Ignite RailsConf (sponsored by OtherInbox)

Hilton Austin, Austin Grand Ballroom, Salon J (6th Floor)

Agenda:

Description:

Five minutes, 20 slides. What would you say? Sixteen artists, technologists, thinkers, and personalities take the stage to answer this challenge.

What is Ignite?  Fast-paced, fun, thought-provoking, social, local, global - Ignite is all of these and more. It's a high-energy evening of 5-minute talks by people who have an idea - and the guts to get onstage and share it with the rest of the Rails community.

Buy your tickets today!

Talks

• 

  Steve Klabnik

  Anti-Oppression 101

  Everyone acknowledges that the software field has an issue with gender balance, but there's lots of arguments about what do do about it. The social justice community uses the term 'anti-oppression' to describe techniques for being more inclusive to people of a wide variety of backgrounds, ethnicities, sexualities, and genders. Software developers generally lack exposure to these terms and techniques. This'll be a quick intro to the topic and terminology.

• 

  Ron Evans

  KidsCodeCamp: Hacking Minds By Hacking Code

  It's good to be part of the technological elite, right? Not so fast! The future requires a lot more new developers than we are currently producing. Our current course is not sustainable. And it is not just about creating the next generation of hackers. The new digital divide creates new risks, as well as new inequities, in society. Enter KidsCodeCamp: a one day free camp for kids, with the small goal of helping seed the minds of the next generation of digital citizens, using programming as the medium. As it runs out, the very first "alpha" of KidsCodeCamp will be the day of Ignite RailsConf. I'll give a follow-up of some of the lessons we learn earlier that day, both good and bad, in near realtime. We need to create the future we want to live in, and that future has already begun.

• 

  Jesse Wolgamott

  Velveeta and Active Record

  Both velveeta and ActiveRecord take a lot of heat for not being "perfectly designed" or "actual cheese". But you know what? They have mass appeal, and are perfect to use in the right circumstances. I present: A refound love affair with migrations, active record, and velveeta.

• 

  Adam Keys

  Yes, and

  I've been taking improv classes, and two of the major principles are "Happy, healthy, sexy" and "Yes, and..." . The more performers are in a positive stance, the better the performance goes. Likewise, we as developers can get more done when we're in a positive state of mind. Happy, healthy teammates work better together. Finding a way to respond to questions and requests with "yes, and" keeps teams on positive ground. So, this is a five-minute tour through the elements of improv comedy and how to use them to work better with other developers

• 

  Richard Schneeman

  Wicked Problems

  A Wicked problem is one that is difficult or impossible to solve. Homelessness, obesity, genocide, and more plague our world; many consider them just facts of life. Those of us lucky enough to attend ignite have the toolset and brainpower to make real lasting change, yet we're increasingly obsessed with first world problems. In this talk I'll introduce wicked problems, and talk about how we can start to impact the communities we live in. Are the problems you're solving today, worth solving?

• 

  Prakash Murthy

  You should run a marathon

  Am training to run my third marathon this fall, and can't stop talking about the benefits of training for and completing a 26.2 mile run! Hoping to get more ruby/rails developers on to the running bandwagon with this spark.

• 

  Bryan Liles

  A developer who lost his spark

  I want to share a story about developer who lost his spark. Where did the spark come from? Why did he lose it? What now? The only way you'll find out is by coming to igniterailsconf 2012.

• 

  Noel Rappin

  Manage Your Development Environment and Never Burn another Hamburger

  The key to being an expert developer is being able to focus your attention and memory on the most important parts of the problem. The hard part of being an expert developer is there are so many different things clamoring for your attention and memory. The problem can be drowned out by the remembering which window has the file you want to look at, what the right git command is, how to start the server, dealing with email... You get the idea. Expert chefs and short order cooks set up their environment in advance so that repetitive items that can be done in advance are done and easily available, and so that their environment tells them important information without the chef having to spend precious time and attention remembering the state of every item in the world. You want to be more like a master chef. You want your environment to be smart enough to tell you important information at a glance. You want to get some practical advice on how to set up your development environment and tools so that more your time and attention can be spent on interesting problems.

• 

  Raimonds Simanovskis

  Analyze and Visualize Git Log for Fun and Profit

  We use a lot of code analysis tools to find out what's bad in the current version of our code. But in addition Git commit logs contain a lot of analytical information about how our code has changed over time. Sometimes it can give us new valuable information but sometimes it is just fun to analyze also meaningless statistics. Therefore I created Git log import for eazyBI data analysis application (https://eazybi.com/help/git) which allows you to create reports and charts from your Git log in fast and easy way. In this short presentation I will use Ruby on Rails commit log as a case study and will reveal new funny both meaningful and meaningless statistics about it.

• 

  Chris Holland

  Synth Geek

  These days synthesizers are often though of as the soulless noise makers of repetitive dance music. But only recently has this notion become the norm. Originally synths make their mark on popular culture as the futuristic outer space noise of Sci-fi and the haunting tones of a new kind of classical music. The massive machines that were developed years ago (well before the ump-chick-ump chick of techno) were created by engineers out of transistors, resistors, capacitors and wires. Truly a geeks instrument if there ever was one.

• 

  Andy Maleh

  Software Craftsmanship vs Software Engineering

  The recent emergence of the Software Craftsmanship movement in the last decade has been accompanied with quite a bit of confusion on what the movement is exactly about and whether it adds any value beyond previous software development movements, such as Agile and Software Engineering. In this short talk, Andy Maleh will define Software Craftsmanship, compare and contrast to Software Engineering, and provide examples on how both disciplines are playing out at the Groupon software development environment.

• 

  Kenichi Murahashi

  Offline mobile app has great potential

  Mobile has poor network and less powerful spec. Offline mobile app will solve this! But I feel asset pipeline conflict with rack-offline. aggregate all path's files to manifest file and detect its change. Do you have alternative way? I need re-implementation asset pipelines parse //= jquery and aggregate several paths, don't I? I don't have implement yet, but Let's hack together!

   

If you're interested in Ignite then you will definitely be interested in BohConf (@BohConf) - the official unconference of RailsConf.