RailsConf 2014
2014-04-22..2014-04-25
Chicago, IL, United States
[RailsConf 2009, RailsConf 2011, RailsConf 2012, RailsConf 2013, RailsConf 2014, RailsConf 2015, RailsConf 2016, RailsConf 2017, RailsConf 2018, RailsConf 2019, RailsConf 2020 CE, RailsConf 2021, RailsConf 2022, RailsConf 2023, RailsConf 2024, RailsConf 2025]
as the organisers put it
RailsConf, the largest gathering of Ruby and Rails developers in the world, will be held in Chicago. Join us from April 22nd - 25th and connect with top Rails talent, companies, and project owners from around the world.
who it's for
Rails developers, backend engineers, engineering managers, site reliability engineers, frontend developers, QA/test engineers, technical leads
topics
mutation testing with Mutant; ActiveRecord performance and data integrity; server-side and client-side rendering; continuous deployment and zero-downtime deploys; background jobs with Storm; AMQP-backed Rack with RabbitMQ; component-based Rails refactoring; accessibility with ARIA in Rails; Rack::Attack rate limiting; profiling Rails applications; service-oriented architecture patterns; PostgreSQL with Rails
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Keynote: Writing Software | David Heinemeier Hansson | 01h 01m |
Argues that test-driven design often degrades architecture by forcing needless dependency injection, shows Rails examples where unit tests pass yet Basecamp… | ||
| Empowering Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) with Accessibility | Nitin Dhaware | 32m |
Demo shows ARIA attributes making real differences: forms announce errors and focus moves to fields, aria-required marks mandatory inputs, live chat updates… | ||
| Demystifying Data Science: A Live Tutorial | Todd Schneider | 29m |
Live demo builds an n‑gram index of RailsConf abstracts, scrapes 497 talks (81 in 2014) with Nokogiri, normalizes text, and stores counts in a redis sorted set… | ||
| Concerns, Decorators, Presenters, Service Objects, Helpers, Help Me Decide! | Justin Gordon | 41m |
Shows concrete refactors on a microblog app: moves email and finder code into concerns, pushes presentation HTML+URL logic into Draper decorators, collapses… | ||
| Mutation Testing with Mutant | Erik Michaels-Ober | 41m |
Mutation testing using Mutant runs your existing RSpec specs against many tiny code changes and reports which mutations survive; an example run produces 82 of… | ||
| Keith and Mario's Guide to Continuous Deployment with Rails | Keith Pitt | 30m |
Claims that teams push master automatically on green for fast feedback and predictable deploys, using Buildbox CI + GitHub PRs, static analysis with Cane and… | ||
| Where did the OO go? Views Should be Objects Too! | Andrew Warner | 32m |
Claim: render one set of templates on server and client by splitting view into a plain-data Perspectives gem object and a mustache templates file. Prototype… | ||
| Rack-AMQP: Ditch HTTP Inside SOA! | Josh Szmajda | 22m |
Rack-AMQP maps HTTP semantics onto AMQP so Rack and Rails apps run over a message broker instead of TCP per-request, using Jackalope as the AMQP webserver… | ||
| Supercharge Your Workers with Storm | Carl Lerche | 42m |
Backend for Skylight runs on Apache Storm and shows how to replace DB coordination with spouts, tuples, partitions and states to scale realtime jobs… | ||
| Modeling on the Right Side of the Brain | Nicholas Henry | 29m |
Claims five essential skills for object modeling: finding objects, identifying collaborations, defining business rules, assigning services and attributes; uses… | ||
| Let Me Code | Liana Leahy | 05m |
A sung parody of Frozen that makes a concrete claim: celebrating Rails 4.0.4 and the coder’s comeback from imposter syndrome while namechecking rSpec won't go… | ||
| Domain Driven Design and Hexagonal Architecture with Rails | Eric Roberts | 31m |
Claims that Domain‑Driven Design plus a hexagonal layout stops Rails’ fat‑model drift and makes code reusable across web and API boundaries. Actual techniques… | ||
| Lightning Fast Deployment of Your Rails-backed JavaScript app | Luke Melia | 32m |
Claims deployment time drops from more than five minutes to under fifteen seconds with zero downtime by separating static assets from Rails, uploading… | ||
| Advanced aRel: When ActiveRecord Just Isn't Enough | Cameron Dutro | 35m |
Claim: aRel lets Rails build arbitrarily complex queries in pure Ruby instead of SQL strings, and ActiveRecord delegates query construction to it. Tools… | ||
| Too Big to Fail | Chris Maddox | 34m |
Company transfers hundreds of millions (soon billions) so risk is concrete: Ruby on Rails code runs validating every model in production every three hours to… | ||
| Deploying Rails is Easier Than it Looks | Ben Dixon | 26m |
Claim: a typical Rails app runs on one VPS with EngineX, Unicorn, and PostGres; provisioning uses Chef Solo and takes about twenty minutes with a single… | ||
| Keynote: 10 Years! | Yehuda Katz | 32m |
Rails claims that convention over configuration succeeds because human decision-making hits ego depletion, so defaults become the most effective psychological… | ||
| What is REST? Why is it Part of the Rails Way? | Javier Ramirez When David Heinemeier | 40m |
Claims Rails made REST mainstream around 2006 and that REST is simply HTTP plus resources = URLs, representations = JSON/HTML and metadata. Shows a working… | ||
| Reading Code Good | Saron Yitbarek | 21m |
Advice for a nightly watch: join a weekly Code Club that reads real gems not just tutorials, limit sessions to 100 lines so a complete gem fits, and expect to… | ||
| Ruby on Rails Hacking Guide | Akira Matsuda | 41m |
Covers concrete internals: Rails has no C-extension and the distributed Rails gem is actually a meta-gem of seven gems (railties, activerecord, actionpack… | ||
| Web Applications with Ruby (not Rails) | David Padilla | 30m |
Shows how to implement an MVC web app in plain Ruby atop Rack interface using a small router, controllers, Haml views, Rack::Utils for params and optional… | ||
| Artisans and Apprentices | Coraline Ada Ehmke | 34m |
Argues that modern bootcamps mirror medieval guilds: both set standards, charge steep entry costs and shrink diversity, and both can create conservative… | ||
| Building kick-ass internal education programs (for large and small budgets) | Chuck Lauer Vose | 31m |
Claim: internal education is easy and cheap when focused on concrete formats and measurable outcomes. Run lightning talks before lunch (30–60 minutes) with… | ||
| Technical Onboarding, Training, and Mentoring | Kate Heddleston | 30m |
Claims a concrete, repeatable four-week onboarding plan that turns juniors into reliably independent engineers faster and cheaper: get a dev environment… | ||
| Surviving the Big Rewrite | Bradly Feeley | 34m |
Describes extracting a realtime product from a monolithic Rails app into static single‑page sites built with middleman and served from S3/CDNs, reusing a… | ||
| Panel: Teaching the Next Great Developers | Noel Rappin | 40m |
Panelists from DevBootcamp Chicago Jumpstart Labs Turing Thoughtbot and Girl Develop It describe concrete outcomes: students learn how to learn, get nine‑week… | ||
| Biggish Data With Rails and Postgresql | Starr Horne | 31m |
Database conventions break once tables hit hundreds of millions of rows: Honeybadger runs ~1 TB of error rows and ingests ~2 GB/day, and naive count() or… | ||
| What the Cache?! | Simon Kröger | 33m |
Claims that Rails with MySQL can survive half a billion requests per day by avoiding queries and layering caches, and shows concrete tactics: versioned cache… | ||
| Tricks That Rails Didn't Tell You About | Carlos Antionio da Silva | 40m |
Shows concrete Rails features and exact code outcomes: reversible migrations instead of verbose change_column, merging model scopes to avoid duplicated where… | ||
| Middleman: the Missing View in the Rails API Stack | Brad Gessler | 34m |
Middleman is a production static-site stack that uses Tilt, Rack and the usual Ruby toolchain to build and deploy single-page apps. Poll Everywhere builds… | ||
| Refactoring Towards Component-based Rails Architectures | Stephan Hagemann | 33m |
Argues that large Rails apps get manageable by extracting verticals into namespaced, testable components: use mountable engine and local gems as packaging… | ||
| Rails as an SOA Client | Pete Hodgson | 37m |
Rails apps become service-front ends so the team builds bounded integration tests that replace real services with fakes and adds contract tests… | ||
| Service Oriented Authenication | Jeremy Green | 36m |
A concrete recipe for adding centralized auth to a monolith and then peeling off services: implement OAuth2 + doorkeeper + omniauth, build a tiny so_auth gem… | ||
| Authorization in a Service-Oriented Environment | Alan Cohen | 26m |
Claim: a small JSON policy language and a tiny adapter gem called IronHide provide a CanCan-compatible bridge that keeps authorization rules out of app code… | ||
| Ruby Heros | Ruby Heros | 17m |
A rundown of what matters: this is the Ruby Hero awards celebrating six winners from a pool of 631 nominations in year seven of the program, with concrete… | ||
| Humor in The Code | Baratunde Thurston | 49m |
Title promises mixing comedy and engineering and delivers specifics: a company (cultivated wit) and a running comedy hack day that produces working prototypes… | ||
| Build The API First | Rosie Hoyem, Sonja Hall | 24m |
Argues for starting with a standardized server first and shows a practical stack to do it concretely using Rails API to produce a lighter faster app plus… | ||
| Designing the APIs for an Internal Set of Services | Alberto Leal | 24m |
Argues that API design succeeds on concrete contracts not platitudes, shows a working cloud platform shiteru and a microservices stack using Ruby/Rails… | ||
| Debugger Driven Developement with Pry | Joel Turnbull | 41m |
Claims that a debugger can drive development not just fix bugs, and demonstrates it by building a bowling score tracker and getting tests green inside one… | ||
| Eliminating Inconsistent Test Failures | Austin Putman | 34m |
Session lists concrete fixes: diagnose Capybara and Cucumber flakiness by reproducing CI state, capture DB with fixture_builder, stub third‑party calls with… | ||
| Effectively Testing Services | Neal Kemp | 27m |
Shows actual tactics and results: use webmock to block real network calls, use vcr cassettes to record real responses and detect unexpected diffs, mount a… | ||
| Front-End: Fun, Not Frustration | Roy Tomeij | 37m |
Twelve concrete tips and low‑hanging fixes: use box-sizing: border-box so padding doesn’t blow up percentage layouts, make nav items display:inline-block and… | ||
| Elements of Design: A Developer's Primer | Jenn Scheer | 29m |
Lists seven concrete design rules (hierarchy, contrast, repetition, proximity, flow, typography, color) and demonstrates them with real sites—GitHub, BuzzFeed… | ||
| Sketchnothing: Creative Notes for Technical Content | Jessica Eldredge | 25m |
Claims that hand‑drawn notes improve focus and memory by combining verbal and visual cues, and that live sketchnoting yields ready‑to‑share artifacts… | ||
| How They Work Better Together: Lean UX, Agile Development and User-Centered Design | John Athayde | 37m |
Claims that design, dev and product iterate together using sketches, quick prototypes and live fixes rather than waterfall deliverables; tools actually used… | ||
| Discovering User Interactions | Cameron Daigle | 35m |
Shows concrete failures and fixes: Publix cash-back screen makes “no” a final, confusing submit; a cab card reader that adds tip and a baffling monorail ticket… | ||
| The Power of M | Charles Lowell | 27m |
Argues that the client-side “M” must be real models with explicit relationships not just templates and callbacks, and demonstrates by building an in-memory… | ||
| I've Pair Programmed for 27,000 Hours. Ask Me Anythings! | Joe Moore | 40m |
Claims nearly 13½ years of near‑daily pairing and four years full‑time remote, and cites an empirical ~15% slow‑down in controlled studies. Describes concrete… | ||
| Bring Fun Back to JS: Step-by-Step Refactoring Toward Ember | Brandon Hays | 34m |
The talk shows a concrete refactor path: wrap messy jQuery in an initLegacyCode jail, write integration tests, extract computed-property models, and replace UI… | ||
| The "Rails of JavaScript" Won't be a Framework | Justin Searls | 34m |
Argues that the Rails-of-JavaScript is not another framework but a conventions+build layer and shows Lineman (lineman.js) as proof: installable via npm… | ||
| An Iterative Approach to Service Oriented Architecture | Eric Saxby | 36m |
Iterative extraction from a large Rails app yields a clear recipe: isolate the data, extract a Ruby client and adapters, then lift a minimal server. Work uses… | ||
| Improve Performance Quick and Cheap: Optimize Memory and Upgrade to Ruby 2.1 | Alexander Dymo | 29m |
Claims that memory optimization is the #1 thing to speed Rails apps, with concrete numbers: garbage collection sometimes consumes 70% of CPU time and upgrading… | ||
| Cognitive Shortcuts: Models, Visualizations, Metaphors, and Other Lies | Sam Livingston-Gray | 33m |
Argues that cognitive shortcuts can solve hard design problems but introduce predictable biases, backing that with concrete techniques and a working example… | ||
| How to be a Boss Without the B-S | Jessie Link | 41m |
Career change into management means swapping solo coding for responsibility for people, schedule, budget and scope; concrete skills taught include… | ||
| Closing Keynote | Aaron Patterson | 01h 01m |
Talk describes AdequateRecord, a fork of ActiveRecord that introduces bind-parameter caching and a statement cache, yielding up to ~100% faster SQL generation… | ||
| Distributed Request Tracing | Kenny Hoxworth | 29m |
Twilio claims distributed tracing lets engineers follow any request end‑to‑end to find bottlenecks and bad nodes; the talk shows instrumentation using Zipkin… | ||
| Saving the World (Literally) with Ruby on Rails | Sean Marcia | 27m |
Two thirds of Virginia hives have died and about 35% of managed hives collapse, so a field system gets built to monitor temperature, humidity and weight with… | ||
| You are Not an Impostor | Nickolas Means | 33m |
Explains that impostor syndrome dates to 1978 and empirically affects 70% of people, maps a destructive loop—introversion, perfectionism, procrastination, fear… | ||
| How to be a Better Junior Developer | Katherine Wu | 36m |
Claim: non‑CS backgrounds supply immediate team value through questions as a junior superpower and mentoring-savvy behaviors. Concrete tactics: get people to… | ||
| Building an OSS-Centric Company (and Why You Want To) | Leah Silber | 33m |
Argues that an open source–centric company is sustainable if revenue mixes consulting, paid training, conferences, small sponsorships and product sales rather… | ||
| All the Little Things | Sandi Metz | 39m |
Code starts as a 43-line conditional around Gilded Rose and a tick method that Flogs 45 and the class Flogs 50; tests guide refactoring into seams, then many… | ||
| Ultra Light and Maintainable Rails Wizards | Andy Maleh | 35m |
Claims a concrete pattern: one main ActiveRecord plus presenter per step that validates only that part, controller-as-control-flow with RESTful URLs for nested… | ||
| Rack::Attack: Protect your app with this one weird gem! | Aaron Suggs | 29m |
Built at Kickstarter and published as the Rack::Attack gem to throttle and block abusive HTTP requests, it implements throttles keyed by IP or parameter… | ||
| Make an Event of It | Jason R. Clark | 32m |
Claims that evented patterns decouple concerns so controllers stop accumulating side effects and tests shrink to asserting a single event fire; demonstrates a… | ||
| Real-time Rails with Sync | Mike Moore | 36m |
Live demo shows a Rails app turned real time by adding chrismccord/sync, wiring browser websockets with faye + thin + foreman, and marking models with sync_all… | ||
| Looking Backward: Ten Years on Rails | Luke Francl | 34m |
A clear before/after: 2004 Java work means raw servlets, JDBC and a long edit‑compile‑deploy loop on WebSphere with inscrutable JSP stack traces; Rails… | ||
| Workshop - Simplifying Code: Monster to Elegant in Less Than 5 steps | Tute Costa | 40m |
Workshop shows four concrete refactorings with runnable Ruby/Rails exercises and Minitest checks: intentional revealing method, special case objects, replace… | ||
| Workshop - Ruby Coding Dojo | Carlos Souza, David Rogers | 01h 08m |
Hands-on Coding Dojo runs a live Ruby session that claims practice beats work and demonstrates test-driven development with Ruby 2.0 and minitest/autorun… | ||
| How to Build a Smart Profiler for Rails | Tom Dale, Yehuda Katz | 36m |
Skylight claims to deliver honest response times by storing histograms and 95th percentile rollups, and it actually handles the scale of real traffic — the… | ||
| Culture of Continue Delivery | Leena S N, Vaidy Bala | 33m |
Claim: adopting XP practices and a CI/CD pipeline turns stalled six-month projects into rapid, tested releases. Evidence: 100+ story cards and a waterfall… | ||
| Writing Small Code | Mark Menard | 35m |
Builds a small Ruby command‑line option parser that starts with booleans then adds strings integers and arrays, keeping TDD and specs green the whole time… | ||
| Software Development Lessons from the Apollo Program | Julian Simioni | 30m |
The Apollo Guidance Computer is described with two kilobytes of RAM and a user interface of verbs and nouns (the DSKY) that actually flies missions; a 12-01… | ||
| Heroku 2014: A Year in Review | Terence Lee, Richard Schneeman | 46m |
Heroku reports concrete wins: deployment times drop about 40% faster deploys by using parallel installs (Bundler 1.5 -j), PIGz compression, asset caching… | ||
| Engine Yard's New and Improved Cloud Platform | Edward Chiu, Will Luongo | 18m |
Engine Yard presents a rewritten Angular.js dashboard, a cluster model that separates load balancer app and DB tiers across regions, reusable blueprints for… | ||
| An Ode to 17 Databases in 33 Minutes | Toby Hede | 38m |
A rapid whirlwind claims to survey 17 databases in 33 minutes and actually names implementations and tradeoffs PostgreSQL with JSON and Hstore and indexing… | ||
| Secrets of a World Memory Champion | Chris Hunt | 24m |
Claims a novice can learn to memorize foreign‑language words, driving directions, phone numbers, a shuffled deck, credit cards and even a conference’s names… | ||
| Panel Discussion: The Future of Rails Jobs | Obie Fernandez, Jeff Casimir, Allan Grant, Chad Pytel | 51m |
Claims: Rails demand stays high but job skills widen beyond Rails to Rails + CoffeeScript + Angular + RSpec + PostgreSQL, onboarding now needs toolchain work… | ||
| WebRTC Change Communcations Forever | Greg Baugues | 33m |
Claims that WebRTC brings native peer‑to‑peer voice, video and data to the browser with concrete APIs: getUserMedia, RTCPeerConnection and RTCDataChannel… | ||
| Workshop - Teamwork Ain't Always Easy | Michael Norton | 01h 20m |
Three simple, concrete methods decide whether to watch: use fist to five for quick low‑risk votes, run collaboration contracts to assign… | ||
| Class Reloading in Ruby on Rails: The Whole Story | Xavier Noria | 45m |
Explains how Rails implements live code changes by replacing Ruby’s default autoload path with a filesystem-backed resolver that loads with load in development… | ||
| Tales from the Crypt | Aaron Bedra, Justin Collins, Matt Konda | 35m |
A contrived Rails app shows concrete failures and fixes: a rollback to reenable CSRF protection after a Doge site triggers unauthorized orders, leaking up to… | ||
| Lightning Talks | Sean Marcia, Sachin Shintre, Andrew Nordman, Justin Love, Matthew Nielsen, Andrew Cantino, Yehuda Katz, Ryan Alyea, Adam Cuppy, Mark Lorenz, Mike Gee, Trever yarrish, Mike Bourgeous, Gostavo Robles, Hector Bustillos, Victor Velasquez, Kay Rhodes, Kevin Fallon, Andrew Vit, Brian Garside, Mike Virata-Stone, Kiyoto Tamura, David Padilla | 01h 40m |
A rapid-fire sequence of demos and claims: micro‑events announce a Ruby hackfest; benchmarks compare JSON, MessagePack and Protocol Buffers across Ruby, Python… | ||
| Curmudgeon: An Opinionated Framework | Ernie Miller | 41m |
Argues that Rails’ built-in opinions cause real surprises: ActiveRecord generates attributes via method_missing attribute generation and computes table names… | ||
| Workshop - All Aboard The Elixir Express! | Chris McCord | 03h 19m |
Claim: Elixir brings Ruby’s ergonomics to the Erlang VM and adds macros and protocols, plus real concurrency and fault tolerance. Tools shown: mix, IEx, OTP… | ||
| You'll Never Believe Which Web Framework Powers Upworthy | Luigi Montanez | 33m |
Upworthy is powered by Ruby on Rails after starting as a Padrino/Sinatra app, migrating into a Rails monolith and then splitting into services; traffic hits… | ||
| Living Social Lightning Talks | Ed Weng Dan Meyer Tyler | 50m |
Monolithic Rails code splits into microservices, so LivingSocial builds a Stepford service that serves JSON “packages” containing precompiled markup styles and… | ||
| Get More Hands on Your Keyboard | Manik Juneja | 28m |
Company history and concrete outcomes matter: a Rails consultancy that starts with a PayPal wrapper (VPayPal gem), builds a paid internal training platform… | ||
| WebRTC Change Communications Forever | Greg Baugues | 33m |
WebRTC claims native peer-to-peer audio/video/data in the browser using getUserMedia, RTCPeerConnection and RTC data channel, with ICE/STUN/TURN for NAT… | ||
| Workshop - Machine Learning For Fun and Profit | John Paul Ahenfelter | 01h 17m |
Claim: Ruby answers concrete user questions. Code uses sex_machine gem to infer gender (about 80% accuracy on first names), a local service built from… | ||
| Workshop - Applications First, Frameworks Second: Better Systems through Design | Adam Hawkins | 01h 47m |
Claim: implement business logic before running rails new by using explicit boundaries and patterns. Workshop shows a 12–13 step repo that builds a single-post… | ||
| Service Extraction at Groupon Scale | Jason Sisk, Abhishek Pillai | 32m |
Groupon faces real scale: 40+ million active global customers, spikes to 30k requests per minute, a 2M‑line Rails monolith and 2k commits a month that cause… | ||
| Using Software Analytics to Help Make Better Business Decisions | Shiv Kumar | 25m |
New Relic shows concrete wins: Ruby 2.1 GC cuts heap size and GC time in staging, browser monitoring surfaces 20–30% of page loads show JavaScript errors, and… | ||
| Workshop - Test Drive a Browser Game With JavaScript | Zach Briggs | 59m |
Hands-on workshop builds a simplified Battleship browser game using Angular with Lineman and Rails for the environment and Jasmine for specs. The group wires… | ||
| Workshop - Taming Chaotic Specs: RSpec Design Patterns | Adam Cuppy | 02h 19m |
Don't you hate when testing takes 3x as long because your specs are hard to understand? Or when testing conditional permutation leads to a ton of duplication?… | ||
| Unreasonable Estimates and Improbable Goals | Adam Sanderson | 29m |
Advice: clarify the exact requirement and why it’s wanted, break work into database Rails and front‑end pieces, list risks (IE8 quirks, denormalizing tables… | ||
| Branding for Open Source Success | Bree Thomas | 32m |
Shows a practical method for turning an open source project into a recognizable who versus what by building purpose, personality and promise. Uses concrete… | ||
| Keynote: What Happens to Everyone, When Everyone Learns to Code? | Farrah Bostic | 46m |
A practical verdict: the claim is that Rails site building and a few cheap services let a nonexpert ship real products — a WordPress blog is replaced by a… | ||
| nothing matches | ||