Schedule

Time	Event/Title	Speaker	Location
8:30am	Registration, coffee, tea, and schmoozing		4th Floor Atrium
9:00am	Welcome
9:10am	Predicting The Future: A Perspectives on Ruby and Rails	Winston Tsang
9:30am	Using Active Scaffold	Joseph Faisal Nusairat
10:00am	Hacking the Mid-End: Advanced Rails UI Techniques	Michael Bleigh
11:00am	Usability on Rails: Tips & Tricks for Creating Passionate Users	Larry Karnowski
12:00pm	Lunch		collect in 4th Floor Atrium and disperse
1:00pm	Playing it Safe - How to write library friendly code in Ruby	Jim Weirich
2:00pm	New Features in Test::Unit 2.0	Daniel Berger
2:30pm	Behavior Driven Development with Cucumber	Brandon Keepers
3:00pm	Coffee Break (with tea, cookies, brownies, and fruit)		4th Floor Atrium
3:15pm	Into the Limelight: An Introduction to a Ruby Rich Client Framework	Paul Pagel
3:45pm	Metawhat? A look into the mysterious metaclass	Brandon Dimcheff
4:15pm	Closing

Note: all speaking events are in Forum Hall. Note: this schedule is subject to change

Speakers

• Jim Weirich is the Chief Scientist for EdgeCase LLC, a Rails development firm located in Columbus Ohio. Jim has over twenty-five years of experience in software development. He has worked with real-time data systems for testing jet engines, networking software for information systems, and image processing software for the financial industry. Jim is active in the Ruby community and has contributed to several Ruby projects, including the Rake build system and the RubyGems package software.

  Talk: Playing it Safe - How to write library friendly code in Ruby

  Ruby's incredibly flexible language features puts a great deal of responsibility on the programmer to use them in a safe manner. This talk will discuss when it is appropriate to use these feature and when it might be better to "play it safe". Also discuss future language features such as "selector namespaces" and how they effect programming styles.

• Daniel Berger is the lead developer of several Ruby projects, including the Win32Utils project. He has been an active member in the Ruby community since 2001 and is a member of the Boulder-Denver Ruby user group. Daniel currently works in the telecom industry. When he's not writing programs, Daniel enjoys hiking, biking and playing board games.

  Talk: New Features in Test::Unit 2.0

  Did you know that Test::Unit is now available as a separate gem? Are you aware of its new features? This talk will be a brief overview of those features, as well as how and why you should use them.

• Michael Bleigh is a web developer currently living near Ann Arbor, MI specializing in Ruby on Rails and advanced user interface design. He is currently working for Intridea, an agile software development firm based in Washington D.C.

  Talk: Hacking the Mid-End: Advanced Rails UI Techniques

  A discussion of the growing development area that lies in between the front and back ends of web applications using real code examples of advanced user interface design and construction. From Lowpro behaviors to block-accepting helpers and interface abstraction, the field for 'Mid-End' developers is coming into its own right.

• Brandon Dimcheff has been using Ruby for real work for 3 years, beginning with Rails and then diving into the Ruby world as a whole. He works at Zattoo, a peer-to-peer internet television company (sorry, only available in Europe) here in Ann Arbor.

  Talk: Metawhat? A look into the mysterious metaclass

  If you've ever seen "class<< self" in somebody's code and wondered what the heck is going on behind the scenes, you're not alone. What you've stumbled upon is the ever-elusive metaclass (or eigenclass, or singelton class... take your pick). The metaclass is shrouded in mystery, but this is mostly just because Ruby does its darndest to hide it from you. In this session, I will show you what's really going on with metaclasses, and how you can use them to do interesting things that are actually useful. By the end of the session, you will understand how simple and elegant using metaclasses can be.

• Larry Karnowski has been designing and developing software applications—mostly network management tools—for almost fifteen years. His biggest passion is solving problems for real people—creating user interfaces that let users kick ass. In addition to hard technical skills like Ruby, Java, etc., he brings experience in usability, product design, and uncovering what users really need.

  Talk: Usability on Rails: Tips & Tricks for Creating Passionate Users

  A brief introduction to usability for developers, including concrete code examples that solve common usability problems in Rails.

• Saved from the brink of "Enterprise" Java despair, Brandon Keepers drank the Ruby kool-aid. He's contributed a fair amount to the open-source Ruby world and has led Ruby and Rails training around the world. At Collective Idea, an agile software development shop, he writes code that tends toward awesomeness and occasionally talks about it at opensoul.org.

  Talk: Behavior Driven Development with Cucumber

  • In order to share the love
  • As a presenter
  • I will demonstrate the wonders of behavior driven development with Cucumber
  • Scenario: Behavior Driven Development with Cucumber
    • Given a desire for higher quality software
    • And a tool called Cucumber that executes feature document written in plain text
    • When you watch this presentation
    • Then you will gain an understanding of behavior driven development
    • And see examples of behavior driven development with cucumber
    • And be equipped to start integrating Cucumber into your development process

• Joseph Faisal Nusairat

  Talk: Using Active Scaffold

  When you first looked at Rails we all loved the speed of deployment. We could deploy applications faster than we ever have before. Part of this ability was to use scaffolding. However, we were then a bit disappointed to learn that we really weren't supposed to use scaffolding in production. Not only that, but scaffolding was still a bit limited. But why? This presentation will show how to use Active Scaffolding to create dynamic applications to interact with the domain. We will also go over how to customize the scaffolding for our own needs.

• Winston Tsang has been crafting software professionally for over a decade at Fortune 500 companies. He has worked on a wide variety of large systems, including billing & accounts receivable, warehouse management, and e-commerce. Winston led teams in the development of several e-commerce systems, as well as taking responsibility for major Fortune 500 web sites. Winston is an active member of the Southeast Michigan Ruby Users Group as an organizer and speaker.

  Talk: Predicting The Future: A Perspectives on Ruby and Rails

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