RubySlide

The Ruby community has driven a lot of technical innovation in deployment and configuration management over the last few years, and so the idea of delivering high-quality software rapidly should be familiar to most of us. But although our tools are state-of-the-art, getting them to work together properly can be surprisingly frustrating. In this talk, I’ll explain how to implement a high-quality rapid build and deploy process using standard CI tools, Bundler, RVM, and Capistrano. I’ll also discuss how to coach your developers, QAs, and client to be "production-ready, any time."

Ruby on Rails is a famously opinionated framework that handles ninety percent of the problems a typical web application faces. But what about the last ten percent? Every app has to jump off the Rails eventually, whether that means integrating with an external web service, importing data from another database, or providing enhanced search functionality. In this talk I’ll lead you through some patterns for handling those cases, and discuss certain features of Rails 3 that let you leverage the best pieces of the core framework without resorting to ugly hacks. Finally we’ll discuss what a new, more modular core framework means for a post-Rails world.

Look, you’re going to go write a bunch of weird, crazy, and quite possibly criminally insane code in Ruby at some point or another in your career. Maybe you already have. I can’t stop you, and I’d be disappointed if you didn’t at least try, so in this talk I’ll show you how to do it without poking your own eye out with the pointy end of a sharpened stick.