August 15th 2009 - Developer Day Boston

Registration, Breakfast, and Welcome

Phenomenal Feedback

Behavior Driven Development! Cloud Computing! Buzzwords? Not in the Ruby on Rails(!) world. See a live demonstration of how Rails developers use constraints and feedback loops to experiment cheaply and quickly iterate over their ideas. It will… blow… your… mind!

speakerrate

Dan Lawless Croak Dan is a web developer at thoughtbot, inc. where he also runs thoughtbot's training program and organizes the Boston.rb hackfests. He actively contributes to open source Ruby projects such as Clearance, Shoulda, Twitter Search, and Quiet Backtrace (now in Rails core).

Break

"Comics" Is Hard: Alternative Databases

It sometimes seems like all domains easily map onto relational database like MySQL and Postgres — that we live in a happy land where all Employees are People, and all People are Mammals. Unfortunately, however, there are many domains that just don't map so easily onto a standard relational schema. In this session, we'll look at three general alternatives to the familiar model, as illustrated by some specific examples. We'll also see how some alternative databases provide a better fit for specific domains.

speakerrate

Ben Scofield
At Viget Labs, Ben builds Rails applications for Web 2.0 startups (for the past four years, exclusively in Ruby and Rails). He's spoken at Railsconf, Railsconf Europe, Rubyconf, and more, and is the author of Practical REST on Rails 2 Projects (from Apress). When he's not speaking or hacking, he spends time with his wife and daughter, reads voraciously, and blogs at www.culann.com and www.viget.com/extend.

Cloud Talk: A RunCodeRun Case Study

Relevance started building RunCodeRun internally about a year ago to meet an internal need for a continuous integration platform. Along the way, we learned a variety of technical lessons about building a product in the cloud and business lessons about how not to start a startup. Part product postmortem and part technical take-away, in this session we will look at both how to build a technically excellent product and also how to build a business on top of it.

speakerrate

Jess Martin
Jess fled from the ivory tower with a fascination for writing code that automatically generates goodness for video games—from graphics to maps to music. His fascination with rapid prototyping led him to build applications for the web where he contributed to several startups. You can now find him fretting over the front-end of many a web application.

Lunch

Lightning Talks

There's a lot of great work being done locally, and we always love to hear about it — so we're adding a slot for lightning talks to the agenda. Come prepared to chat about what you're working on or are interested in!

Bringing Your Great Ideas to Fruition - Managing a Team of One

Do you have a great idea for an awesome site but have no time to make it? Are you so frustrated that there is no tool that does (blank) and you wish someone would just get started working on it? Making your pet personal project can be quite an undertaking, so together we're going to go over:

• Choosing the right technology
• Making use of your greatest skills
• Finding the time
• Prioritizing features and knowing what to put in your beta
• Finding "cool new stuff" to implement
• Not letting your "me job" interfere with your "day job"

We're also going to take a first look at Sara's debuting project "Url Bundle," written in the ASP.NET MVC framework, We will learn some cool techniques like:

• Javascript templating with JQuery
• JSON web services for async data manipulation
• Making your own custom Url Shortener
• Social media integration

We will send you on your way prepared to share your great ideas for rocking software to the world.

speakerrate

Sara Chipps
Sara is a developer specializing in the .NET framework, an irreverent blogger at GirlDeveloper.com, and a writer for Datamation.com. She enjoys participating in and organizing community events such as Code Camps and most recently NJ Tech Drinks (a shoot off of the NY group, and an excuse for nerds to go to bars together). She enjoys speaking to diverse groups from the Girl Scouts to straight up code junkies. Her goal is to inspire more females to see that being a developer is fun and glamorous.

An Introduction to CSS 2.1 & CSS 3

CSS 2.1 and CSS 3, while not widely supported at the moment, are inching closer and closer to gaining the browser-level support we all wish for. Now that Firefox 3.5 has been released, and because of the fairly high adoption/upgrade rate of it's user-base, front-end developers are one step closer to the stress-reducing benefits these two versions of CSS provide.

In this presentation, you'll be introduced to a fair chunk of CSS 2.1 and CSS 3 selectors, properties, and values. You'll see actual code, the rendered output of that code, a few in-browser demonstrations, and we'll discuss the ways in which these new items can make your life, as a front-end developer, much easier.

If you and/or your company supports gracefully degrading certain aspects of a website's design, then you'll be able to apply a large portion of the CSS we'll be discussing right away.

speakerrate

Marc Amos
Marc runs Boston Web Studio and spends the day designing, developing, marketing, writing emails, book-keeping, and more. After hours, he is either working on improving the Build Guild, which he co-founded with a friend, or enjoying 'no-computer' time with his wife of two years, Sharon.

Break

Enjoy Your Version Control

For most developers, dealing with their source control can be one of the worst parts of the day. You shouldn't have to fear doing merges, making drastic changes without affecting the mainline, setting new team members up, or even just pulling down the latest changes. You'll learn why Git, a fast and distributed version control system, has gained popularity in both open source projects and the workplace, and you'll see how it's made version control enjoyable once again.

speakerrate

Nick Quaranto
Nick Quaranto is a 5th year Software Engineering/Computer Science major at Rochester Institute of Technology, and an internbot at thoughtbot, inc. When he's not coding Ruby, he's probably writing tips about Git at http://gitready.com, or finding awesome projects to feature on his biweekly column on the GitHub blog, the GitHub Rebase.

Happy Hour