Big Ruby 2014
who it's for
Ruby on Rails developers, backend engineers, platform engineers, site reliability engineers, engineering managers, QA engineers, open source maintainers
topics
RabbitMQ durable event ingest; SQS high-availability queues; MongoDB event-sourced BI; sharded Rails databases; MySQL auto-increment trick; Hatchet end-to-end testing; Science gem parallel experiments; coverband production code coverage; Unicorn on Heroku deployments; job processing at million/hour; Kibana Elasticsearch logging; feature toggles and online migrations
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Testing The Untestable | Richard Schneeman | 34m |
A five‑year build pack starts with exactly zero tests and becomes a deployable, testable system by running real git repos against Heroku, measuring deploy… | ||
| Lightweight Business Intelligence with Ruby, Rails, and MongoDB | Coraline Ada Ehmke | 28m |
Claims a working lightweight BI built with Ruby on Rails, an event-sourced Leviathan, and MongoDB on the backend that captures every message from RabbitMQ… | ||
| Mo' Jobs Mo' Problems: Lessons Learned Scaling to Millions of Jobs an Hour | Tanner Burson | 44m |
Builds a concrete story: moves from syslog loss to replacing pipelines with RabbitMQ for durable event ingest and SQS for cheap highly available queues… | ||
| Building Def Con Ctf With Ruby | Vito Genovese | 24m |
A Ruby-based scoreboard runs on Ruby on Rails + Unicorn on Heroku backed by Postgres and New Relic, serving 24 qual challenges (Sinatra, x86, ARM) and finals… | ||
| How Shopify Sharded Rails | Camilo Lopez | 23m |
Shopify shards a once-single Rails DB in 2013 to handle ~150k requests per minute with peaks near 400k and $1.6B GMV and ~88k paying shops, doubled the number… | ||
| A 4-Pack Of Big Lightning Talks | Chris Morris | 29m |
Built a small production console with pry enhancements, batch helpers and text tables to speed lookup and email dumps; replaced brittle factory_girl/machinist… | ||
| Open Source Isn't For Everyone, But It Could Be | Ashe Dryden | 21m |
Open source contribution sits at 1.5% women and other groups are unmeasured, time and pay gaps cut many out, and hostile interactions push people away… | ||
| Castle On A Cloud: The Github Story | Ben Bleything | 29m |
GitHub runs most internal apps across roughly 350 AWS instances and about 250 Heroku dynos and balances EC2, RDS, EBS and S3 with concrete tooling: IAM roles… | ||
| Refactoring With Science | Wynn Netherland | 29m |
Claims that production-safe refactoring is possible by running parallel code paths and measuring differences, using the Science gem to run control vs candidate… | ||
| It Looks Like You're Writing A Service: Would You Like Help? | Mando Escamilla | 27m |
Union Metrics extracts seams from a Rails app into a stand-alone service called spectator with a concrete spec (URI, params, request body, and status codes 201… | ||
| In Praise of Smallness | B.J. Allen | 30m |
Argues for breaking big risks into frequent, tiny steps: keep feedback low magnitude frequent, push atomic changes that run in CI (Jenkins) and pass test suite… | ||
| Harry Potter and the Legacy Codebase | Harry Potter | 28m |
Claim: legacy code stores domain knowledge and yields to methodical archaeology rather than rewriting. Concrete tools and practices: use turbulence gem to… | ||
| Lightning Talks | Christopher Krailo, Aaron Lasseigne, Mando Escamila, Jeremy Perez, Jeffery Davis | 28m |
Five five‑minute segments document concrete outcomes and tools: “User Groups are Awesome” lists meetup cadence, hack nights, a blog link and local groups… | ||
| Throw Some Keys on it: Data Modeling For Key/Value Data Stores by Example | Hector Castro | 18m |
Models Uber driver presence with a distributed key value store using grid cells as keys and serialized sets as values and demonstrates a working implementation… | ||
| Herding Elephants | Clint Shryock | 33m |
Claim: Heroku Postgres runs the largest fleet of Postgres databases using a handful of Ruby apps. Concretely this is a constellation of Sinatra apps, hundreds… | ||
| Developers are From Mars, Developers are From Venus | Adam Keys | 34m |
Lists five developer character types — Grinders, Tour guides, Geniuses, T‑shaped generalists and a “fun leader” — and gives concrete tactics: one Grinder… | ||
| nothing matches | ||