Las Vegas Ruby Mini-Conference

The Las Vegas Ruby User Group is holding a one-day mini-conference at the Innevation Center.

There is no cost to attend, and lunch will be provided. We do ask that you please RSVP (earlier is better), both so that we can plan for lunch, and Innevation can get us the right venue.

Six talks will be given throughout the day by group members. If you are interested in presenting, please contact the organizers.

Tentative schedule:

9:00-10:00 - Check-in and welcome

10:00-11:00 - Randomness in Testing: Paul Grayson (https://www.meetup.com/las-vegas-ruby-on-rails/members/12145600/)

11:00-12:00 - Functional Programming in Ruby: Jason Arhart (https://www.meetup.com/las-vegas-ruby-on-rails/members/8847559)

12:00-1:00 - Lunch (provided)

1:00-2:00 - Simplifying Your Applications With Null Models: Alex Peachey (https://www.meetup.com/las-vegas-ruby-on-rails/members/30772422)

2:00-3:00 - Cleaning Up Your Views: Brian Hughes (https://www.meetup.com/las-vegas-ruby-on-rails/members/76710652/)

3:00-4:00 - Integrating Stateless Ruby APIs with Client Side Apps: Fred Guest (https://www.meetup.com/las-vegas-ruby-on-rails/members/14049895)

4:00-5:00 - Wrap-up, discussion and comments

Randomness in Testing - Paul Grayson
Learn how random factors can affect your tests and how to put randomness to good use. I will present a very simple new gem called rspec-sticky_seed that enforces a proper workflow when using randomness with RSpec.

Functional Programming in Ruby - Jason Arhart
Functional programming is gaining momentum in the software engineering community. To an imperative or object-oriented programmer, much of the language and languages of the functional programming world seem foreign and hard to understand. This talk will show that functional programming is really not that hard to understand, and Ruby is actually a pretty good for programming in a functional style.

Simplifying Your Applications With Null Models - Alex Peachey
The applications we build are often littered with conditionals around the models we use. The most common thing we tend to check is existence. It seems we are always sending questions like present?, empty?, and nil? to variables we think might have values. ActiveRecord tends to hand us a dreaded nil whenever something isn’t found. This forces us to check for existence at all levels of our application. In this talk we explore using null models to simplify and even remove excess logic in our applications.

Cleaning Up Your Views - Brian Hughes
In the Rails world we always hear about Skinny Controllers and Fat Models all the time. This makes a lot of sense, since the majority of your application’s logic is likely split between the M and C layers, but M - V - C has three parts. What about the application/presentation logic that always seems to live in our Views? This talk will focus on a Rails-specifc implementation of what’s know as the Decorator Pattern. We will see how this pattern allows us to refactor the code our of our Views and into more maintainable, and testable, classes.

Integrating Stateless Ruby APIs with Client Side Apps - Fred Guest
There’s a lot to be gained by splitting up a traditional Rails app into a json API and a decoupled client side app, not the least of which is the ability to easily reuse the API for native clients, but as a web architecture it is less well established than server side rendering, which leaves a lot of gray area for new practitioners. In this talk we’ll look at an example using the rail-api gem with a reactjs client, and to fit the definition of a stateless API, the rails-api will not include action-view, sprockets, or sessions.