MagicRuby

Lodging

Looking for a room? Our conference rate for the hotel is only $189 (that's well over 50% off)!
Check out the event reservation mini-site for more info!

The Venue

Disney's Contemporary Resort and Convention Center

Rising majestically between the shores of Bay Lake and Seven Seas Lagoon, Disney's Contemporary Resort immerses you in a world of modern art and landmark architecture as sleek monorails silently glide through the center of the stunning atrium lobby. You'll enjoy the distinctive style of oversized guest rooms and suites, most with dramatic lakefront or Theme Park views, along with a marina, health club, and an expansive pool area. For a truly memorable dining experience, the award-winning California Grill offers breathtaking views of Cinderella Castle from high atop the hotel. And, you're just a short stroll or monorail ride away from all the sights and sounds of the Magic Kingdom® Park and Epcot®.

Once you're here, you'll discover that the Walt Disney World® Resort offers more magical experiences than you ever dreamed possible. Don't pass up the chance to add an extra few days before or after your meetings for a spectacular golf or spa getaway or the perfect vacation with family and friends. We'll even extend the same room rates* you received for your meeting to any nights you add to your visit.
(* Room Rates are subject to change without notice and are based on availability. Group rates may not be combined with any other discounts or offers.)

Keynote Speakers

Chad Fowler (InfoEther)

Chad Fowler is an internationally known software developer, trainer, manager, speaker, and musician. Over the past decade he has worked with some of the world's largest companies and most admired software developers. He loves to program computers and, as part of his role as CTO of InfoEther, Inc., spends much of his time solving hard problems for customers in the Ruby language. He is co-organizer of RubyConf and RailsConf and author/co-author of a number of popular software books, including "The Passionate Programmer" and the upcoming "Rails 3 Recipes".

Dave Thomas (Pragmatic Programmers)

Dave Thomas is a programmer.

The Talks

Documentation is freaking awesome, Kyle Neath (GitHub)

I have a confession: I love documentation — and I don't just mean code comments. I mean documentation of every form. I want to introduce you to the breadth of documentation styles and forms. I want to show you how to produce beautiful generated documentation. I want to explain what makes an awesome README. How to build an amazing marketing website for your library. I want to gush about why I think writing TomDoc is going to make you write better code.

Ruby is such an expressive language that your code can end up looking like anything you can imagine. Documentation is paramount in helping others understand why and how they should be using your code.

Kyle Neath is a designer/hacker who's currently polishing pixels at GitHub, Inc. Kyle loves HTML and CSS like they were his own children and has been hacking on Ruby creating things no one cares about since 2005.

 

Developing Cocoa Applications with MacRuby, Brendan Lim (Intridea)

MacRuby gives Ruby developers the ability to write full-fledged Mac applications while enjoying the benefits of the Ruby language. Sick of Objective-C? Crave metaprogramming and proper lambdas while hacking on Mac apps? MacRuby is for you. Attendees will be able to learn about what makes MacRuby so special, differences between MacRuby and RubyCocoa, and even see a MacRuby application created from start to finish.

Brendan Lim is currently the Director of Mobile Development at Intridea. He is the author of a number of OSS projects and the co-author of MacRuby in Action, which is due to come out very soon in early-access form.

Loving your customers, loving your peers, Alan Johnson (Carsonified)

I got into software because I like programming, but also because I really like working with great teams and helping people. I wanted to make great products that make folks happy and help solve their problems. I figured it would be easy because all of the cool startup stories I read about made it sound really easy. I was dead wrong.

In my talk I'll share how hard it is to really make people happy, and how the best way to do it is to put their interests above our own. We'll talk about writing software that makes customers giddy and we'll talk about writing code that makes our teammates dance. I'll share tons of stories from my background and the background of other people I know about how they've succeeded and failed at this, and hopefully by the end we'll all come out appreciating and caring about our customers and peers a ton more than when we started.

Alan Johnson is lead engineer at Carsonified by title, only engineer by actual position. Alan has been writing software for forever, and writing Ruby since 2007. He has written written a couple of small ruby open source tools with a few followers on GitHub, like rcov_plugin and control_center and worked with Yehuda Katz on handlebars.js, a javascript templating language.

 

Cultivating Cucumber, Les Hill (Hashrocket)

Cucumber lets software development teams describe how software should behave in plain text. That is great in theory, but in practice using Cucumber can be hard and frustrating. This talk will highlight some tips and techniques to help you cultivate your Cucumber suite to be more effective and easier to work with.

Les Hill writes awesome Ruby code for a living and loves it. One of the earliest Rocketeers, he has moved heaven and earth writing rocket-science software at a stealthy security firm, pioneered one of the web's first AJAX applications, and has written core algorithms for scale-free peer-to-peer networks. Les is an active contributor to OSS and occasionally co-hosts the Ruby5 podcast.

 

Geospace Your Rubies, Peter Jackson (Intridea)

Location-based applications are everywhere, yet most modern Rubyists haven't ventured far beyond superimposing a few locations on a Google Map. In this talk, the Rubyist will learn about the many spatial programming possibilities within the Ruby landscape, including non-location-based applications, geographic applications using custom imagery, answering difficult questions using spatial queries, Moving Beyond the Dot-On-The-Map, and how to get started with Geospatial Programming today.

Peter Jackson works at Intridea. After directing movies proved to be too lucrative for his humble lifestyle, Pete moved away from his native New Zealand to become a DC based Ruby hacker. Or, it was a pretty cool name until that no-talent ass-clown from NZ starting winning Oscars.

 

Code Isn't Enough, Gregg Pollack and Caike Souza (Envy Labs)

This is a talk about lessons they don't teach in programming classes. It takes more then just technical skills to succeed at being a software developer. You may also need to communicate effectively, manage projects, train your clients, and mainly just play well with others. We developers are an anti-social breed who enjoy being left to our own devices, so many of these skills don't come naturally.

In this talk Gregg Pollack and Caike Souza will give some tips to help software developers improve their craft and increase the odds of succeeding at our chosen field. We'll also share some of the core principles we hold dear at Envy Labs, and show how we implement them on a daily basis. We'll be discussing a number of topics and sharing some horror stories about how we have often failed at each of them.

Gregg Pollack is founder of Envy Labs and a contributor to the Rails Activist Team, ORUG, BarCamp Orlando, and Ignite Orlando.
Caike Souza is a developer at Envy Labs who recently founded Orlando Code Dojo.

 

Meditation + Code, Mike Gehard (Pivotal Labs)

What would software development look like if we could apply the time tested principles of meditation to writing code? Meditation teaches that if you focus your mind on one thing, you can easily achieve that thing. When we write code, we are trying to achieve many things but if we break down the process of writing software into many single things then we can easily apply the principles of meditation to them.

The talk will cover some background on meditation (maybe we'll even try some) and then segway into how testing can help us apply these techniques to making our code better and providing better software to our clients.

If all goes as planned, attendees will walk away with some concrete ideas to apply to their projects in the test driven development space and maybe even a desire to start meditating.

Mike Gehard works for Pivotal Labs in Boulder, Colorado. We specialize in helping our clients get most bang for their buck through the use of TDD/BDD, Pair programming and Ruby/Rails.

 

Exceptional Ruby: An in-depth look at handling errors in Ruby, Avdi Grimm

You know how to raise and rescue exceptions. But do you know how they work, and how how to structure a robust error handling strategy for your app? This talk will cover Ruby's exception mechanism in detail, and give some pointers on error handling architecture based on real-world experience.

This is a two-part talk. The first part will cover Ruby's rich exception mechanism in depth, including features you may not have known about. The second part will discuss strategies for implementing a robust and cohesive error-handling policy for your application, based on real-world experience.

Avdi Grimm is a husband, father, Rubyist since 2001. Interested in distributed systems, geographically dispersed teams, and sustainable software development. Author of Open Source Ruby projects such as NullDB, Hammertime, AlterEgo, and many others. Contributor to various Ruby projects, including Gemcutter and the DataMapper/SimpleDB adapter.

 

Crank Up Your Apps With TorqueBox, Jim Crossley (Red Hat)

There are many options out there for serving your Rack/Rails applications, but how many have asynchronous processing, job scheduling, and clustering built-in, running on JRuby, perhaps the fastest, truly multi-threaded Ruby implementation available? In this talk, we'll explore TorqueBox, which combines JRuby with the JBoss Application Server to provide Ruby developers with all of the above. 'Java' is a polarizing word to Ruby developers, but with TorqueBox, you develop, deploy, and manage your applications without writing a single line of Java or XML.

TorqueBox takes the pain out of background processing (e.g. BackgrounDrb, DelayedJob, Resque, etc), scheduling (e.g. myriad cron-backed gems) and clustering (e.g. HAProxy). It provides a uniform deployment environment that can easily scale either down to your laptop or up to hundreds of clustered servers, allowing you to build, test and debug your applications consistently.

Jim Crossley is a Senior Engineer at Red Hat working on the family of projects listed at http://projectodd.org/.

 

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Cloud, Wesley Beary (Engine Yard)

Cloud computing scared the crap out of me – the quirks and nightmares of provisioning computing and storage on AWS, Terremark, Rackspace, etc – until I took the bull by the horns. Let me now show you how I tamed that bull.

Learn how to easily get started cloud computing with fog. It gives you the reins within any Ruby application or script. If you can control your infrastructure choices, you can make better choices in development and get what you need in production. You'll get an overview of fog and concrete examples to give you a head start on your own provisioning workflow.

Wesley Beary is an avid Rubyist and Open source enthusiast. He spends his days developing fog at Engine Yard and spends much (probably too much) of his free time working on other open source projects.

 

What Happened to Desktop Development in Ruby?, Andy Maleh (Obtiva)

While web development is thriving in the Ruby world with Rails, Sinatra, and other frameworks, desktop development is still not very common as a lot of developers rely on Java technologies like Eclipse or straight .NET technologies such as Windows Forms. This talk will walk attendees through some Ruby desktop development frameworks/libraries, contrasting the pros and cons of each, and mentioning what is missing that discourages developers from relying on Ruby to build desktop applications. Frameworks/libraries covered will include MacRuby, Shoes, Limelight, and Glimmer.

Annas (Andy) Maleh is a senior consultant at Obtiva, a consulting firm based in Chicago that embraces agile practices and software craftsmanship. He has had extensive experience working with agile XP teams to develop enterprise solutions on both the desktop and the web. Mr. Maleh has presented on software development and best practices at numerous conferences, including the Agile conference, GLSEC, EclipseCon, and RubyConf. He is also the founder and lead developer of Glimmer, an open source project for develop development in Ruby. Mr. Maleh holds an M.S. in Software Engineering from DePaul University and a B.S. in Computer Science from McGill University.