SFRails: When Androids Attack + Rebuilding Couchsurfing in Rails

Agenda:

7:00 Pizza/Beer/Networking
7:30 Intros/Host/Every Day Carry
7:45 Talk 1: David Golombek, When Androids Attack
8:10 Tech Short: Anand Dass, Filepicker.io
8:20 Talk 2: Andrew Geweke, Rebuilding Couchsurfing in Rails
9:00 End

Talk 1: When Androids Attack: System Testing of Android vs a Rails SOA

David Golombek from Lookout will detail their experiences doing end-to-end testing in mobile-to-service systems. It's a subject that doesn't get much visibility but ends up being pretty challenging, especially with regards to stability and repeatability. Topics of the talk with include:

Why API testing isn't enough Challenges of scripting the Android Emulator Design of our services and communication framework Design of our testing framework Problems with our approach and future directionsAbout the Speaker

http://photos3.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/b/0/4/c/event_187305132.jpegDave Golombek is something of a startup junkie; he's on his sixth startup in a seventeen-year career spanning super-computing, computer graphics, chip design, distributed data storage, source code analysis,and most recently mobile security. Dave is a tools builder at heart and loves automation, frameworks, and understanding complex systems. At Lookout, Dave has worked on multiple mobile OS clients, scaling the backend from 1k to 30M users, system test frameworks, and much more.

Tech Short: Anand Daas, Filepicker.io

Anand Daas from Filepicker.io will give a short presentation on the challenges of file uploading and storage and demonstrate their solution.

About the Speaker

http://photos1.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/1/5/4/2/event_207125442.jpegCo-Founder Filepicker.io. Growth hacker. Software sales and biz. dev. exec. with battle scars to show.

Talk 2: Making a New World: Rebuilding Couchsurfing in Rails

It’s often been said that a lot of software engineering is “like changing the engines on the plane while it’s in flight”. At Couchsurfing, they have been recrafting a Boeing 787 around a tattered old biplane — one piece at a time. Andrew Geweke will talk about how we’re migrating from a ten-year-old PHP website built with dubious software-engineering principles, hosted at the world’s cheapest lease-host, to a brand-new Rails site and database hosted in the cloud, all incrementally and all while serving 60 pages per second, every second.

Andrew will cover:

• Keeping six million user accounts in sync across multiple databases (including one with a 110+-column user table),
• Being ready for NoSQL scalability without paying the price too early,
• The CS runtime “environment in a box” — making sure several dozen pieces of server software always work together correctly,
• Amusing stories from a gold-mine of technology.

About the Speaker
http://photos4.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/e/6/c/a/event_198119082.jpegAndrew Geweke is the VP of Product Development at Couchsurfing. He runs all aspects of product development, including both engineering and product management, for both the web and mobile platforms. He is passionate around creating maintainable code, building scalable systems, and developing pragmatic solutions quickly and without a lot of drama.

Hosts/Sponsors

http://photos2.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/1/5/9/2/event_154325522.jpeg

Zendesk (http://zendesk.com) is built on the premise that you should
love your help desk software. Their web-based
help desk software used by 20000+ organizations
worldwide. If you have customers, then you need
Zendesk.