(443) 451-3001
One of the “meta” talks that I enjoyed the most at RailsConf 2013 was the first day’s closing keynote entitled “Stables and Volatiles,” given by Michael Lopp. For the full story, check out Michael’s blog, but here’s the gist.
There exists two personality types at opposite ends of a spectrum: stables and volatiles. While you can see these personality types everywhere, Michael defines each personality type as it manifests in an application developer as follows:
In late April, I attended my very first RailsConf, held this year in Portland. For those of you who don’t know, RailsConf is the biggest yearly gathering of Ruby on Rails developers, featuring multiple tracks of experts giving talks on their specific area of expertise. It’s a pretty big deal.
Although it can be difficult to gauge the strength of a community, the large financial investment on RailsConf seems like a solid indication of its value to many developers across the country and world. And let me tell you, things are looking good.
tl;dr
you are using poltergeist and your konacha tests fail to start with an error like the following,
Timed out waiting for response to {“name”:”visit”,”args”:["http://127.0.0.1:58265/"]}….
then you should add
Capybara.register_driver :slow_poltergeist do |app| Capybara::Poltergeist::Driver.new(app, :timeout => 2.minutes) end Konacha.configure do |konacha| require 'capybara/poltergeist' konacha.driver = :slow_poltergeist end
to your konacha configuration file.
The Details
Here at SmartLogic, we embrace automated testing. We use an in-house continuous integration (CI) server running Jenkins to test each of our projects on every commit. We isolate projects from one another on this server by having each project run in a dedicated Vagrant virtual machine.
It’s not surprising that at an event like RailsConf, people will engage in some professional networking. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean talking shop, and with four days of conference, some of us might need a break. After the second day of RailsConf, I was intent on avoiding shop talk as much as possible—at least while I was at the after parties.
In fact, I set the (unrealistic) goal of avoiding tech talk altogether. Of course, I failed—I was at RailsConf after all, and many, if not most, of the people there were excited about something related to their work. But there were many people with whom I didn’t share any particular business-related enthusiasm. The conscious decision to focus my discussion outside of work made it easier for me to have conversations with these people.
It’s natural to want to have some common ground, some common experience, when interacting with others. Having something in common makes it easy to relate; when you’re speaking, you have some confidence the other person cares, and when you’re listening, it’s easier to follow. But when meeting new people, it’s not clear that you have any interests in common (technical, or otherwise).
Why I Didn’t Want to Talk About Rails Development
At RailsConf, it was likely I would have some common experience with Rails with any of the other guests. But, if you’re like me, you get tired of answering questions like “What version of Rails do you guys use?” Starting a conversation about work when you’re in town for a conference also sets a precedent for the rest of the conversation. To me, it indicates professional motives (to some extent, anyway), and therefore sets up some pressure: I would be interacting with another person as a professional. Not that I have any doubts about myself as a professional, but I wasn’t interested in this sort of pressure at an after party. Read the rest of this entry »
You know the deal from RailsConf day 1, day 2, and day 3. Day 4 was light, so here are just a few final links to wrap up with:
tenderlove/enterprise · GitHub
For more like this, follow @smartlogic on Twitter.
You know the deal from RailsConf day 1 and day 2. Here are links from Day 3, with a special section dedicated to the lightning talks.
oestrich/hypermedia_rails · GitHub
HATEOAS Rabbit Hole – Google Groups
awslabs/seahorse · GitHub
rails/strong_parameters · GitHub
AWS Command Line Interface
filtersquad/rocket_pants · GitHub
rails-api/rails-api · GitHub
intridea/grape · GitHub
Apache Thrift
Rest.li
noahhl/batsd · GitHub
sensu (Monitoring.)
Throughout RailsConf, I will be bookmarking key links to follow up on later. Links from Day 1 are here. There are fewer links from Day 2, but it’s the quality that counts, right? Of course, feel free to comment with any links that you found useful.
Here are the links:
Throughout RailsConf, I will be bookmarking key links to follow up on later. I wanted to share these links so that whether or not you could attend RailsConf, you can follow up on the resources, upcoming events, and miscellanea we’re talking about.
Here are the links from Day 1:
As a software developer who has just recently jumped on board the Ruby on Rails ship, I’m quite excited to be attending my first RailsConf in Portland. More than 20 talks a day will be spread out over five tracks from Monday to Wednesday, with an additional handful of talks on Thursday morning. There are tons of interesting talks being presented, but it’s impossible to see them all, so here are a few of the topics that I’m looking forward to hearing about:
I’m very excited to see some practical talks lined up for this year’s RailsConf. As SmartLogic’s Director of Development Operations, I’m closely involved in the overall progress and performance of all our client applications, and their technology stacks and server deployments are near and dear to my heart. My favorite topics this year are trending towards scaling, monitoring, and the best server side tools for the job. This probably isn’t a surprise given how much I talk about servers.
So these are 2 talks from each day that I’m most looking forward to right now:
