http://github/dnclabs

- client_side_validations – gem that does client side validation for rails
- takes AR validations – serves them via json – used by jquery.validate

how to kill rails
github.com/michel
bad practices by a few rails developers
Don’t reduce yourself to $20/hr, stick to your price, delivery quality
Communication is important!

Democracy.com
Raimond Garcia
Revolutionize Democracy
Parsed Congress web page – created a prototype on heroku in 48 hours
legal palitical party in spain – “partido de internet”

What’s new in RSpec-2
David Chelimsky
in beta right now
Old rspec won’t work with Rails 3
doesn’t work with rails < 3 (yet)

http://github.com/rspec

$rspec spec
modularized, rspec-core is built on micronaut

Surveyor gem
Mark Yoon
Surveys in your Rails app
write surveys in DSL
exmaple Kitchen Sink survey
dates, ranges, plck any, grids, multiple answers
needs: admin ui, validations in UI, Rails3 support

http://github.com/breakpointer/surveyor

MySQL is awesome

@igrigorik
Don’t believe all the NoSQL hype

http://bit.ly/bgi1Wf

more flexibility in the relational model
em-proxy gem – tcp level proxy
- used to rewrite SQL queries on the fly

Michael Hartl
railstutorial.org
Joy of publishing online
goal – write a source file, publish HTML & PDF with syntax highlighting & linking to other sections
PolyyTeXnic
HTML & PDF stay in sync

Jake Scruggs
@jakescruggs
ActiveMQ & ActiveMessaging
Mostly a Java shop, so not Resque, delayed job
sending messages is easy
pass id’s NOT serialized objects
Tips:
- Tell ActiveMessage to not be greedy
- Namespace your queues
- Name your pollers
- Double Kill – Die Poller Die – script/poller run vs script/poller start

Greg Nelson
foreign assistance

http://bit.ly/RwandaOnRails

Jim Rumsick (Big Tiger)- HashRocket
Improv – Comedy to Coding
Programming is about communication

http://github.com/flipsasser/Persistence-Smoothie

NoSQL means no ACID
Keep what you know – don’t throw out your MySQL

DataMapper is the swiss army knife of ORM
- can point different models to different datastores
- Have a lot of refactoring to do

Sample Store App
- Authentication – keep in Reational DB
- Products – store metadata
- Purchases – keep it in RDB
- Activity Stream – denormalize with key/value store

mongofy – gem for moving data from mysql to mongo

Drawbacks
- DataPortability is lowered
- Lot more moving parts
- Say goodbye to all your fun AR mixins

Scales linearly – increases not only read access, but also write access

A ColumnFamily per query

CassandraObject
- Mostly AR compatible
- In flux
- taking patches

redis is not use for everything because entire dataset used to have to fit into RAM – would have to shard across machines

github – uses redis for routing, can add, remove.modify routes quickly & easily – can determine what server to put new users on, etc

Old – HAProxy sending to mongrels
New – Unicorn – instead of receiving requests, it asks for one using ‘select’, pooled, forks similar to passenger

Used 6 or 7 different bg – SQS, DelayedJob
Used Delayed job for 2 years

resque is built on redis, jobs are serialized to json and workers can be in any language http://github.com/defunkt/resque

resque has a plugin API – 15 or so plugins already exist – http://wiki.github.com/defunkt/resque/plugins

has admin interface

github has 35 types of background jobs

Notes: lightning fast talker! Lots of good information though. I’d have a beer with this guy!

get entire object graph in a single query
previously did 35 joins and took 20 minutes to return

comparison between mongo, couch & cassandra
big selling point was dynamic queries – nice happy medium when coming from relational databases
“I don’t want to write any more ****** XML, so goodbye Cassandra”

No universal agreement that a NOSQL solution was the right idea

“Easiest database to install ever (except maybe Redis)”
No schema migrations

Forked MongoMapper -> Monoid
- MongoMapper was very young

Mongoid
- Prefers Embedding Documents
- Atomic Operations by Default, based on attribute changes
- rich criteria api
- master/slave suppor
- simple versioning
- is NOT ActiveRecord (and should be treated as such)
- Features always have performance in mind

mongo – can index in background as of 1.4
regex queries on fields
Denormalization is acceptable, embed as much as possible (no FK constraints)

Hybrid DB model
- Hierarchical Data Stored in MongoDB
- Relational Data stored in MySQL
- Data that required transactions stored in MySQL
- Simple Data in Redis
- Favor suitability over simplicity

It’s ok to use more than one datastore

Working without transactions
- Atomic updates generally cover you
- fairly easy to roll your own optimistic locking
- need to do manual rollback in integration tests
- selenium tests can run in a separate process

in production
- deployed on engine yard cloud / ec2
- 0.5 TB of data
- put mongodb on it’s own utility space
- feed it lots of ram, lots of disk space
- chef scripts easy due to simple installation

http://try.mongodb.com – mini tutorial

MongoDB tries to fit between key-value stores & relational databases

Data as Documents – documents are in BSON (binary json)

mongoDB operates on documents using special syntax

update() takes a query and an update (what to do) .. the update is applied to the results of the query

Embedded documents – i.e. Comments become embedded within Posts
Or you can normalize – Post id within each comment
Decisions to be made on what makes most sense for how you need to access the data

Embedded – fast queries, document always appears with parent

Hash is the object used to represent MongoDB objects

MongoMapper

Very informational, I want to try using this!

2 of the 3 cofounders here in room
Do one thing well – deploy a rails application onto the web
$git push heroku master
let developers use tools to deploy that they are already using
“No step 1″

heroku stacks – let’s you target a version of a vm & libraries that you want to target – linux version, ruby, etc

http://docs.heroku.com/rails3

http://www.scvngr.com

http://www.syphir.com

http://getcloudapp.com

pandastream – cloud based video encoding

Anything can be a cloud service as long as it’s deployed in the same infrastructure – memcached, monogohq, etc

My note: this is probably a sales pitch on RPM, but at least I know that gong in

• Performance is value
• Apdex – how your customers feel about the service they are getting – how satisfied they are
• Awesome “Knuth is my homeboy” image with appropriate quote: “premature optimization is the root of all evil”
• Nice charts to compare metrics vs 24 hours ago, a week ago, a month ago

My note: I was right, and now I am bored…but I am going to go read about solr

How did we get here?
Technical Debt – but there is no bailout program! Good idea if you intend on paying back.

Metrics are a great way to facilitation conversation
It’s ok to ask others how/why the code was written

if its hard to write tests around your code, that’s a smell

output of metrics tools is just text – you can make these metrics tool fail the build !

There’s no substitute for peer review

rcov can fail the build by setting “–failure-threshold n”
- should increase the threshold as your code coverage goes up so that you know when it drops

reek – fail the build by capturing the output
result = %x{reek app lib}
exit 1 unless result.empty?

flog -
flog app  awk ‘NR==4′ | awk ‘{print $1}’
exit 1 if result.gsub(“:”,”").to_i >= 20

metric-fu
wraps tests in pretty pictures

Compare charts to previous sprints – generate conversation

Great presentation materials – cartoony, fun
Good speaker, useful demo

Panelists: Joe Ferris (thoughtbot, inc), Jeremy Kemper (37signals), Marcel Molina (Twitter), Rick Olson (GitHub), Derek Willis (The New York Times)

Authentication

• OAuth 1.0 spec is difficult to implement – signature difficulties, etc
• OAuth 2 uses ssl & tokens – much simpler to implement, has overhead of SSL

Input & Response Formats

• Hoptoad now only supports XML – because they are write heavy and use streaming they were able to simplify their interface and make it faster by dropping support for other formats
• NYTimes – XML & JSON, expanded formats based on user needs
• Twitter – XML, JSON, RSS, Atom – probably going to move towards JSON only to scale up – XML is too verbose – lots of memcache full of XML fragments
• 37signals – uses RJS

To Version or Not to Version

• Twitter – hard problem – fork with multiple deploys? Inheritance? – lots of work. What do we need versioning for? Lotsa stuff we thought needed versioning actually didn’t. Looking for tips on how to do easily.
• 37signals – is it really a problem?  If you think it needs a new versions, just make it a new resource
• How do you support legacy – 37signals: Given enough lead time application developers can deal with it fairly quickly (1 month).
• Hoptoad – no matter how many people you tell, they won’t upgrade. You won’t loose as may people as you think. People don’t upgrade until something is broken.
• Twitter – explosion of resources could be a problem. Implement new option/param/header to allow people to get new functionality during transition period. Look at analytics & how much time has passed then take out conditional and drop previous. “It’s going to break if you don’t upgrade.”
• NYTimes – “we’re shutting this off in 3 months”

Scaling

• NYTimes uses mashery and varnish
• 37signals – reverse proxy caching, usage patterns of API are usually very different than patterns of web traffic
• Twitter – cache not only fragments, but fragments of fragments – so that the more volatile stuff can expire without losing the more static data. Consider a streaming API instead of having users continuously poll. (mentioned “Cache Money” which I had to google cuz it’s a sweet name: http://github.com/nkallen/cache-money/tree/master)
• Github – take advantage of HTTP headers & caching

Code Separation

• Should there be a separation between your web & api code?
• Github – API code was in same code as controllers – became separate API controller – looking at moving to a Sinatra app
• Twitter – used to be DRY and works great for most applications. web/mobile/api encapsulated in respond to’s. Different code for rate limits, etc, “became unruly”, merge conflicts when split across teams, etc. Now they duplicate, but it’s not that bad because of skinny controllers & fat models.
• 37signals – just because twitter does it, doesn’t mean you have to. Much much easier to keep API in same code, should be exception to separate – this is why respond_to exists.

Security Concerns

• Twitter – “You’re going to get screwed no matter how awesome you are. And it’s a really hard problem.”
• Github: Don’t use cookies & sessions in your API requests
• 37signals – don’t worry about authenticating (use oauth) worry about authorization

Developer Communications

• Twitter – Tools & documentation – Page for “Is there a problem with the system?” – portal for developers
• Hoptoad – make sure your documentation is correct & up to date!
• 37signals – Don’t just put up a mailing list.
• NYTimes – use your own API – build samples & actually use/run them
• Github – documentation is actually stored in git
• 37signals – dogfooding