data bucket.

Now we all use Postgres, which is amazing, so we should take full advantage of it.

This hands-on session will teach advanced SQL querying with Common Table Expressions and Window Functions, as well as doing validations in the database, and finishing up with executing Ruby code on the database server itself, where it runs much faster and can be shared between applications easily.

In a world we teach ourselves a lot of things, why not do it Ruby-on-Rails-on-Pi way? Let’s get our hands on a piece of hardware, understand what it takes to setup one up, install a couple of libraries, Ruby, RVM, RBENV, a GUI. Let’s get a couple of sensors: motion, temperature, humidity, tsunami, ectoplasm and see if we detect a cool thing or two. Let's discuss how we can use what we know about Rails to explore things on a RaspberryPi. From a practical point of view, we will go through installation, setup, and build a monitoring Motion Sensor application on a RaspberryPi.

Docker and Kubernetes are both experiencing massive growth in interest and adoption, but so what? Neither one is written in Ruby, why should your average Rails developer care? Let's get hands on with Kubernetes and see exactly how powerful it is as a tool. Blue-Green deployments, Canary Releases, Independently scaling API services. Kubernetes doesn't solve these problems directly, instead it provides a powerful set of abstractions to help you implement them yourself. Each attendee will be given full access to their very own ready-to-go Kubernetes cluster running in the cloud.

You have likely heard of test-driven development. In many circles it's touted as the only way to write software. Indeed, TDD is a powerful tool in writing software that not only works, but continues to work as time and features pass. However, when learning to test-drive software, you're often left confused about where to start and which direction to go.

This talk will provide some some gentle advice about TDD as we interactively iterate on an app starting with a proposed feature, adding tests, building the implementation, and refactoring to the final solution.

The effectiveness of your team is limited by your communication. To be a great developer we need to be able to express ideas into code. To be a great developer on a team we need to be able to transfer those ideas and that code between other humans.

In this workshop we will be focused on improving our own teams by improving our own communication. We will learn how to give more effective and meaningful code feedback, how to break complex ideas down into simple jargon free components, and we will discuss how we can build better teams and streamline our development processes.

RubyMotion, the Ruby runtime that lets you develop native apps for iOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS, and ANDROID, using your favorite editor, and the Ruby language and Ruby tools that you all know and love.

Come and get your feet wet developing native applications with RubyMotion Starter (Free!).

Are you a full-stack developer and have a slow website? Let's fix that! This workshop is an introduction to improving page load times and general front-end performance for Rails full-stack devs. Some literacy with Javascript, HTML and CSS is assumed, but you don't have to be up-to-date on the latest Javascript trends (let's face it, no one is!). Bring a Rails application and your laptop and let's get working.

JavaScript is everywhere and so are its frameworks. There’s tons of pressure and excitement to choose the right or cool tool to be used in your app but we don’t talk enough about how to use it in a production app that may or may not have an existing JavaScript structure. In this talk, I walk you through the some of tools from the React ecosystem that can be brought into your existing app and how to work around tutorials that mostly geared towards greenfield projects.

You can create all sorts of interesting programming projects with APIs, but it can be difficult to learn how to use them, or find APIs that are friendly enough to learn with. This workshop is intended for beginner and intermediate programmers who have never played with an API before. Together, we'll go through the process of setting up a small Sinatra app integrated with a free, well-documented API service, from authentication to sending and retrieving data.

In this workshop, developers will learn practical models that take the magic out of design. Because even though design is creative work and sometimes needs a spark of inspiration, there's not much wizardry involved. We will run through—practice with—a few much used design models. After this workshop you will be able to hire better designers, give better feedback to designers, and know how to improve an interface without a designer there to help you.