Ben Cochran - Pry - A Ruby Developer’s Friend

In the Ruby world, Pry is IRB on steroids. In a blazingly short period of time you will learn how to install and invoke it, replace your Rails console with it, use it to debug server issues inline, configure macros and shortcuts, and a couple of other neat tips and tricks.

Ben is a Polyglot Principal Full Stack Developer and Architect with 15 years of experience developing standalone and web based applications in Enterprise, Freelance and Startup environments. His company, enhasa.io, is seeking contract work and potential CTO-for-hire engagements. He also has a penchant for 3D Printing as well as using Kubernetes for orchestration of containerized applications.

James Bush - Generating Markdown Docs for Rails Models with James Bush

James shows off a practical solution to crawl a typical Rails app to generate documentation on models, fields and relationships and output to Markdown.

Video is not available, but here’s the code shown in the talk:

GitHub Gist

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Rails.application.eager_load!

models_to_document = ApplicationRecord.descendants
  .map(&:to_s)
  .uniq
  .select { |m|
    ActiveRecord::Base.connection.table_exists? m.underscore.pluralize
  }
  .map(&:constantize)

model_descriptions ||= {}

models_to_document.each do |model|
  model_referenced_by = models_to_document
    .select { |m| m.column_names.include?("#{ model.table_name.singularize }_id") }
    .map(&:to_s)
    .join(', ')

  model_references_to = model
    .column_names
    .select { |cn| cn =~ /_id/ }
    .map { |r| r.gsub(/_id/, '') }
    .map(&:camelize)
    .join(', ')

  model_ancestors = model.ancestors.select { |k| k < ApplicationRecord }

  model_descendants = model.descendants

  model_heirarchy = (model_ancestors + model_descendants).map(&:to_s)

  model_column_names = model.column_names.reject { |cn| cn =~ /\Aid|created_at|updated_at|uuid/ }

  model_description = model_descriptions[model.to_s]

  puts "### #{ model.to_s }"
  puts
  print obj "```"
  "#{ model_heirarchy.each { |model_name| puts model_name } }" if model_heirarchy.length > 1
  puts
  puts "#{ model.to_s } <- #{ model_referenced_by }" if model_referenced_by.present?
  puts "#{ model.to_s } -> #{ model_references_to }" if model_references)_to.present?
  puts
  model_column_names.each { |cn| puts "  |#{ cn }" }
  puts "```"
  puts
  puts "#{ model.description }"
  puts
end

Output as Markdown (for a few models):

User

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User <- Certification, Invitation, Message, Philosophy, Prep, Resource

  |email
  |encrypted_password
  |reset_password_token
  |reset_password_sent_at
  |sign_in_count
  |current_sign_in_at
  |last_sign_in_ip
  |name
  |gender
  |age
  |bio
  |height
  |phone_number
  |avatar_file_name
  |avatar_content_type
  |avatar_file_size
  |coach

Contest

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Contest -> Prep

  |title
  |prep_id
  |date
  |url

Conversation

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Conversation <- Message
Conversation -> Sender, Recipient

  |sender_id
  |recipient_id

Wes Winham - Pen Testing The Developer Interview: Attacks that ace tech interviews and defenses that build better teams

The developer hiring process is vulnerable. Let’s attack it!

We’ll draw on the pen testers toolkit and lessons learned the hard way across my decade of startup hiring. We’ll break down the typical developer interview process. Then, we’ll use the lens of social engineering and cognitive bias to identify specific tactics for acing interviews. Finally, we’ll defend our interviews to make them better at predicting team success.

Attendees will leave armed with both a) tools to be a more effective interviewer and b) tools to presents their best self as a candidate.

Wes spent the last 10 years responsible for engineering at an Indianapolis SaaS startup called PolicyStat. Through building that product team from scratch, he learned (the hard way) a lot about hiring. He discovered that’s it is deceptively difficult. After selling PolicyStat last year, Wes started a SaaS company called Woven to fix developer hiring.

Tony Drake - Rolling your own Ruby package

There may come a time when rbenv, rvm, or cruby won’t cut it for your use case. Sometimes you need or want a current-day Ruby version installed on the system level but most Linux distros provide really out of date Rubies. To get what you want, you need to roll your own Ruby. Creating OS packages may sound scary, but in reality they are easy once you have a build system setup. I currently maintain a small set of servers for my side projects and have used my own self-built package of Ruby for quite a while now.

Who is Tony Drake? Tony is a senior web developer with about 10 years (most of it in Ruby) of total experience building websites professionally. By day, he curses DHH’s name while hacking away at code and trying to keep junior devs from scraping their knees. By night, he’s peeling away from the starting line while blowing up other vehicles in my way in Mario Kart.