Agile Style Scalability

Published September 29th, 2011 Under Coding | Leave a Comment

This video presents Pivotal Labs development process: how they go from minimum viable product to high traffic site, where they focus and when. In particular, the talk will provide hands-on pointers on how to make your Ruby on Rails application run fast and scale. Not just theory, but specific tools and concrete steps.

Organizers: The San Francisco Ruby on Rails Group
Video Source: http://marakana.com/forums/ruby/ruby_on_rails/411.html

Learning TDD through Test-first Teaching

Published July 5th, 2010 Under Software Testing, TDD | Leave a Comment

How to get started with TDD? Test-First Teaching is an innovative teaching approach that is gaining widespread adoption. Sarah Allen talks about how she teaches Ruby and Rails through a test-first approach. She demonstrates test-first teaching and then discuss how to turn the corner from simply making tests pass to how to use a test-first approach to software design.

Video Producer: East Bay Ruby Meetup Group

Rails in the Large: How Agility Allows Us to Build One Of the World’s Biggest Rails Apps

Published May 12th, 2010 Under Coding | Leave a Comment

Neal Ford shows what ThoughtWorks learned from scaling Rails development: infrastructure, testing, messaging, optimization, performance.

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/ford-large-rails

Selenium on Rails

Published July 24th, 2009 Under Agile | Leave a Comment

Have you heard the story of the poor code monkey? The one who had to prove to his boss that his web app actually worked? Are you the poor code monkey? See how Selenium on Rails can make it easier to take the pain out of view testing by writing and automating view tests in the browser, so you can spend more time coding and less time automating. Acceptance tests are a crucial part of the process of building business software as well as an important part of regression testing often ignored by developers because they are painful. They’re boring, fragile, and tedious. Using SOR you can quickly install Selenium and get it running on your Rails project.

http://scotland-on-rails.s3.amazonaws.com/1A07_EricSmith-SOR.mp4

TDD: It’s About More Than Just “Testing”

Published July 24th, 2009 Under Coding, Software Testing, TDD | Leave a Comment

Recently, in the Rails community, there has been an upsurge of interest in testing. For instance, in the past year alone, we’ve seen the introduction of a bevy of new testing-related gems (i.e. context, cucumber, factory_girl, remarkable, webrat, etc.). These are all good things. And yet do we still see the forest for the trees? While testing improves code quality, facilitates refactoring, and eases debugging, these are not ends unto themselves. This point often seems to be lost as the “testing” drum is beaten ever louder in the Ruby on Rails community. This talk will attempt to engage the audience to rethink WHY they write tests via argument and example.

http://scotland-on-rails.s3.amazonaws.com/1A05_EvanLight-SOR.mp4

The Great Rails Refactor

Published May 25th, 2009 Under Coding | Leave a Comment

In this talk, Yehuda Katz goes deeper, explaining some of the details of the work. He explains how Rails is becoming ORM agnostic, with code samples of work done so far. He shows some of the more significant performance enhancements, and explains why they increased the performance of the framework. Finally, he goes into some of the more interesting refactoring experiences of the transition.