Talk

RSpec is good, but it’s even better with less of it. We’ll first look through a heavily obfuscated real-world example, learning why parts of RSpec like let, subject, before, shared_examples, and behaves like can make your tests hard to read, difficult to navigate, and more complex. We’ll discuss...

I built software to kill people and I gave a talk about it to warn people to think through their choices. Oppenheimer helped design the atomic bomb - was he able to atone?

As developers, we often stare at a computer screen all day only to go home and stare at more glowing boxes all night. Having a nontechnical hobby can really help to keep us sharp for our day jobs.

As I live-paint a small model for a tabletop wargame, I will describe some of the techniques I use....

The need to keep your personal information, sensitive or nonsensitive, secure from prying eyes isn’t new, but recent events have brought it back into the public eye.

In this workshop, we’ll build and upload public keys, explore Git commit signing, and learn to sign others’ PGP keys. If we have...

Body weight can be a difficult issue to grapple with. But we’re software engineers—what if we approached it as an engineering problem? Our bodies have inputs (food) and outputs (water and waste). The difference between the two dictates weight changes.

We’ll visualize the steps for several sorting algorithms not only using pretty visualizations on a slide, but also with people as the objects being sorted. Don’t know what an algorithm is, what performance really means, or what “Big O” means, or what these best-, worst-, and average-case time...

I’m going to tell you about how I took a job building software to kill people.

But don’t get distracted by that; I didn’t know at the time.

Easily searching across an application’s data is a pervasive need. If you are lucky, you can get away with simple sorting or searching on a single column, but it is more likely that you need full text search across multiple models, all from a single search <input>.

Thanks to the power of ...

Rails is a mixture of design patterns, practices, and magic. In this talk, we’ll explore how Rails embraces ideas from other frameworks and projects.

Active Record was born of Martin Fowler. MVC was the brainchild of Trygve Reenskaug. Rails 3 completely absorbed the Merb project, gaining...