RailsConf 2015
2015-04-21..2015-04-23
Atlanta, GA, 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
The flagship event of the Ruby on Rails team members and community. It's the largest official gathering of the year, attended by top Rails talent, companies and project representatives from all over the world.
who it's for
Rails developers, backend web developers, devops engineers, site reliability engineers, engineering managers, open source contributors
topics
ActiveRecord performance tuning; JSONB and Postgres 9.4; Puma server deployment; Heroku deploy buttons and app.json; Ruby MRI GC and allocation tracing; RSpec internals and test DSLs; Per-commit benchmarking with ruby-bench; Authy two-factor integration; Real-time voice and video in Rails; ActiveJob service-oriented architecture
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Closing Keynote | Kent Beck | 46m |
A clear set of practices for feeling “at ease” at work: run quick Lean Startup experiments to prove a feature matters, put testing before shipping (TDD or… | ||
| Interviewing like a Unicorn: How Great Teams Hire | Chakri Uddaraju, Alaina Percival, Aline Lerner, Allan Grant | 46m |
Panel reports analyzing thousands of interviews show surprising specifics: surveyed candidates’ perceived vs actual performance shows no correlation, and one… | ||
| Passwords are not Enough | Greg Baugues | 46m |
Live code of Authy integration in 15–20 minutes into a Rails app using Twilio tools, adding authy_id, phone and country code fields, calling Authy API to send… | ||
| Leveraging Microsoft Azure from Ruby | Eduard Koller | 36m |
Ruby access to Microsoft Azure is practical: use the Ruby SDK for Azure and the Azure gem for fog to manage cloud storage, virtual machines and networks from… | ||
| Heroku: A Year in Review | Terence Lee | 36m |
Covers what changed and what to act on: the purple Heroku deploy button plus app.json templates that auto-provision add‑ons and env vars, GitHub repo… | ||
| Keynote: Aaron Patterson | Aaron Patterson | 55m |
Proposes concrete fixes and measurements: implements a proof‑of‑concept for automatic parallel testing (one‑DB approach yields ~0–15% gain; multi‑DB still… | ||
| What’s happening in your Rails app? Introduction to Introspection features of Ruby | Koichi Sasada | 37m |
Ruby MRI introspection reveals concrete fixes not vague advice: use allocation_tracer and GC tracing to see which lines create thousands of objects, use… | ||
| Building RailsPerf, a toolkit to detect performance regressions | Kir Shatrov | 30m |
Practical account of building RailsPerf: a per-commit regression detector that runs per-commit benchmarking against Rails using a suite of microbenchmarks… | ||
| RSpec: It's Not Actually Magic | Noel Rappin | 40m |
Shows RSpec source step by step so the DSL stops feeling magical: how describe/it/expect/eq map to example groups, expectation targets and matchers, how blocks… | ||
| Ruby on Rails on Minitest | Ryan Davis | 33m |
Minitest is a tiny, pragmatic test framework (from ~90 lines to ~1,600) that Rails adopts: Rails 4.0 → minitest 4, Rails 4.1 → minitest 5, and Rails 4.2 →… | ||
| Ruby Heroes Awards | Gregg Pollack, Olivier Lacan | 20m |
Conference hands out six community awards backed by numbers and projects: 397 nominations, a contributor graph showing 10,946 commits vs Matt’s 3,758, repeated… | ||
| Rails Core Panel Discussion | Aaron Patterson, Santiago Pastorino, Godfrey Chan, Jeremy Kemper, Guillermo Iguaran, Andrew White | 36m |
Panelists describe concrete onboarding via submitted patches and issue triage, report action cable being integrated with unknowns, and note the rails api merge… | ||
| What Comes After MVC | Peter Bhat Harkins | 31m |
Argues that messy Rails models become manageable by extracting immutable values are immutable (subject, call number) with gems like adamantium and equalizer… | ||
| Implementing a Strong Code-Review Culture | Derek Prior | 38m |
Claims that code review’s primary value is knowledge transfer and team awareness rather than bug catching backed by a 2013 Microsoft and University of Lugano… | ||
| Teaching GitHub for Poets | Aaron Suggs | 46m |
Kickstarter runs a 1 hour class that teaches the GitHub flow in browser so any staff can make copy changes, open pull requests, and rely on CI and staging to… | ||
| Humane Development | Ernie Miller | 42m |
Argues for humane development by naming concrete failures and fixes: shows a Kanban backlog and a real estimate that misses by 2.5×, contrasts sprint culture… | ||
| What We Can Learn about Diversity from the Liberal Arts | Liz Certa | 32m |
Examines concrete changes that made liberal arts more diverse and tests which apply to tech: a content audit of introductory materials (a Rails for Zombies… | ||
| Don't Be A Hero: Sustainable Open Source | Lillie Chilen | 29m |
Maintainers face becoming single points of failure for projects like Double Union and tools such as bridge troll; mitigation is concrete: add a CONTRIBUTING… | ||
| Opening Keynote | David Heinemeier Hansson | 01h 03m |
Announces Rails 5 as a milestone and describes concrete features: Turbolinks 3 adds data-turbo-permanent to cache pages and carry client-side state (shopping… | ||
| Docker isn’t just for deployment | Ben Dixon | 20m |
A teaching platform uses Docker to serve browser IDEs orchestrated via a pure ruby toolchain and the daa gem alongside the docker gem and Sidekiq jobs. It… | ||
| DevOps for The Lazy | Aja Hammerly | 30m |
Builds a minimal Rails scaffold, swaps sqlite for Postgres, writes a three-line Dockerfile and a three-line init script, and shows that with about twenty lines… | ||
| Microservices, a bittersweet symphony | Sebastian Sogamoso | 38m |
Argues that microservices often introduce more operational complexity than they solve, backed by concrete rules and tradeoffs: use cognitive load to size… | ||
| Resilient | Smit Shah | 33m |
flipkart handles peaks where a single minute of downtime costs about $2,000 and peak minutes can cost ~$8,000, so designs favor fail fast timeouts, bounded… | ||
| Bringing UX to Your Code | Joe Mastey User Centered | 30m |
Argues that UX principles apply to code and demonstrates concrete harms and fixes: API names that mislead like delete vs destroy, silent modifiers that give no… | ||
| Nothing is Something | Sandi Metz | 36m |
Argues that hidden assumptions in code are real concepts worth naming and shows concrete Ruby examples: monkey‑patching true/false, a working null object… | ||
| How Does Bundler Work, Anyway? | Andre Arko | 36m |
History shows how require setup.rb and rubygems lead to bundler which does two concrete things it resolves versions ahead of time using heuristics for an NP… | ||
| Strategies for being the Junior on the Team | Louisa Barrett | 25m |
Argues that people are the most powerful tool for a junior and gives concrete tactics: network at meetups and conferences, show up repeatedly to become a… | ||
| Understanding Rails test types in RSpec | Sam Phippen | 27m |
Walks through Rails + RSpec live coding that uses outside-in testing, writing a failing feature/controller/model specs trio against a to‑do app, creates… | ||
| Level Up with OSS: Develop Your Rails Dev ... | Courteney Ervin | 29m |
Open source contributions accelerate skill and hireability by producing concrete artifacts: resolved issues, documented installs, and reviewed pull requests… | ||
| Amelia Bedelia Learns to Code | Kylie Stradley | 35m |
Begins with concrete Rails mistakes and fixes: edited schema instead of writing a migration and discovering schema timestamps matter, used scaffold for… | ||
| So You Want to Start Refactoring? | Jillian Foley | 33m |
Practical refactoring in Rails focuses on concrete moves: beef up test coverage and keep tests unchanged during the refactor so they stay a safety net… | ||
| Workshop: Do Users Love Your API? Developer-focused API Design | Pete Holiday | 01h 16m |
Mailchimp reports ~250,000 users hitting v2 every day and billions of requests, finds 75% rated it “good or excellent,” yet v2 suffers many endpoints… | ||
| Civic Hacking on Rails | William Jeffries | 25m |
HeatSeek builds a Rails-backed system of wireless thermometers and dozens of sensors that log temperatures, produce graphs and reports, and feed evidence to… | ||
| SVG Charts and Graphics with Ruby | Starr Horne | 39m |
Shows that Ruby can generate SVG instead of pulling in a heavy JS library, actually building bar line and donut charts as XML using rect path circle and text… | ||
| Breaking Down the Barrier: Demystifying Contributing to Rails | Eileen M Uchitelle | 01h 22m |
Lab shows how to turn a title into results: a runnable ActiveRecord reproduction script that actually reproduces the bug, measured speedups with Benchmark IPS… | ||
| Implementing a Visual CSS Testing Framework | Jessica Dillon | 30m |
A visual CSS testing framework gets built: RSpec specs drive Selenium to take full-page screenshots only in Firefox, uploads images to an AWS bucket, then uses… | ||
| Dynamically Sassy | Jeremy Fairbank | 33m |
Shows how to generate dynamic CSS from Sass by adding SassScript functions and using the Sass engine with a custom options hash and load_paths to inject a user… | ||
| Curly — Rethinking the View Layer | Daniel Schierbeck | 34m |
A Rails-friendly template engine called Curly templates extracts all view logic into plain Ruby presenter classes placed in app presenters, keeps HTML purely… | ||
| Crossing the Bridge: Connecting Rails and Your Front-End Framework | Daniel Spector | 35m |
Compares concrete integrations: TodoMVC examples in Angular (Bower, ngResource), Ember (Ember CLI, Ember Data with ActiveModelAdapter + ActiveModelSerializers… | ||
| Ruby Debugger Internals | Dennis Ushakov | 20m |
Explains how RubyMine debugger supports Ruby 2.0 by actually using and comparing APIs: set_trace_func (eager binding, slows a simple 5s loop to ~2 minutes)… | ||
| Trailblazer: A new Architecture for Rails | Nick Sutterer, J Austin Hughey | 40m |
Trailblazer claims concrete structure: operations are the domain, controllers become tiny dispatchers that only call an operation’s process method, and models… | ||
| Delivering Autonomous Rails Apps behind Corporate Firewalls | Nick Merwin | 53m |
Packages a Rails SaaS into an on‑prem VM and proves a deployable prototype: an 800MB–1GB VM, a 50–100MB vendored app tarball and a per‑customer encrypted… | ||
| Using JavaScript from the Future in Your Rails App Today | Steve Kinney ECMAScript | 32m |
ES2015 (ECMAScript 6) introduces concrete fixes and sugar: let and const stop hoisting and accidental globals (demo with five buttons), template strings… | ||
| Your Front End Framework is Overkill - Server Side Javascript w/ Rails | Jim Jones | 34m |
Claim: server side JavaScript with Rails replaces heavy front end frameworks for many dynamic interactions. Implements three parallel apps — vanilla Rails JS… | ||
| React.js on Rails | Michael Chan | 31m |
Argues that React lets Rails keep server rendering while adding only the JavaScript needed, demonstrates shipping a feature in an hour, and shows concrete… | ||
| Rails and EmberCLI: an integration love story | Jonathan Jackson | 39m |
History of Rails/Ember integration turns into a practical solution: a thin gem called EmberCLI Rails that starts the EmberCLI build, reads the built assets and… | ||
| Internet of Things: Connecting Rails with the Real World | Karim Butt | 31m |
Claims a working Rails + Angular IoT stack: a Raspberry Pi rails app serves device APIs, exposed with ngrok, while the cloud Angular UI controls smart LIFX… | ||
| Burn Rubber Does Not Mean Warp Speed | Bree Thomas | 34m |
Argues rapid developer training (24 hours to six months) produces bad assumptions and weak outcomes, contrasts with historical apprenticeships measured in… | ||
| Beyond Hogwarts: A Half-Blood's Perspective on Inclusive Magical Education | Jaime Lyn Schatz When | 22m |
Claims that two of the three leaders who defeated Voldemort were not raised in the magical world and that battle-tested students emerge measurably stronger… | ||
| Crossing the Canyon of Cognizance: A Shared Adventure | Pamela O. Vickers | 42m |
Argues that the critical gap is between unconscious incompetence and conscious competence, and that concrete mentoring practices — clear context in answers… | ||
| Making Data Dance | Clark Barrett | 31m |
Rails apps push heavy queries into PostgreSQL using lead/lag window functions to mark message groups and indoor location transitions, then fold those results… | ||
| Get started with Component-based Rails applications! | Stephan Hagemann | 01h 28m |
Claims that componentizing a Rails monolith actually reduces cognitive load and test time, and shows how to do it: extract a domain into a predictor gem by… | ||
| Data Warehouses and Multi-Dimensional Data Analysis | Raimonds Simanovskis | 39m |
Builds a star/snowflake data warehouse from Rails transactional tables, loads it via ETL (mentions Kiba and concurrent-ruby) and queries it with a Mondrian… | ||
| What I've Learned in 7 Years of Podcasting about Ruby | Charles Max Wood | 32m |
Podcasting over seven years yields concrete practices not platitudes: interview hundreds of developers, record over Skype, use screencast toolchains like… | ||
| Sometimes a Controller is Just a Controller | Justin Searls | 42m |
You grok SOLID. You practice TDD. You've read Sandi's book…twice. You rewatch Destroy All Software monthly. You can pronounce GOOS. You know your stuff! But… | ||
| So Long, Hoboken: Migrating a Huge Production Codebase from Sinatra to Rails | Eric Weinstein | 31m |
A migration moves a 12–14 small-app Sinatra suite into Rails by choosing between melting/mounting (Rails boots Sinatra, hurting memory and reload performance)… | ||
| Speed Science | Richard Schneeman | 41m |
Shows concrete claims and fixes: reproduces slowness, uses a scientific loop of hypothesis + measurement, and ships tooling like derail benchmarks… | ||
| Slightly Less Painful Time Zones | Katherine Wu | 30m |
Case study of a weekly-email scheduler that shifts from a single Monday 10am to per-account local 10:01am, implemented in Ruby/Rails using tzinfo / IANA tzdata… | ||
| Better callbacks in Rails 5 | Claudio Baccigalupo | 29m |
Claim: Rails 5 stops treating returning false no longer halts callback chains; to stop a chain code must raise an exception to stop a callback. This affects… | ||
| Adventures in Federating Authorization and Authentication with OAuth | Lance Gleason | 36m |
Describes federating OAuth to handle 30,000 concurrent requests and a site that’s roughly 90% read-only; evaluates Doorkeeper + Devise + OmniAuth and rejects… | ||
| Processes and Threads - Resque vs. Sidekiq | James Dabbs | 35m |
Resque forks a child per job so one worker process handles one active job, parent stays responsive and uses signals for restart and isolation; memory… | ||
| 5 Secrets We Learned While Building a Bank in 16 Months | Stan Ng, John Phamvan | 47m |
Claims a full banking stack gets built and launched in 16 months after an 8-week Ruby rewrite of a 500k-line C# app, using Rails, PostgreSQL, Redis and… | ||
| Playing Games In The Clouds | Nadia Odunayo | 26m |
Two example mechanisms and concrete outcomes: with two nodes of capacity 5 and 2 handling 4 jobs the Nash-style allocation sends 3.5 jobs to the faster node… | ||
| High performance APIs in Ruby using ActiveRecord and Goliath | Dan Kozlowski | 31m |
Claims a Ruby API is reimplemented to hit roughly 1000X throughput and cut 90th percentile latency under 200ms by replacing threaded Rails with an evented… | ||
| Why Your New API Product Will Fail | Scott Feinberg Congrats | 30m |
Claims that Level 3 Hypermedia and perfect architecture fail without usable tooling backed by docs and SDKs, with concrete fixes: tests that solve common… | ||
| You, Too, Can Be A Webserver | Julian Simioni | 20m |
Live command‑line experiments show how to speak HTTP directly: using netcat as a tiny webserver and typing raw HTTP/1.1 requests reveals headers, cookies set… | ||
| AMS, API, Rails and a developer, a Love Story | João Moura | 24m |
Active Model Serializers gets a new release with an adapter API, built‑in fragment cache support and a JSON:API adapter; benchmarks over 10,000 loads show… | ||
| Scaling Rails for Black Friday and Cyber Monday | Christian Joudrey | 37m |
Platform serves 150,000 shops and peaks near a million requests per minute; Black Friday/Cyber Monday hits ~600k req/min and ~6,000 orders/min. Scaling choices… | ||
| How to Program with Accessibility in Mind | Chandra Carney | 31m |
Argues accessibility must be built first not bolted on, showing screen reader demos that repeatedly read 17 items and trap navigation on real sites like Home… | ||
| Metasecurity: Beyond Patching Vulnerabilities | Chase Douglas | 39m |
Claims a higher‑level “meta security” that defends against exploitation rather than just vulnerabilities, noting Rails averages ~7 CVEs yearly (recently double… | ||
| Rapid Data Modeling Using ActiveRecord and the JSON Data Type | David Furber | 40m |
Uses Postgres JSON/JSONB and ActiveRecord::Store to put varying attributes into a single data column, exposes them with store_accessor and custom typecasting… | ||
| How to Talk to Humans: a Different Approach to Soft Skills | Sharon Steed | 01h 01m |
Workshop argues that vulnerability becomes a marketable asset not a liability and teaches concrete practices: pair exercises, timed sharing, and active… | ||
| Bending the Curve: How Rust Helped Us Write Better Ruby | Yehuda Katz, Tom Dale | 44m |
Skylight rewrites its Ruby agent in Rust and ships a featherweight agent that uses far less CPU and memory while collecting far more fine‑grained timing and… | ||
| Now Hear This! Putting Real-Time Voice, Video and Text into Rails | Ben Klang | 43m |
Argues that WebRTC peer-to-peer media with ICE/STUN/TURN and codecs like Opus/VP8 enable real in‑app voice, video and text; shows a working demo: Firefox and… | ||
| ActiveJob: A Service Oriented Architecture | Andy Croll | 17m |
ActiveJob in Rails 4.2 provides a stable interface to queue systems like Delayed_Job/Sidekiq and powers ActionMailer async delivery, plus GlobalID for… | ||
| The World of Rails Security | Justin Collins | 34m |
Overview of concrete Rails security issues and fixes: historical behavior of mass-assignment and strong parameters, real XSS and CSRF examples (including a… | ||
| The power of cache in a slow world | Michael May | 38m |
Claims concrete tactics: CDN Fastly runs varnish forks and accepts VCL, saving hundreds of milliseconds by avoiding the three‑way TCP handshake for repeated… | ||
| (Re)Building a large scale payments system on Rails | Michel Weksler | 41m |
Claims that Rails can run large‑scale payments if core problems get fixed and shows concrete experiments: use protected access gem to hide ActiveRecord from… | ||
| What If Shakespeare Wrote Ruby? | Adam Cuppy | 48m |
Claim: Shakespeare’s craft maps to Ruby through domain specific language and expressive conventions, using iambic-meter analogies to show how small, repeatable… | ||
| Prying Open The Black Box | Godfrey Chan | 37m |
Shows how to turn a mystery Rails failure into a reproducible fix by following the stack trace, disable backtrace cleaner to see full frames, and inserting… | ||
| Designing a Great Ruby API - How We're Simplifying Rails 5 | Sean Griffin | 38m |
Describes designing and shipping a concrete replacement for ad hoc attribute casting in Rails by extracting a reusable type object, adding lazy and strict… | ||
| Coding: Art or Craft? | Emily Xie | 35m |
Argues that coding fits two concrete metaphors: software craftsmanship manifesto codifies a guildlike apprenticeship model that attracts several thousand… | ||
| Keynote - Day 1 Closing | Sara Chipps | 40m |
A hardware startup story that moves from Johnny-Five and Arduino experiments to a funded product: wins an innovation award at Node Knockout out of roughly 700… | ||
| Lightning Talks | Obie Fernandez, Lance Gleason, Claudio Baccigalupo, Christopher Rigor, Chris Kibble, Reid Morrison, Joshua Quick, Andre Arko, Shane Defazio, Jeremy Evans, Isaac Sloan | 01h 41m |
Quick bursts: a claim to train 100,000 African software engineers with Andela; a production concurrency tool (Parallel Minion) handling hundreds of threads and… | ||
| A New Kind of Analytics: Actionable Performance Analysis | Paola Moretto | 29m |
Claims a prototype that combines synthetic linear ramps, production monitoring and data instrumentation with unsupervised machine learning to localize… | ||
| Getting a Handle on Legacy Code | Randy Coulman | 01h 25m |
Starts with the Gilded Rose kata, adds support for conjured items that must degrade quality twice as fast, and proves it with focused specs plus Golden‑Master… | ||
| Deploy and Manage Ruby on Rails Apps on AWS | Alex Wood | 56m |
Deploys a sample Rails app to AWS using an OpsWorks two-layer stack (Rails app server + MySQL EC2), runs Chef recipes to provision instances, and performs… | ||
| What is this PGP thing, and how can I use it? | Caleb Thompson | 30m |
Workshop shows how to install gpgtools from a USB or gpgtools.org, generate a 4096‑bit PGP key with a one‑year expiry, export a public key to keyservers, and… | ||
| Voila, Indexes! A Look at Some Simple Preventative Magick | Jamis Buck | 34m |
A concrete claim: shipping tables without indexes causes full table scans that explode as data grows — the example generates one scroll per minute reaching 700… | ||
| http://exploration | Craig Buchek | 01h 14m |
Hands-on lab that actually boots a vagrant box and HTTP exploration VM, runs vagrant up and vagrant ssh, and uses real network tools: openssl s_client and… | ||
| Test Driving your Rails Infrastructure with Chef | Nathen Harvey, Nell Shamrell-Harrington | 01h 21m |
Claims that infrastructure can be developed test‑first using Chef and that you can iterate quickly by combining Test Kitchen with unit and integration tests… | ||
| Ambitious Capybara | Eduardo Gutierrez | 32m |
Claims concrete fixes: use Capybara with JavaScript drivers to test complex UIs, avoid brittle CSS selectors by adding data- attributes and custom Capybara… | ||
| nothing matches | ||