"Your talk is APIs and infrastructure, stuff that most web developers don't fully understand although they should, can you explain what some of the requirements are to understand what you're going to talk about?"
Cipriani: HTTP Caching is a subject that all Rails developers will need to deal some day, the great thing about it is that you can learn and get experience incrementally, applying the basic HTTP headers is enough to have a relevant result and as you want to have more control over the way your resources are being cached or expired, more advanced techniques are just there to learn. But I recommend that the audience have at least basic knownledge in HTTP protocol to enjoy more the other insights I'll show.
"Many developers would love to become as experienced and fluent in Ruby as you are. What have been some of the pitfalls you had to overcome in order to become a great developer? Any good tips for a Ruby beginner?"
Cipriani: First and most important, don't believe that you are a great developer, even if someone told you so. Always feel unconfortable about not having a deeper knowledge about some technology or language, and reserve some time to try new things. Also, learn to contribute and listen carefully to feedbacks from the community. Make something useful for you or someone else that solves a real problem, this gives motivation to continue doing great stuff.
"There are so many new technologies, best practices and so on being released all the time. In your personal opinion, and maybe related to your current field of work, what are some of the trends in technology that you think we should be paying attention for the near future?"
Cipriani: The world is still having lots of difficulties to deal with the massive stream of information being produced by companies, social networks, sensors, etc. So I think that any technology or general initiative that proposes itself to help to solve this problem will get a lot of attention and investiments around the world. And among these technologies are some areas of Computer Science such as Semantic Web, Machine Learning, Information Management/Retrieval and Distributed Database Systems.