Our code is full of hidden assumptions, things that seem like nothing, secrets that we did not name and thus cannot see.
These secrets represent missing concepts and this talk shows you how to expose those concepts with code that is easy to understand, change and extend.
Being explicit about hidden ideas makes your code simpler, your apps clearer and your life better. Even very small ideas matter. Everything, even nothing, is something.
Software engineering as it's taught in universities simply doesn't work. It doesn't produce software systems of high quality, and it doesn't produce them for low cost. Sometimes, even when practiced rigorously, it doesn't produce systems at all.
That's odd, because in every other field, the term "engineering" is reserved for methods that work.
What then, does real software engineering look like? How can we consistently deliver high-quality systems to our customers and employers in a timely fashion and for a reasonable cost? In this session, we'll discuss where software engineering went wrong, and build the case that disciplined Agile methods, far from being "anti-engineering" (as they are often described), actually represent the best of engineering principles applied to the task of software development.
Background job processing is an important component of most large Rails applications. Two of the most common solutions - Resque and Sidekiq - are largely differentiated by one underlying architectural decision: processes or threads?
Is this talk, we'll provide a gentle introduction to threads and processes, and then crack open the Resque and Sidekiq gems to see how they work. Along the way, we'll learn a bit about concurrency at the OS and Ruby layers, and about how some of the tools we rely on every day are written.
We don't see it all the time but robots that make our lives easier are already here with us. While they look nothing like the Transformers (cool!) or the Terminator (cool but scary), they affect our lives just as deeply. They assemble our cars, package our goods, manufacture our electronics, harvest our crops, clean our floors, drive our cars and even fight our wars (scary again).
In this talk, we want to show you how you can create and program your own autonomous robots using Ruby. We will show you how we built an inexpensive hexapod spider robot and how we wrote the software to control it, using Ruby.
This talk is inspired by Jim Weirich, who showed us Friendly Flying Robots with Ruby in 2013.
