RubySlide

Two years ago Rackspace had a problem: how do we backup 20K network devices, in 8 datacenters, across 3 continents, with less than a 1% failure rate -- every single day? Many solutions were tried and found wanting: a pure Perl solution, a vendor solution and then one in Ruby, none worked well enough. They not fast enough or they were not reliable enough, or they were not transparent enough when things went wrong. Now we all love Ruby but good Rubyists know that it is not always the best tool for the job. After re-examining the problem we decided to rewrite the application in a mixture of Erlang and Ruby. By exploiting the strengths of both -- Erlang’s astonishing support for parallelism and Ruby’s strengths in web development -- the problem was solved. In this talk we’ll get down and dirty with the details: the problems we faced and how we solved them. We’ll cover the application architecture, how Ruby and Erlang work together, and the Erlang approach to asynchronous operations (hint: it does not involve callbacks). So come on by and find out how you can get these two great languages to work together.

CoffeeScript will ship with Rails 3.1 to replace RJS as the preferred way to dynamically generate JavaScript. It’s a new language that take the best parts of Ruby, Python, and others to ease the worst parts of JavaScript. More than being the new kid on the Rails block however, CoffeeScript is mind-expanding in ways that will make you remember the first time you ever gave Ruby a try. This presentation will take you through the basics of CoffeeScript, starting with a crash course in syntax, all the way to a working application.

Lone Star Ruby Conference 2010... by Jesse Wolgamott Dive into the target audiences and differences in NoSQL storage, how to implement them and what this NoSQL thing is all about. Discuss how SQL has limits when you get to web-scale and how NoSQL bypasses these limits.

I gave this talk at Lone Star Ruby Conference in Austin on 8/28/2010.