Meetup March 8, 2017

Tony Drake - Reporting on Rails - ActiveRecord and ROLAP Working Together

This talk is over a brief journey through the world of Relational Online Analytical Processing (ROLAP) and seeing how this can apply to Rails. This will also include a couple database considerations and possibly an overview of a DSL he’s building that ties it all together.

Tony Drake is currently senior developer on a team specializing in billing and reporting for an enterprise-level Rails application where he co-architected a custom ROLAP framework using PostgreSQL on the backend. He’d like to share his ten years (seven of those with Rails) of professional web development experience with others. He can also kick anyone’s butt in Mario Kart with Rosalina.

Ryder Timberlake - Expand Your Perspective and Change Your Life Through Pair Programming

Editor’s Note: This video is highly condensed for time and has poor audio due to many people speaking simultaneously. That said, I think it’s a wonderful example of how to run an impromptu meetup workshop, and a view into the thought and processes of solving a few simple puzzles on Codewars.

Tech is siloed. Languages, teams, and services are siloed. Good design is frequently portrayed and interpreted as a constellation of context-independent best practices. And oftentimes we can hardly have a productive conversation about design without our knee-jerk ideas of the way we ought to build something getting in the way.
When we enforce conventions in a project, we often do so without a good understanding of which conventions are essential and which are peripheral. We often do so without a sufficiently shared vocabulary of design with which to argue constructively. And when we choose a tool, we often do so by merely defaulting to what we know behind a shield of inscrutable buzzwords – words whose meaning is rarely exposed to the same rigorous inquiry with which we examine spaces or tabs or choice of editor.

I would argue that a startling majority of the most intractable technical problems we face in software are simply interpersonal and communication problems expressing themselves in a technical domain. And I think we can make things a whole lot better by just putting our heads together.

This is more workshop than talk. Bring your laptop and ideally your free Codewars account.

Ryder is an Iron Yard alumnus and engineer at Salesforce, where he writes tests for the Approvals app and is a contributor to the automated testing framework used across the Marketing Cloud. He is an outspoken advocate of sound implementations of pair programming, which he believes to holistically aid all manner of technical and human endeavors in software – from writing maintainable code and fostering good user experiences to encouraging effective communication and diversity in the workplace.