WindyCityRails 2016
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Saving Sprockets | Richard Schneeman | 28m |
Sprockets has over 44 million downloads and a single maintainer responsible for >70% of commits, so the project faces a maintenance crisis. Work described… | ||
| Money Makes Your App Go Round | Noel Rappin | 29m |
Payment gateways like Stripe, Braintree, PayPal handle the API but the hard parts are post-charge: one parsing bug occurs about one-in-200–300 transactions… | ||
| Why You Should Start an Apprentice Program | Joe Mastey | 11m |
A six month apprenticeship converts a call‑center self‑taught candidate into a promoted developer by focusing on learning not billable output, paying a living… | ||
| Let the Junior Dev Upgrade Rails | Tara Scherner de la Fuente | 26m |
Tells how a junior dev runs multiple Rails upgrades from 3.x to 4.1, converts ~25 models/controllers to strong_parameters, writes tests to reproduce failures… | ||
| Day 1 Lightning Talks | Jim wyrick | 19m |
Starts with a comic song about brittle code smells and piles of impure functions, then details a concrete estimation method that uses 10,000 simulations seeded… | ||
| Rebuilding Highrise from the Inside Out | Michael Dwan | 21m |
Highrise undergoes an inside-out rebuild while keeping customers live: the team keeps Rails 3 for compatibility, extracts specific subsystems as microservices… | ||
| Writing Declarative, Maintainable Integration Tests Using Page Objects | Dorian Karter | 21m |
Argues that page objects make RSpec + Capybara integration tests declarative, DRY and far less brittle, and demonstrates by building page objects for product →… | ||
| Livecoding an SMS Chatbot | Greg Baugues | 16m |
Live-codes an SMS/MMS chatbot that impersonates a Twitter celebrity using markov chains, pulling up to 3,000 historical tweets via the Twitter gem (200 per… | ||
| Scaling a Rails Monolith w/Event Driven Microservices | Marko Anastasov | 27m |
Describes migrating a heavy Rails monolith into small, purpose-built services that communicate asynchronously via RabbitMQ and persist events with Postgres… | ||
| Building Your Own R2 Unit in Ruby | Jamie Wright | 27m |
Claims that chat is the next UI and shows exactly how to build a Slack bot in Ruby: create a Slack app, store the bot access token and team/user IDs, run a… | ||
| When Web Scale Doesn't Make Sense | Jack Christensen | 29m |
Argues that most apps avoid web-scale complexity by keeping data on one powerful node (Postgres) and minimizing extra stores like Redis, ElasticSearch, or… | ||
| Building a Better OpenStruct | Ariel Caplan | 30m |
OpenStruct’s beautiful API hides a big cost: typical use runs 10–40× slower than an explicit class. Several fixes are explored: open_fast_struct avoids upfront… | ||
| Why TDD Is Crap | Eric Smith | 15m |
Argues that TDD does not reliably produce fewer bugs or faster delivery, cites only small student comparisons and no strong empirical proof, and shows concrete… | ||
| Layered Security | Aaron Bedra | 27m |
Advocates doing generic checks at the edge (CDN, load balancer, webserver) and specific checks at the data layer, using SSL Labs (aim for B+), HSTS and other… | ||
| TCP Sockets Programming in Ruby | Sebastian Sogamoso | 26m |
Explains how Ruby maps to the Berkeley socket API and demonstrates actual calls like socket bind listen connect read write close, shows using Ruby helpers… | ||
| Lightning Talks, Day 2 | 31m | |
Forty five-minute snippets report concrete takeaways: a primer on the four A’s with clear definitions of appropriation, assimilation, appreciation, allyship… | ||
| Does Progressive Enhancement Have a Place in Today's Web? | George Brocklehurst | 30m |
Claim: progressive enhancement remains useful because building from start with HTML and then layer on CSS and JS lets teams ship a server-rendered HTML/CSS… | ||
| Enter by Bootcamp | Esther Leytush | 13m |
Dev Bootcamp runs an 18–19 week program with 9 weeks remote + 9 weeks on-campus, teaching command line, Git/GitHub, HTML/CSS, Ruby, Rails, JavaScript (React on… | ||
| From OO Patterns to Functional Programming w/o Killing Yourself | Tomasz Rusilko | 26m |
Converts a sprawling OO strategy-based mortgage scoring system into a pipeline of pure data-transforming callables using Ruby lambdas/modules as callables and… | ||
| Ruby + Water | Tiffani Ashley bell | 18m |
A data-driven nonprofit built on Rails 5 and Action Cable handles applications, internal near‑real‑time notes, and inbound email via Griddler + Mandrill; a… | ||
| nothing matches | ||