Anthony Panozzo - Sidekiq

In this presentation, you’ll learn about why you might want to consider an asynchronous worker queue for your web application. We’ll talk about some Ruby frameworks for doing so, and then cover Sidekiq in depth. We’ll start with basic usage and testing of Sidekiq jobs. To provide more context, we will run through a quick overview of Redis (which Sidekiq is built on) and what it can be used for. Finally, we will explore some useful Sidekiq Pro extensions and point out some important things to watch out for.

Who is Anthony?

Hi, I’m Anthony Panozzo. I work as a Senior Software Engineer at OurHealth, and have used Sidekiq on a couple of different projects over the last few years. One time I woke up and had a million jobs in a queue and was very concerned.

Daniel Brown - WTF is Motivation?

Ennui, lethargy and lassitude are fancy words often used to describe a basic problem: Person A doesn’t like doing Thing B and feels an obvious lack of enthusiasm … but Thing B is kind of important. In other words, no one calls you lazy because you didn’t create a temporary fork-and-spoon sculpture using your new cutlery. You get called lazy when you are supposed to do something that is important to somebody … and you don’t.

This talk is all about Self-Determination Theory (SDT), a psychological model that describes motivation as coming from autonomy, competency and relevance. My aim is to teach you to use SDT to build internal motivation when it doesn’t come naturally and teach others to do the same.

Who is Daniel?

I (Daniel Brown) am a husband (to Nina), co-founder (of Occam Education) and code monkey (Rails!) in roughly that order. I studied Arabic and Russian as an undergrad, went to Syria and then dropped out of an MS program in Arabic to start Occam Education with my brother. In 2014, I went to a Rails coding bootcamp, and in 2016, I received an MS in Applied Positive Psychology. I have worked in education (tutoring and ESL) since 2005, and much of my recent work has been in coaching adolescents striving to build internal motivation and grit.

Tony Drake - Testing a Gem Against Different Databases and Different Versions of Rails

So you built a gem that integrates with ActiveRecord. You write tests, push to Github, CI passes, and then publish to RubyGems. Great! But later, someone submits a bug… the gem doesn’t work with MySQL and Rails 4.2 and you only tested your gem against PostgreSQL and Rails 5. You want your gem to support all “active” versions of Rails and at least both PostgreSQL and MySQL. So how to do you it? How do you get your tests to be able to run against different versions of Rails and databases on a whim? Let’s go through from start to finish the story of creating a gem and testing against these permutations of real world setups.

Tony Drake is a senior web developer with about 10 years (most of it in Ruby) of total experience building sites professionally. By day, He curses DHH’s name while hacking away at code. By night, he’s peeling away from the starting line while blowing up other vehicles in my way in Mario Kart.

Chris Vannoy - Scripting the Mac with Ruby

Ruby’s a scripting language, so why not use it for, you know, scripting. When you combine MacOS’s built-in scripting and automation tools - such as Automator, launchd, AppleScript, Workflows and Services - with Ruby, nothing is out of reach. Let’s walk through MacOS’ core automation and scripting tools, and use a dash of Ruby to build ourselves something useful (or, failing that, something silly).

Chris has been developing in Ruby for more than a decade, is a former instructor at The Iron Yard coding bootcamp, and current Senior Engineer at Sigtsr. He cares entirely too much about college football, naps, and podcasts.