Adam Darrah - The “Hooked” model on building habit-forming products

Adam discusses the ethical questions of developing a habit-forming product. We will look at the “Hook” model that is used to create a habit-forming product: Trigger, Action, Variable Reward, and Investment. Finally, we will look at the “Make It Rain” iOS app as a case study of the lessons learned from this book.

Adam Darrah leads a team of Ruby on Rails developers at Tangoe (formerly MOBI), a global technology expense management company. Adam has been involved in several startups in Indianapolis including Challonge and Brackets for Good. Away from the keyboard, Adam enjoys traveling, cooking, and economics podcasts.

Chris Flack - Level Up - Growth in Individuals, Teams, and Organizations

Mentorship and growth at 3 levels: Individual, Team, and Organization.

Over the past year, I’ve put a lot of my focus into growth and “learning how to learn”. This is a quick synthesis of some of my experiences, what I’ve picked up from my own mentors, and the lessons I’ve brought back to my team.

Chris is an Iron Yard Indianapolis Alumnus and Ruby developer for Tangoe’s GoMobile division (formerly MOBI). Home brewer, tinkerer, gamer, and generalist nerd.

David Michael Gregg - The Physics of Software Design

David Michael Gregg introduces Meilir Page-Jones’ software design principle of “connascence” - Popularized formerly by Jim Weirich.

Learning how to write quality, maintainable code has been a question left to intuition, personal reinvention (after repeated failure), and the memorization of maxims such as “Tell Don’t Ask”, “Feature Envy”, SOLID, et al.

But can we compare these maxims – these learned lessons – across paradigms, and arrive at a generalization which serves as a sort of guiding “Grand Unified Theory of Software Development” (Jim Weirich)?

Some of this work has been done, and the resulting concept and vocabulary is not only simple to explain (and immediately applicable) to early learners, but can serve as a metric for quantifying maintainability and refactoring opportunities at all levels of software architecture.

Matt Swanson - JavaScript Sprinkles: Avoiding client-side hell with view-over-the-wire

A brief tour of building a speedy Rails app with Turbolinks and Stimulus.

Matt Swanson leads teams and build products for customers at SEP, a software product design and development agency in Carmel. He’s been using Ruby in some capacity since 2010. His favorite Ruby method is Array#compact.