André has been working as a developer in the eCommerce field for more than 15 years. He's currently employed as a ecommerce consultant and Ruby developer at webionate GmbH where he's working for clients and on shipcloud.io. In his free time he's doing "a lot" of sports. Preparing for his first marathon, triathlon and bicycle race in 2014. He is also one of the organizers of Rails Girls Hamburg.
Living a developers life makes you more susceptible to mental illnesses like depression and bipolar disorder. However, these things have always been stigmatised and therefore are a tricky thing to talk about. That is because people naturally assume the worst. Depression e.g. can get pretty serious, leading to a disconnect with the world and finally ending with a person taking his/her own life.
In my talk, I'll explain the hows and whys of depression based on what I’ve experienced first hand. You will hear about how I slowly recognized that something might be wrong with my life. I’ll show you the unusual way I tried to self medicate my symptoms instead of reaching out to family or friends. A way that was costing me quite some cash and a lot of my free time. You will also hear a few strategies that have helped me dealing with my depression inspiring you to think outside of the box of the "normal" developer life!
Austin became blind at birth. He started programming at age seven on an Apple II/e and since then has used all major operating systems. He currently uses a Mac, Linux, and loves his iPhone. He does freelance accessibility consulting, and uses RubyMotion to program in iOS. He lives in Philadelphia and also enjoys cooking vegetarian food and meditation.
How can a blind person even use an iPhone? Austin Seraphin will explain this, and give personal examples of why accessibility matters and how products like the iPhone have revolutionized life for the blind. He will introduce RubyMotion, a Ruby toolchain for writing iOS apps, and he will demonstrate motion-accessibility, a Ruby gem to make accessibility features easier to implement by sighted programmers and which opens up the world of iOS development to the blind. This talk has received acclaim at #inspect, the RubyMotion developer's conference.
Bart ten Brinke is an experienced product developer, building web applications for over eight years, mainly focussing on Ruby. In 2012 he has started his own company called Retrosync and he is currently a partner at the technology accelerator Govannon. Prior to this, Bart worked at Nedap Healthcare as a product developer and Security Officer. Here he developed a web based planning solution that is now used by the majority of the dutch home care sector. Bart holds a Masters title in Information Technology and a Minor in Biomedical Engineering, both from the University of Twente, The Netherlands. He is also a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) and bass player.
For people who want to start, or have just started a project. The Agile Inception Deck is an interactive 10 step workshop that will help you regain focus in your project. Instead of just showing you these steps in keynote, you will be applying each step directly to your project and discussing the results together. We will be dealing with sales pitches, customer benefits, determininig scope, et cetera. If you can't or do not want to discuss your current project in public, please feel free to join the workshop with a made-up one! Looking for a good example of an agile inception deck? Take a look at the book: The Agile Samurai.
Ben works for digital agency 1minus1. A regular contributor to open-source, agile fanboy and harbours an almost unhealthy obsession for all things API. Ruby is his first love. Beards a close second.
Let's broach the age old subject: what exactly does constitute 'good design?' 'Subjective' - you might say? Well you're probably right. Is it meeting your client's needs? Is it embracing change in light of solid requirements? How about scalability? Operational needs? My head hurts! We didn't even mention those sacred three letters T...D...D... Let's have an open, and inclusive discussion on what exactly constitutes good design. You'll hear opinions-a-plenty, there'll be heated discussion and no doubt. Let's do something different and bring our thoughts out into the open! Say it with me: 'FOR GOOD DESIGN!'.
Blithe has a PhD in physical chemistry but changed careers to become a web developer at Big Nerd Ranch in Atlanta. Blithe has grown from RailsGirls participant to coach. She helps organize a monthly meetup for women interested in continuing to learn about Ruby on Rails. When she’s not crafting web applications or teaching new developers, she spends time traveling, riding her bike, or with her dog Nola.
For software engineers, troubleshooting is one of the toughest and most important skills to develop. When problems arise, a beginning developer's first instincts are to panic and head to StackOverflow. Rather than quick fixes, it's important to seek a deeper understanding of what went wrong.Biologists, chemists, and physicists increase understanding about the world by applying the logical steps of the scientific method to discover solutions to complex problems. Like scientists, developers can learn troubleshooting skills by treating each problem like a mini "science" experiment. In this talk we'll explore how using the scientific method can lead to greater understanding and more viable solutions to complex problems.
Christophe is C?O and CoFounder at PullReview, an automated code review for Rubyists. He's a Ruby and C++ developer. When he doesn't code disease simulators or PullReview, he helps other when facing dev challenge, he writes on 8th Color blog, he co-organized and coached the 2nd Rails Girls Brussels, and he has given talk at user groups (BRUG, Paris.rb). He enjoys a lot of stuff and discussing them.
We'll illustrate how we can use static analysis tools to drive the refactoring of a Rails app. We'll introduce the static analysis tools and how to understand it on canonical examples, then on real examples, we'll drive the refactoring
Daniel is building Metros all around the world and empowers Ruby in areas nobody would expect it. At night he is contributing to mruby to push it to even more areas of his daily job. The last 7 years he spent most of his time in China. This year's talk is especially important to him, due to his time in the most heavily polluted city of the world and the recent increase of his small family.
You might have heard that the weather in Beijing is sometimes a little bit foggy. Over the last couple of years I played with particle sensors and air purifiers. Together with Ruby, cheap electronics and a lot of particles to test with, it turned out that you can have a lot of fun analysing the dust, reducing it and even turn it into art.
Full-time web developer, part-time psychology student and Rails Girls organizer + coach. A lifelong nerd, I have been working in tech for over 10 years now, doing pretty much anything from coding to customer support to computer science research. All along, I have been deeply intrigued about why there are so few of my type in this field, and what can be done to make community I love more inclusive and diverse.
The Ruby community has for several years been on the forefront of encouraging women to pick up coding - and the good news is, more and more women use the opportunities and pick up basic coding skills. Yet it is another big step for them to become professional developers or contributors to the tech community. And the bad news: Statistics show that women are leaving the tech sector at higher rates than they are entering it (and also at much higher rates than men). Again, there is good news: Nowadays, a good part the tech community seems to be very aware its lack of diversity and eager to change it. But what exactly can we do to debug the situation?
There are widely-published, extremely frustrating cases of overt discrimination and harassment in the tech community, yet fortunately this is not something every woman in tech experiences. While this is good news as well, it is also bad news because it means that the now common advice of „Don’t be an asshole“ is not enough to solve the problem. Instead, research in the fields of psychology and linguistics suggests that there are some general "bugs" in the ways we think, perceive and interact that explain why women feel uncomfortable entering and staying in technical roles. Now that we found a bug hiding somewhere deep in our minds, what can we do about it? In my talk, I will propose some „workarounds“ to deal with this "bug", falling into three categories: What any member of the tech community can do, what women in particular can do and what community leaders can do.
College dropout, turned college instructor found computers because everything else in his life was going too well. Forged by the fires of tech support, quality assurance and software development, he now brings technology to the hungry, sullied masses with raw energy, untold empathy and a strong injection of humor. Did I mention humility? Loads of that too.
Nearly all our larger scale applications end up with a utils folder, module, or class. We all know them as our project's junk drawers. The wayward place for motley code. In this talk we will explore these junk drawers, come to know their stories, and lay to rest the question: Does having a junk drawer in my application make everything better or worse?
Grayson is a freelance web developer and designer last seen in Michigan. He recently finished studying computer science at Michigan State, where he researched digital evolution, started a chapter of ACM and helped several startups build their web services.
He's passionate about teaching programming, growing the open source community, and writing software that solves real problems.
The newest TLA (three letter acronym) flying around twitter is SOA: Service-Oriented Architecture. Groan. Yet another thing for us to learn.
Let's tackle this new technology together by building a lightweight logging service to improve how we capture information from our apps. Our project will get our feet wet with non-Rails webapps, NoSQL databases, and inter-process communication. Best of all, we'll learn firsthand how to extract smaller services out of our monolithic apps.
Charles Nutter, Thomas E Enebo
The team behind JRuby provide us with a glimpse into the world of the other Ruby implementation, including a preview of the next major release, JRuby 9000.
Jan is a freelancing web developer from Hamburg, Germany, a wannabe electronic musician, an angry cyclist and a dented part time utopian. He's constantly oscillating between frontend- and backend technologies and losing all faith in humanity. He's has strong feelings for the web platform but sometimes ponders a second career as a gardener. Or as a professional frisbee player. He's @halfbyte and blogs at jan.krutisch.de. He also tries hard to finish his book.
The web's original architecture is decentralised, and for good reasons. Somehow, though, we managed to forget that throughout the last years. We use centralised services like twitter, facebook and gmail without thinking (or even blinking). I'm going to argue in this talk that decentralisation matters a lot because it makes the web resilient against technical and non technical threats which are, as we now know, thanks to Snowden, real and not only theoretical. What can we do about it? We need new technologies, but we also need to think about how to find forms of organisations and ways of doing business to accommodate decentralised structures. The future is, indeed, not equally distributed, and it is upon us to fix that.
Ruby/JavaScript developer for thoughtbot, inc. in Denver, CO. Organizer of Code for Communities, a group dedicated to combining open source technologies with open data in Colorado.
D3.js is a JavaScript library that allows developers to create easily expressive graphics in the browser. In this hands-on workshop, you'll learn the basic building blocks of D3.js and slowly build up an interactive D3.js visualization from scratch using data from GitHub.
Laura works as a web developer for testCloud in Berlin.
She has a background in intercultural studies as well as tech and a strong interest in both fields.
Before moving into web development, she spent three years in Asia, mostly Thailand, where she learned a lot about seeing things from several angles at the same time, understanding differences and finding productive approaches to make things work.
We all interact with websites and apps on a daily basis. Connecting people from all over the world, the Internet seems to promote a culture of its own, internationalized, heavily English-based. But does that mean when you build your app or your website, it will be the same for everyone? Because, people will generally use it and interact with it the same way, right?
Right?
Not quite. The web isn’t neutral, just as the people using it aren’t - nor are the people building it. It’s easy to forget sometimes that culture has a huge influence not only on how people interact with each other, but also on how they interact with apps, platforms and websites. Especially if you keep in mind that, depending on your product, the majority of your users might not be as internationally savvy as you are, there are lots of questions that should be asked.
Cultural aspects are something you’ll want to keep in mind if you want to be successful in different markets - and they are something that concerns not only the marketing: They might very well touch everything starting from user interfaces and design right down to the actual functions of your product.
This talk will start you out in important basics about culture and what aspects are useful to look at. It will then move on to practical examples and, most importantly, give you ideas for what you can do to make your international product launch successful. Culture does eat products for breakfast all the time - but yours doesn't have to be one of them!
Long time coder, started coding back in the early 80's starting with C, progressing throu C++ and lots of languages. Learned about Ruby 4 years ago and fell in Love. Since that I have been prioritizing to use Ruby whenever there is a possibility. Leader of the local Ruby community in Bergen. Now mostly working as a project manager utilizing the long experience to make a the life of user better trough smart use of software. Huge believer in keeping things simple and understandable. no.linkedin.com/in/leffen/
How to combine Sinatra, angular and D3 to make excellent graphics. Sinatra gives a small and easy to understand server side code ( a lot nicer than node), angular makes it possible for the same on the client side. And to top it off with excellent graphics presentations from D3 in one easy to use package. Taken from a real world experience to present statistical data and get a clearer and better view of the data.We will look at how to make a api in Sinatra to produce suitable data to be consumed by D3.
Hi I'm Luca, a developer. My family, music & programming are the things that I love the most. I'm the author of Lotus a complete web framework for Ruby.
It's about a decade that we use Ruby for the web. Some of the products of these years have tons of messy code, slow builds and painful upgrades to deal with. If your application uses fat models AND fat controllers, you've got the point. Lotus is a minimal, but yet powerful framework that is focused on good object oriented design, testability and speed. You will learn about the patterns that it implements to solve these problems and to push Ruby performance to the limit. We need new ideas to evolve as a Community and as individuals. Good news are that you can apply them on today. Let's talk together!
Maren is a freelance data analyst and project manager. She is a passionated ruby developer in progress, loves DIY, digital media and arts. After she led a big IT project at her former work she started learning to code two years ago at a Rails Girls workshop. Maren is part of the Rubymonsters study group and the project manager and one of the developers of Speakerinnen. As head of the local chapter of Digital Media Women Berlin she loves to encourage women to build networks and to be more visible in their professional environment.
Anja is a trained communication designer who works as a picture editor for a daily newspaper in Berlin. She has always been interested in information technology. This is why she started to learn programming javascript and ruby three years ago. When she ran out of online-tutorials, she discovered the Rails Girls Project. After one of their weekend workshops Anja and other participants started "Rubymonsters" - a weekly ruby learners meetup. "Speakerinnen Liste" is the first public project coming out of this group and was launched in March 2014. To date more than 500 female speakers have enlisted on this rails-powered platform. In 2013 she took part in the first Rails Girls Summer of code, improving the test coverage of the sinatra web framework. She works part time at a rails development company in Berlin.
Most public stages at conferences and events are populated by men. And not only in the tech scene.
Speakerinnen.org is a project that aims to make women more visible as speakers and help event organizers find female experts for their conferences. On the Speakerinnen website women can sign up and publish their profiles, specifying their topics of expertise.
The platform was developed by a Rails Girls Berlin study group and successfully launched in March 2014. It took a year to develop and saw a group of 8 programming newbies confront many technical challenges and learn a great deal about Ruby and Rails along the way.
This talk will give an overview of the technical and social process of developing Spearkerinnen: as newcomers to software development and with the help of a great community. We will also cover some success stories that show how Speakerinnen raises awareness about the issue and has already made a difference at some events.
Michele is a former English Language Arts teacher from Long Island, New York who moved to Berlin in August '12. Shortly after her move, she discovered her true calling in coding. She began her first Junior Web Developer position earlier this year at Sociomantic Labs in Berlin. With her talk she wants to make this industry a better place for everyone and she hopes that her talk will inspire a significant amount of people to make a difference in their own communities. Outside of coding, her passions include rock climbing, comedy, reading, writing, and pizza.
This is the story of how I changed careers in less than a year, from zero to fully employed web developer. I worked hard, but I was able to flourish and succeed because of the help I received from individuals and organizations throughout my extended network. This talk is meant to inspire you with concrete ways you can help out in your own community to welcome newcomers and career-changers. As Tal Ben-Shahar said, "There's so much benefit to the person who contributes to others that I often think that there is no more selfish act than a generous act," so why not come to this talk for your own good?
Paolo is the author of Metaprogramming Ruby. He has fifteen years of experience as a developer, ranging from embedded to enterprise software, computer games, and web applications. Paolo lives a nomadic life, mentoring agile teams throughout Europe. He has a base camp in Bologna, Italy. He loves Ruby.
Your job is a strange one, developer. Sometimes, it's as simple as a bycicle. Other times, it's as complicated as jumbo jet. But whatever you do, mind those times when your job is as complex as a frog --- because those are the times that will call for the best of your energies.
Pere Urbón-Bayes is a Senior Software Engineer with more than 10 years of experience, specialized on delivering graph processing technologies in the area of smart energy data, knowledge management and text analysis at Belectric IT Solutions (former Aperis GmbH). As speaker at international conferences he lectured about graph processing and how to put meaning to our data. He also organized the first Graph Processing Developer Room at FOSDEM.
Big Data might be a buzzword, because to be honest we all want to do it, but not all of us are really doing it. Although what this hipe gave us is the sense that we must keep an eye on our data, that we can do a lot more if we take a close look to hole picture. We plan to introduce you to the graph processing techniques and tools available nowadays. Graph might be a very handy tool that can solve some of your problems and within this workshop we plan to drive you to a complete overview of different situations that will provide you with the bases necessary to move on in the topic.
Ruby coder and wannabe cyborg. Ambassador for decent tea and Mars exploration. Internauta de Corazón. My grandma taught me BASIC, but I never learnt to whistle.
Friday night, 1 am. You're down to the last third of your Augustiner and you're frustrated.
For over an hour you've been browsing that folder of unfinished Ruby side projects of yours, realizing that almost all of them are dry CRUD applications. Meanwhile, some of the cool kids in your twitter timeline keep posting their Ludum Dare submissions.
You cannot help but wonder if you should have learnt something other than Ruby.
For a second you even ponder trading in its elegance for some robust C++.
DON'T PANIC. Stop that XCode download. There's hope:
Gosu is a Ruby library providing basic building blocks for game development like a window with a main loop, sound samples, gamepad input etc.
And it's so simple that you can even start developing your first game that same night, even after another beer.*
Let me walk you through building a 2D game with Gosu from the first line of code to a playable game.
* [This talk will, of course, neither advocate nor support coding under the influence of alcohol.]
Sebastian Korfmann is a seasoned Web-Engineer from Germany, working for Bulletproof Networks in Australia. A nomad for some time, he's now based in Ho-Chi-Minh City, Vietnam.
When he's not travelling around the world to participate in conferences, he's running meet-ups to socialise with the local startup community in Saigon.
Before I came to Vietnam just over a year ago, it was pretty much sphinx-like to me. Sure, there was this war thing a few decades ago, rice, coffee and a friend of mine did some backpacking a few years back. But how about tech, Ruby and startups? How does it compare to the other hubs in Asia, Australia or Europe? Ho-Chi-Minh City (formerly known as Saigon) in particular is an aspiring hub for all sorts of web related companies and individuals. Driven by progressive locals and location independent entrepreneurs, it's interesting to observe the evolution of an environment that was shaped by socialism towards a vibrant startup culture. Vietnam has one of the fastest growing economies in South-East Asia, and for good reason.
Sandra is a Berlin-based analog & digital creative with over 15 years of design experience, currently working as a freelance designer & illustrator. A paper addict who collects words, loves cats and dances to the radio. Her favorite project: Art Direction / Concepts for the first EMILY THE STRANGE Nintendo DS game.
We obsess about the best TODO app and always try out the next fancy tool to get our ideas out of our head. At the same time, we sometimes forget how easy, simple and flexible pen and paper are. This talk will take a step back from the screen and show some easy techniques to improve your daily work and focus by structuring information on paper or a whiteboard in a pleasing fashion. With a few simple steps, you will find your notes more efficient and - most importantly - more rememberable.
Tom is a computer scientist and programmer. He has lectured on optimising compilers at the University of Cambridge, co-organises the Ruby Manor conference, and is a member of the London Ruby User Group. His latest book, Understanding Computation, was published by O’Reilly in 2013.
Monads are in danger of becoming a bit of a joke: for every person who raves about them, there’s another person asking what in the world they are, and a third person writing a confusing tutorial about them. With their technical-sounding name and forbidding reputation, monads can seem like a complex, abstract idea that’s only relevant to mathematicians and Haskell programmers. Forget all that! In this pragmatic talk we’ll roll up our sleeves and get stuck into refactoring some awkward Ruby code, using the good parts of monads to tackle the problems we encounter along the way. We’ll see how the straightforward design pattern underlying monads can help us to make our code simpler, clearer and more reusable by uncovering its hidden structure, and we’ll all leave with a shared understanding of what monads actually are and why people won’t shut up about them.
Tworit is a student of Instrumentation and Electronics engineering in College of Engineering and Technology, Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India. He is an Open Source enthusiast and always is interested in stuffs related to the latest software and hardware technologies. He keeps pondering if he could make something based on both combined. As far as Ruby is concerned, it provides high flexibility through its gems and for this very reason, he always tries to find ways and means to create things using Ruby.
Have you ever wanted to turn on your microwave oven or refrigerator just before reaching home so that you can get your food immediately Or ever wondered if you can control a robot in south-asia sitting in Japan ? If yes,here is the thing that you are looking for. Come and have a look at my "Web controlled mini-robot".