1. Kevin P. Davis, Ph. D
4/23/13

2.  http://openhack.github.io/
 Simple purpose: “Code together, on anything”
 A little food
 A little introduction
 Then code for a couple hours
 @OpenHackNAP, but there are many others:
it’s a movement

3.  Downtown Naperville, 33 ½ Jefferson
 TwoCanoes Software
 HashRocket
 Very typical looking startup
 Macs everywhere
 Beanbag chairs everywhere
 I mean, really hipster. Might as well have
been Austin. Or Portland. Or Boulder.
◦ And very welcoming

4.  Couple .NET guys
 Apple guys
 Java guy
 Mainframe guy
 Bunch of Rails/Ruby guys
 So we didn’t have that much in common.
Except the guy bit.

5.  Instead of co-hacking, the night turned into a
presentation (by the will of the participants
and their curiosity), with lots of Q&A
 Starting with
http://jonallured.com/2012/10/17/setting-
up-a-new-rails-app.html, we
built, tested, and deployed a Rails application
to production (on the for reals interwebs)

6.  Functional programming paradigm
 If you’re getting started, use RVM
◦ Package management
◦ Keeps your versions clean and you smiling
 Gems are the spiritual precursors to NuGet
Packages
 Rake is “ruby make” – think NAnt

7.  MVC Framework
 Wildly popular
 “Optimized for Programmer Happiness”
 “Convention over Configuration”

8.  ActiveRecord – Architectural Pattern
◦ Relational database
◦ Instance of active record tied to row in a database
◦ Ruby has an ActiveRecord library
 Postgres – Open source database
◦ Actively maintained and under development
◦ RDBMS
◦ Since 1986 (!)

9.  BDD framework
 Provides automated scenario testing
◦ Given [and]
◦ When
◦ Then
 Compare to NBehave

10.  YAML Ain’t Markup Language (Views)
 Requires more research. I’m going to admit
this is a mystery to me.
 Views written in YAML rendered into HTML

11.  DVCS
 All the cool kids are doing it
 Job interview question : “What’s your GitHub
handle?”
 Can be local or use GitHub

12.  Application hosting
 First dyno is free (disk + cpu + network)
 Solid integration with git
 Easy to provision and publish

13.  Apparently the market is sick (the good kind)
 Enormous supply/demand gap for Rails
 When asked why, the answer was
“Community”
 Salaries look competitive with .NET
(glassdoor.com)
 Dev bootcamps and other Ruby outreach

14.  Beware.
 The Rails Community is a Cult.

15.  http://rubyonrails.org/
 http://cukes.info/
 http://www.yaml.org/
 https://www.heroku.com/ - free dyno
 https://github.com/
And for the truly demented (er… dedicated)
 http://devbootcamp.com/