Tony Drake - The Anatomy of a Ruby Gem: Going from Zero to Sharing Code

Tony gave us an early preview of his talk at RubyConf 2018. The video wasn’t great, so just watch the final product from RubyConf!

To many Rubyists just starting out, gems can appear very mysterious. You list them in a Gemfile and run ‘bundle install’ or install them directly with ‘gem install’. Suddenly, your programs gain more functionality than they had before. But what are gems? What makes them work? How can you make your own to share with the world? Let’s find out.

Tony is a senior developer with about 10 years of professional development experience (8 of those with Ruby). He enjoys working in development teams of all sizes and helping junior developers level up. When he’s not hacking away or being a part-time DevOp, you can find him online kicking butt in Mario Kart.

Steve Hodges - Testing gems in your Ruby apps

We Rubyists tend to include lots of open-source gems in our projects. How do we responsibly use them and keep our production apps from breaking? In this quick Ruby Jam, Steve covers how he tests to make using gems safer and upgrading them cleaner, and how gem authors can help.

Steve has been writing Ruby since 2011, and writes (and relies on) tests daily. He’s written web applications for money since the dark days of PHP 3.x. He enjoys solving problems, improving craftsmanship, mentoring, and tacos.

Fishbowl Panel on Mentoring Engineers

Emcees (left to right):

• Anthony Panozzo
• Kyle Shipley

Kyle Shipley and Anthony Panozzo (aka Shipnozzo, aka Biggie Talls) are cofounders of Woven, an evidence-based developer hiring platform. They’ve been engineering leaders at OurHealth, Castlight Health, Haven, Lessonly, and a variety of other early-stage companies. Woven runs on Ruby/Rails and JS/React and supports exercises in a variety of other languages and frameworks.

Panelists (left to right):

• Andrew Robinson III is the head of product and engineering at Lessonly. He started out doing Net and Java (even some COBOL back in the high school days)… but found the light around 2011 which is when he found RoR. He loves engineering, but recently his passions have been split between engineering, design, product, and servant leadership.

• Steve Caldwell is the Vice President of Technology at Springbuk, the health intelligence platform for employers. Over the past decade, Steve has devised, built, and sold software applications ranging from the Department of Defense to the Fortune 500. He is a serial entrepreneur with a passion for building businesses that are innovative and impactful. When he’s not geeking out over the next big thing in technology, he’s most likely out missing a putt somewhere.

• Lindsey Ashburn is a Development Manager at Conga. She is a firm believer in servant leadership and enjoys striving to provide the best environment possible for the success of her team. In a previous life she was a Software Developer, Configuration Manager, QA Engineer, Project Manager and a stay at home Mom. When she’s not working she is most likely chasing after her two small children or sleeping because well, children.

• Matt Brown is CTO at Pattern89, the data science for paid social platform, where he leads a team of engineers who help marketers experiment at scale. In his past, he was Director of Engineering for both Salesforce and ExactTarget. Those positions came after the acquisition of iGoDigital where he was VP of Engineering. He has interests in many things including ruby, scones and good beverages (only ask about coffee if you have time to spare)