Rubyconfbr2013 | AkitaOnRails.com

Rubyconf Brasil 2013: Meet Luis Cipriani

Tue, 27 Aug 2013 10:00:00 -0300

If you didn’t register yet, don’t miss this opportunity. Go to the official website to register as soon as possible. The conference will commence on August 29th. The countdown is reaching its end! Only 2 days to go! Register while there is still time!

This is the 6th consecutive year that Locaweb and myself are organizing yet another great Rubyconf in Brazil. Several great established companies and tech startup are supporting the conference sending great developers.

Meet Twitter, which I believe needs no introduction. Luis Cipriani recently joined them as Brazil Partner Engineer, after a long run at Abril Publishing in its R&D department. He is an specialist in many technologies but particularly APIs and web infrastructure.

Don’t miss his talk precisely at 1:15PM of the second day of the event. Let’s get to know more about him:

“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.

Rubyconf Brasil 2013: Meet Carlos Galdino

Mon, 26 Aug 2013 09:20:00 -0300

Meet Plataformatec a Brazilian consulting shop specialized in Ruby on Rails and known for famous open source projects such as Devise and Simple Forms. Carlos Galdino is a software developer at Plataformatec.

Don’t miss his talk precisely at 4:00PM of the first day of the event. Let’s get to know more about him:

“Your talk is about Rubinius, one of the alternative implementations for Ruby, can you explain what some of the requirements are to understand what you’re going to talk about?”

Galdino: I’d say that the most important thing the audience should have is to be curious about how things work under the hood, otherwise it’d be boring for them. I’m going to give an overview about how an implementation of a language, in this case Rubinius as the implementation and Ruby as the language, which concepts are present and how they’re tied up. So, if you ever wanted to know what happens to the code you write after writing it, you should attend the talk.

Galdino: Never stop learning. Always be curious about things and how they work. Another thing that I think is extremely important is to be open-minded, you shouldn’t only read and learn about Ruby or Rails. Try to read about completely different subjects, subjects that you might don’t use in a daily basis. It’ll help you when deciding something because you’ll have different perspectives.

Galdino: Functional Programming. After being the next big thing for decades, I think its time has finally come. You see everyday more and more people excited and talking about it. We’ve reached a point where you can’t ignore concurrency and parallelism, and functional languages make easier to deal and even avoid some common problems that appear when dealing with such things in languages like Ruby, Java and others.

Rubyconf Brasil 2013: Meet William PotHix

Fri, 23 Aug 2013 12:20:00 -0300

If you didn’t register yet, don’t miss this opportunity. Go to the official website to register as soon as possible. The conference will commence on August 29th. The countdown is quickly approaching it’s destiny, only 6 days to launch!

William Molinari, also known as PotHix, works for Locaweb building their Cloud Computing technologies.

Don’t miss his talk precisely at 4:00PM of the second day of the event. Let’s get to know more about him:

“Your talk is about how you used Ruby to build Locaweb’s Cloud offerings, many still think that Ruby is only good for web applications and they don’t know how much it’s used in the infrastructure as well, can you explain what some of the requirements are to understand what you’re going to talk about?”

PotHix: This talk will show how we used Ruby and Rails to build an app to deal with hypervisors, firewalls, dhcp and some other network tasks. You don’t need any advanced knowledge in Ruby. Some knowledge about Rails or networking in general will help you benefit more from the talk but it would be great to have an intermediate knowledge of Ruby and the basics of networking.

PotHix: Something that helped me a lot when learning Ruby was being in touch with good Ruby developers, attend to local user groups (Guru-SP in this case) and attend to online free courses (like rubylearning.org). Learn new languages and try different programming situations and exercises also helps a lot to understand the ways we can choose to solve a problem.

PotHix: I’m not using it directly but I believe in Docker potential to build and manage different environments. I think we’ll have a lot of interesting softwares build on to of it and flynn.io looks a good example.

Rubyconf Brasil 2013: Meet Bruno AbstractJ

Fri, 23 Aug 2013 11:40:00 -0300

Meet JBoss, today a division of Redhat, both of them are very recognized brands in the Java and Open Source fields.

Bruno Oliveira, also known as AbstractJ, works implementing the AeroGear product for JBoss, he is a former Caelum teacher and developer and he has been collaborating in the open source community.

Don’t miss his talk precisely at 2:00PM of the first day of the event. Let’s get to know more about him:

“Your talk is about cryptography done right in Ruby, this is a very compelling subject that all programmers should understand specially considering the recent discussions around privavy and information security, can you explain what some of the requirements are to understand what you’re going to talk about?”

Bruno: Cryptography can be a tough topic, specially for newcomers. Try doing it blindly without background knowledge and you can easily get into serious trouble, or even get fired. Please don’t expect deep complex math or anything like that, since I don’t consider myself a crypto analyst and this isn’t the presentation goal. As long as you’re interested in learning few tricks you’ll be fine.

My main goal at RubyConf Brazil is to discuss cryptography for mere mortals, non-experts, developers like you and me. As a consequence, I’ll be covering basic concepts, common mistakes, how complex the existing APIs are (with good reason) and how Krypt can potentially narrow the gap between simple and safe. I’ll also be covering controversial topics like privacy on the internet in general.

Bruno: I’ve started my career as a sysadmin a long time ago, I was paranoid about infrastructure security, firewalls, DMZs and honeypots, and before I even realized I was programming to solve my day-to-day issues. The early days were hard ones, and involved a lot of reading; the nice thing is that all my early security experience came to be very useful nowadays. Take this advice: the best thing you can do is to learn from your previous experiences, whether they are bad or good.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a Ruby, Rails, Java, Python programmers, the most important thing is having no fear of learning, change, or leaving your comfort zone. If you are working at a dead-end job where you stopped learning new stuff a long time ago, just quit. Quoting Johnny Cash “Success is having to worry about every damn thing in the world, except money” - it’s more common than you think to give up a good salary to have the opportunity to learn and improve your skills.

Another tip is: while reading a hundred of books is important, never downplay contributing to open source projects. There’s a lot of experienced programmers out there, sharing their code at GitHub, how about getting together and hacking some code? I think the best way to learn is having your code torn into pieces by others; it doesn’t matter if your code is good or bad, being a good developer is about overcoming the fear of making mistakes and learning from them instead; as a bonus you’ll improve your english skills.

Bruno: We have been living in a critical moment with the recent privacy scandals, security became a hot topic and suddenly every application or framework now has “military-grade security”. Don’t buy into the hype! Instead, try to understand the basics of cryptography, keep up with CVEs and NIST. Another good place to go a little deeper on the topic is to take a look on some security libraries like libsodium and Blake2.

Rubyconf Brasil 2013: Meet Danilo Sato

Thu, 22 Aug 2013 12:08:00 -0300

If you didn’t register yet, don’t miss this opportunity. Go to the official website to register as soon as possible. The conference will commence on August 29th. The countdown continues, only 7 days to launch!

Meet Thoughtworks one of the most recognizable brands in the international consulting market.

Danilo Sato works for Thoughtworks for 5 years, dealing with international projects and evangelizing Agile and Lean methodologies.

Don’t miss his talk about Object Oriented Programming precisely at 11:00AM of the first day of the event. Let’s get to know more about him:

“Your talk is about a subject that most feel like they understand but they usually don’t, which is object oriented programming, can you explain what some of the requirements are to understand what you’re going to talk about?”

Danilo: You probably have already heard or learned a little about Object-Orientation. That should be enough prior experience to understand my talk. Having worked with Rails might help understand some of the examples, but I won’t assume you have in-depth knowledge on the subject. The topics I want to cover will be applicable to Ruby in general, as well as other OO languages you might have to work with.

Danilo: I think one of the easy pitfalls in our industry is to be close-minded about which technology you work with. The software industry changes all the time, new languages, libraries, frameworks are created, evolve, get in and out of fashion. It’s very easy to find a comfort zone and not worry about everything else, but you risk becoming obsolete or locked-in to an old technology if you’re not constantly challenging yourself to learn new things.

Danilo: Just like in fashion, technology evolves but also have cycles. I would say that instead of focusing only on the next new trend, there are lots to learn from studying the past. We like to learn the same lessons over and over again, and my talk will touch on a core skill that I think won’t go away: software design. Investing in learning about software design is something that will pay off when you move to a new language, when you learn a new framework, and when you’re building an application for your client. To me this is a core skill to invest in.

Rubyconf Brasil 2013: Meet Eduardo Shiota

Mon, 19 Aug 2013 12:45:00 -0300

If you didn’t register yet, don’t miss this opportunity. Go to the official website to register as soon as possible. The conference will commence on August 29th. The countdown begins, 10 days to launch!

Meet Baby.com.br a Brazilian e-commerce geared toward the baby products. It’s under the umbrella of venture capitals such as Monashees and Accel Partners, and they have a big Ruby development team.

Eduardo Shiota works for Baby for a while, he is responsible for usability and front-end development. Because he studied both Arts and Computer Science, he has a unique point of view that binds both worlds.

Don’t miss his talk precisely at 10:15AM of the first day of the event. Let’s get to know more about him:

“Your talk is about Modular and Event-Driven Architecture in Javascript, can you explain what some of the requirements are to understand what you’re going to talk about?”

Shiota: If you’re starting with Front-end or just JavaScript development now, it’s important to know that the language is much more than jQuery, visual effects, and DOM manipulation. Having this concept in mind and the desire to understand the fundamental concepts of the language are enough to take in the content of this talk, and apply it on a daily basis.

“Many developers would love to become as experienced and fluent in Javascript and 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 beginner?”

Shiota: It’s pretty easy to get stuck on basic Front-end development, doing one-file-huge JavaScript solutions, and simply slicing PSDs into CSS. You have to take it to the next level. Ask yourself “How can I make this better? How can I make this reusable? How can I test this? How can I make this easily understandable and modifiable?”. Search for the answers. Read a LOT of books, like Eloquent JavaScript, JavaScript: The Good Parts, and JavaScript Patterns. Subscribe to JavaScript Weekly e BrazilJS Weekly. Watch a lot of JavaScript talks on YouTube. Write some simple games or quizzes. Try some new methods. Have fun. =)

Shiota: We’re living a boom of JS MV* frameworks, languages that are compiled to JavaScript, like CoffeeScript and TypeScript, and the growth of the Node.js community. It’s important to not stick to just a single solution or library, stay in touch with the growth of the language as a whole, and know which topic is worth digging deeper. Keep yourself up to date on ECMAScript 6 “Harmony”’s progress, and every update on modern browsers APIs.

Rubyconf Brasil 2013: Your first time in São Paulo, Brazil

Thu, 15 Aug 2013 17:00:00 -0300

Update (08/24/2014): I just posted a companion article for this one, highlighting the tourist points of the city.

Update (02/2014): this article was written for Rubyconf Brazil 2013, so don’t be confused by the context.

Rubyconf Brasil is quickly approaching, don’t miss it on August 29, 30. Register today at the website. Several speakers will be coming to Brazil, don’t miss your chance to get to know Hal Fulton, Hongli Lai, Laurent Sansonetti, Kevin Tripplet, Jaime Andrés, Dávila, Ben Langfeld, Pablo Astigarraga.

I understand that it can be intimidating to come to Brazil for the first time so I decided that it could be a good idea to draft a few important things to keep in mind while staying around here.

First things First (TL;DR)

The weather is quite cool these days, it’s Winter in Brazil and although it’s not as cold as in North Europe it’s a good idea to bring some extra coats if you’re not used to a cold weather. On the other hand, the weather can change quite dramatically in a few days here in São Paulo. For example, right now it’s around 12 degrees Celsius (or around 54 Fahrenheit), going down to less than 9C (48F) at night. But it seems like it’s possible to go up to almost 30C (86F) during the conference days, so come prepared, specially if you are staying for an entire week or more.

DO NOT FORGET TO BRING A UNIVERSAL POWER PLUG ADAPTER!!

This is very important: until 2011 we had outlets that were compatible to the USA and some European power plugs. After that the country changed to a (worse in my opinion) new standard that is completely incompatible with any other plugs. Some good hotels have adapters for foreigners but I wouldn’t count on that. When you land at the airport you can buy them at the duty free stores, just don’t forget or you will be out of juice for your devices!

Speaking of which, another thing that is quite useful is to find a telecomunications store at the airport (Claro, Vivo, Oi, Tim) or in any mall or big commercial area (Paulista Ave. has some). Buy a pre-paid SIM card for your smartphone, with 3G enabled - and test it in the store!. It will be a whole lot easier to navigate through out the city that way. Whenever I go to other countries that is the first thing I try to do. Also make sure to have some friends or acquaintances in your contact list in case you have any emergencies or even get lost in the city.

You most probably don’t speak Brazilian Portuguese. The first thing to know is that it’s not nearly the same as Spanish. It’s very difficult to find people that can speak fluent English, but be assured that most people here will try their hardest to understand you. Friendliness is definitely something you can count on. Speak slowly and the clearest that you can to make yourself understood. In public transportation and taxi cabs that’s going to be bit different as workers under our traffic stress aren’t particularly friendly, so be patient.

About taxi cabs, when you arrive at the airport you may be approached by private drivers. DO NOT TAKE THEM. Use an official taxi company at the airport exit. It’s easy to make the distinction as the official taxi are all standardized and you will see staff organizing the lines. Pay the fare at the taxi booth inside the airport with a pre-determined price. Even while walking around the city, always get a cab from an official line. You may want to try apps such as 99Taxi while in the city.

By the way, Google Maps works great around here, even to know subway time schedules. Waze also works great.

BRAZIL IS NOT VIOLENT!! (in general)

Regardless of what you may have heard or read in news channels, Brazil in general is not a violent country. Not even in São Paulo, our largest and crowdest city. It doesn’t mean that it’s not there, just don’t go look for it. Keep in mind a few useful rules: don’t make it easy for pickpockets. If you leave your bag in the floor, unattended, you may not find it there later.

There is a popular saying here “a oportunidade faz o ladrão” that can be roughly translated as “opportunity makes thieves”. It’s not properly translated culturally wise but I think you got it. Just make sure to not have all your money in your wallet in the backpocket of your pants. It’s wise to distribute it in your pockets, specially if you decide to wander around some of the rougher areas of the city (more on that below).

It’s totally safe for you to walk around by yourself. Avoid “showing off” while in busy areas. Speaking in your shiny brand new smartphone while walking around crowded streets may not be a good idea. If you’re in a taxi cab, stuck in a traffic jam, don’t be playing with your tablet while having your window wide open. Be aware of your surroundings. That being said, there’s no need to be paranoid. In 6 years of receiving foreign speakers at Rubyconf, not once I have heard of anything that happened to any of our speakers or to anyone else for that matter. I myself have lived more than 3 decades here and I’ve been robbed once a decade.

Rubyconf will be near one of the landmarks of this city: Paulista Avenue. If your hotel is nearby it’s a good area to be because it’s the easiest way to access most of what’s important in the city. If you’re not near the conference venue and not near a subway station be prepared to get some heavy traffic. Rush hours in São Paulo start around 8AM until 10AM and then from 5PM until 9PM. And I mean much-worse-than-Manhatan levels of traffic jams. So be organized and wake up early. If you’re 5 miles away or more from the conference, calculate at least 1 hour in traffic.

Business hours in São Paulo start at 9AM and ends at 6PM. Banks open at 10AM and close at 4PM. Shopping Centers and other stores and restaurants are usually open at least until 10PM, lot’s keep working until after midnight. Night life in São Paulo is particularly busy. You will find drugstores, markets, convenience stores, and several busineses that go on for 24 hours.

Understanding the City: A Geography Overview

With the most important points being said, let’s focus on location. As the wise would say, “location, location, location.”

First and foremost, some may find this confusing because “São Paulo” can refer to 3 different things: the state, the capital city of the state, the big metropolitan area also known as “Greater São Paulo” which is a group of 39 municipalities around São Paulo City.

The metropolitan area is humongous. The Greater São Paulo has no less than 20 million people. São Paulo City alone has more than 11 million. We are talking about the 6th most densely populated area in the planet. If we expand to the Campinas city through Jundiaí city, this area has 12% of the country population. In terms of size, we are talking about something the size of the entire country of Lebanon or Jamaica.

Even with this size, one thing you will notice right away is that our public transportation is surprisingly lacking given that the GDP of this area alone was more than USD 300 billion (2011).

It’s important to understand the geographic map. The map below shows the Greater São Paulo metropolitan group:

São Paulo City is the big grey area in the middle. When you land here, you will be at Guarulhos International Airport (GRU) in Guarulhos City, which is outside of São Paulo. It’s one of the green cities in the north. You will have to go through a 40 to 50 minutes ride (without traffic) to go downtown.

Now, let’s zoom in the grey area from the previous map:

Our city is roughly divided in 5 zones: North, South, East, West and Center or what I prefer to call “Old Downtown”. This is 11 million people city but you will never have to go out of the area I circled in red, mainly near Old Downtown and what I personally call “New Downtown”.

Let’s zoom in a little bit the area surrouding the red circle:

There is this river named “Tietê” that cuts through the city. It creates this “semi-island” that we call “Expanded Downtown”. Inside the island are the areas I called “Old Downtown” and “New Downtown”. The Paulista Avenue roughly divides those 2 areas. The old one more up north and the other more south.

The red lines are the main avenues that connect the city traffic. Line number 4 in the map is the Paulista Avenue. The blue line is what we call the “Marginal”, it’s a large road that surround this Expanded Area and follow the Tietê River course. Although it’s one single continuous wide road, it has 2 names: Marginal Tietê at the north half and Marginal Pinheiros at the south half.

So you will be most of the time around Red Line Line 4 (from the map above), the Paulista Avenue, located within the Expanded Area, surrounded by the Marginais. You will probably go through the Marginal when you come from the Guarulhos Airport (which would be way north outside of the map).

Remember I mentioned much-worse-than-Manhatan traffic jams? This is a snapshot of the traffic layer of the São Paulo Expanded Area around 5:30PM on a Thursday just so you have an idea of what I mean:

I call this traffic map “São Paulo bleeding”.

I hope you’re still with me in the Geography lesson. Now let’s get more practical: subway lines!

I will overlay the metro lines on top of the map above so you have an idea:

Now the cleaner map (click the image to see the larger version):

And now the abstract representation to make it easier to navigate (again, click the image for the larger version):

You will most certainly not go away from the area cropped in the image above, the green line, which go under the Paulista Avenue. So you guessed it: from Paulista Avenue you have easy access to many of the interesting places in the city.

We have several ways to go through the public transportation, but the easiest way is to know that you can buy individual tickets inside the subway station. Always buy at least 2 so you have your way back guaranteed. It’s the cheapest and faster way to navigate through the city. Use taxi cabs to go from a subway station to where you want to go and then back. Using a taxi for tourism is the easiest way to go bankrupt fast, because they aren’t cheap, specially with heavy traffic.

Conclusion

This should cover the basics to understand the city. The São Paulo page at Wikipedia does a great job of explaining more details about the city, tourism and recreation options. There is also this Wikitravel Page that might help.

Most people will be staying at the Pergamon Hotel. It’s at walking distance from the conference venue (Frei Caneca Theater), but you will probably want to get a taxi to go to Paulista Avenue, it’s less than 5 min by car. And the Frei Caneca St. is parallel to Augusta St. which is very well known for it’s active nightlife, if you like it.

Unfortunately we don’t have anything that comes close to Yelp! around here. Don’t be shy, if you don’t know anyone from here, use the conference to get to know more people. Brazilians are really very friendly and they will be more than willing to explain a lot more and give great recommendations.

Don’t stay just in the hotel. This is a great opportunity to get to know a new place, different people and culture. Pay special attention to the Old Downtown, the historic center and contrast it with the “New Downtown” where you will find the luxurious neighborhood of Jardins and the Tech neighborhoods of Vila Olímpia and Brooklin. Get in touch with the Brazilian Ruby community beforehand to schedule visits to startups and other companies.

Don’t be a stranger, this is a city and a community that wants to exchange experiences and knowledge. Welcome to São Paulo!

Rubyconf Brasil 2013: Meet Hongli Lai

Wed, 14 Aug 2013 17:41:00 -0300

If you didn’t register yet, don’t miss this opportunity. Go to the official website to register as soon as possible. The conference will commence on August 29th.

Meet Phusion the group of computer scientists from the Netherlands that first made Ruby on Rails deployment really easy. Most people won’t remember but prior to 2007 it was pretty painful to deploy a Rails application. Zed Shaw brought us Mongrel. But it was not until Phusion released Passenger that we started to speed up to the point where Ruby web deployment became the gold standard.

Hongli Lai is coming here for the second time, he was in the very first Rails Summit Latin America 2008 together with his partner Ninh Bui. Since then they have been evolving the Passenger technology, making it work with Apache, NGINX and in several different customizations and scenarios.

Don’t miss his closing keynote about Passenger precisely at 4:45PM of the first day of the event. Let’s get to know more about him:

“Your talk is about the upcoming Phusion Passenger 4, can you explain what some of the requirements are to understand what you’re going to talk about?”

Hongli: To understand the talk, you should have a basic understanding on how to deploy a Rails application. For example, past experience with using Phusion Passenger, Unicorn, Puma or Thin will be very helpful. You don’t have to understand it very deeply, because the talk is designed to be easy to follow even for beginners. A part of the talk, especially the optimization and tweaking part, will be more advanced, but I will structure them in such a way so that beginners can follow it as well.

Hongli: I believe the best way to become good is to get a lot of practice. I do not believe in talent, but I do believe in hard work. I think I am at the place I am now because I’ve been developing software for more than a decade. For the first few years, my code sucked and I didn’t really understand what I was doing. It was only after years of experience that I began to produce good code.

In the beginning, I was self-taught. Self-teaching can get you very far, but there are certain mathematical and formal foundations that are best learned at a university. In that regard, my computer science education has helped me a lot, although I could never have reached my current level without a lot practical experience as well.

Finally, it is a good idea to be curious about other people’s work. You will learn a lot by studying others’ design and code, both with regard to what to do and what not to do. It is also a good idea to be open minded, and not to jump to conclusions too quickly. What at first glance appears to be a bad piece of code written by someone else may have legitimate reasons for being like that. It is important to understand those reasons.

Hongli: I do not believe you should pay too much attention to trends. Trends come and go, and a lot of the current trends are just modifications of past trends. Furthermore, not all trends may be useful to you in their raw form. Instead of following a trend, you should understand the core reasons behind the trend, and adopt those instead.

That being said, there are several trends which I believe are good trends to follow and which I believe are timeless:

Automated testing. You should definitely have automated tests, which have saved me time and time again in the past. Having a good test suite gives you confidence and reduces developer anxiety (fear of breaking something), which allows you to develop faster. There are several styles in area the automated testing, e.g. TDD and BDD. I belong to none of them, but I take ideas from all of them and apply them where I think makes sense.
Continuous integration. Instead of having long development cycles, and integrating developer branches after a long time, or releasing software to staging after a long time, you should do it short intervals. This will give you more confidence, reduces developer anxiety and will allow you to release to production with less hassle. Continuous integration implies automated testing. A CI tool such as Travis or Apachai Hopachai is indispensable.
Operational automation. If a task takes too many steps, or if it’s too mentally draining (which makes it easy to introduce human errors), consider automating the task as much as possible so that you only have to enter one command to get it done. There are two trends which are strongly related to this core idea:
The devops movement. Compared to traditional sysops, which performs a lot of tasks by hand, the devops moment seeks to automate as much as possible. You describe your cluster configuration in code, and a tool such as Chef, Puppet or Ansible builds the cluster for you. It changes the game so much if you can run a single command to rebuild your entire server cluster, instead of manually installing and configuring software every time.
Virtualization of the development environment. This is like devops for development environments instead of for production environments. Instead of letting your developers build their development environment manually (installing a compiler, installing git, installing MySQL, editing your software’s config files, etc), you describe the environment in code and let a tool such as Vagrant (in combination Chef, Puppet or Ansible) build it for you. All developers will have a consistent development environment, and they can set up a new one quickly whenever they switch machines. When done properly, no human error will be possible.

Rubyconf Brasil 2013: Jaime Andrés Dávila

Tue, 13 Aug 2013 18:58:00 -0300

If you didn’t register yet, don’t miss this opportunity. Go to the official website to register as soon as possible. The conference will commence on August 29th.

Meet Neo, they call themselves a “global product innovation company”. They are spread all over the world and have several well known names involved, such as Eric Ries, Ian McFarland, Evan Henshaw-Plath, Jim Weinrich and many more.

Jaime Andrés Dávila works at the Uruguay branch of Neo, formerly known as Cubox. He is a prolific software developer that proposed a unique approach to explain a recently well discussed design pattern, DCI, with something intriguing: semiotics.

Don’t miss his talk precisely at 1:15PM of the second day of the event. Let’s get to know more about him:

“Your talk is the design pattern known as DCI, one that has been recently discussed quite a lot. If someone is just beginning with Ruby, can you explain what some of the requirements are to understand what you’re going to talk about?”

Jaime: Probably the most important thing to understand is the concept of “design patterns” not the specifics of every pattern, but the “reason to exist”, why patterns are important, why not a single pattern is the silver bullet for everything and as an specific topic, the MVC concept.

Related to semiotics, it doesn’t matter if you don’t have any experience, I’m going to start from scratch and just give some details on the specific part that’s important for us, in this case DCI; however if you are interested in this kind of lecture we could have a good talk about social fields.

Jaime: Just keep reading, keep learning and keep enjoying every moment in front of your computer. One of the most important things someone has told me is “don’t be afraid to say I don’t know”.

Oh!!! and commitment with your work: if you decide to do something, don’t quit, just stay there until you’re satisfied with your work, that way you’ll learn to be professional and specially you’ll learn to be proud of your work.

Jaime: OWA (one window app), it’s not just the concept, it’s the way that should be implemented, JS has proved it’s a great and complex language so learn some of the main frameworks like angularjs, emberjs, backbonejs.

Hypermedia API, even there’s a lot information about it, I think it’s still not fully implemented so there’s still a lot of space to improve and learn.

Rubyconf Brasil 2013: Meet Caike Souza

Sun, 11 Aug 2013 10:00:00 -0300

If you didn’t register yet, don’t miss this opportunity. Go to the official website to register as soon as possible. The conference will commence on August 29th.

Meet Envylabs a very well known Ruby shop based in Orlando, Florida. They are also well known for the CodeSchool e-learning website, where you can learn a lot about everything you need to know to become a good web developer including courses in Ruby, Git, Javascript and much more.

Carlos Souza, also known as Caike, is a Brazilian programmer who moved to Orlando to work for Envylabs a few years ago. He works as a programmers for Envylabs as well as a teacher for CodeSchool and he is coming back to Brazil to share his experiences.

Don’t miss his talk precisely at 2:00PM of the first day of the event. Let’s get to know more about him:

“Your talk is about joining ongoing Rails projects, which may be difficult sometimes. If someone is just beginning with Ruby, can you explain what some of the requirements are to understand what you’re going to talk about?”

Caike: This talk is for anyone who has jumped into existing Rails project, either at a new job or contributing to open source. If you’ve ever joined a Rails project started by someone else, it’s likely that you’ve run into issues with setting up your environment, getting the app to run properly on your machine, deploying it to production for the first time and other blockers that got in the way of writing new features or fixing bugs.

My goal is to show some techniques that can help reduce the overhead of joining an existing Rails project.

Caike: The tip I have is to never stop learning new things, but at the same time to learn how to be comfortable with the unknown. There are times out there that you will have to take a leap of faith and just assume things work the way they do. Some people have a hard time accepting that, but the sooner you realize that it’s ok to not know about absolutely everything, the easier it will be to actually get things done.

Also, the best way to write good code is to read good code. There are many open source projects out there and amazingly talented developers behind them, so use the source! :)

Caike: Definitely ed tech (educational technology) is a big thing that’s revolutionizing the education field and I feel we are about to see even greater things in the near future. It’s great to see new ways of using technology to facilitate learning and not only enabling people to get jobs, but more importantly, enabling them to discover new passions.

Rubyconf Brasil 2013: Meet Pablo Astigarraga

Fri, 09 Aug 2013 09:00:00 -0300

If you didn’t register yet, don’t miss this opportunity. Go to the official website to register as soon as possible. The conference will commence on August 29th.

Meet Vivid Cortex a MySQL monitoring and analysis tools as a service. They just raised $2M to further improve their technology. Pablo Astigarraga is coming to speak at the event, more specifically about a subject that most people think they know but they actually don’t: the classic Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern.

Don’t miss his talk precisely at 1:15PM of the first day of the event. Let’s get to know more about him:

“Your talk is about the MVC pattern and it’s history, an important concept to be mastered by every Ruby on Rails or even Javascript programmer. If someone is just beginning with Ruby, can you explain what some of the requirements are to understand what you’re going to talk about?”

Pablo: My talk is much more about the design pattern itself than about the particular implementation of Rails, so while having basic familiarity with Rails or any other MVC framework will probably be helpful but you don’t really need it in order to follow the talk. The aim of the talk itself is to give some insight on how this particular design pattern has developed over the years and what are the problems it solves well and the problems that we aren’t quite certain of how to approach yet, so hopefully it should add to whomever does software on the web these days.

Pablo: Good question. I think the only real pitfall in the way of becoming a good developer is complacence. If we as developers keep an open mind and remember to always be playful, passionate and informed about our craft we’ll become good at it, the scary thought is that in order to keep being good developers we need to never stop learning stuff, but that’s kind of awesome, too.

In the end the only things we need are practice and willingness. :)

Pablo: Hum, I think the platform as a service world is becoming super interesting. Sure: Heroku paved the way a few years ago by being all magical about their deploys, but now that they’ve open sourced their buildpack tool Docker it’s super easy to set up your own PaaS with projects like Dokku, I have this on my own VPS and I am able to deploy Ruby (and many more) apps with zero configuration simply by doing a git push to it, this is the future for all deploys, I think, and I love it.

Rubyconf Brasil 2013: Meet Hal Fulton

Thu, 08 Aug 2013 09:00:00 -0300

If you didn’t register yet, don’t miss this opportunity. Go to the official website to register as soon as possible. The conference will commence on August 29th.

This is the 6th consecutive year that Locaweb and myself are organizing yet another great Rubyconf in Brazil. For some years I wanted to bring one of the most influencial authors in my library: Hal Futon, author of The Ruby Way, one of the best books to learn Ruby.

Finally, he will be here! He will be the keynote speaker to open the second day of the conference on August 30rd. So don’t miss the opportunity to meet him. Let’s get to know some more about him before the event.

“Your talk is about External DSLs, an important concept to be mastered by every Ruby programmer. If someone is just beginning with Ruby, can you explain what some of the requirements are to understand what you’re going to talk about?”

Hal: This talk isn’t specifically relevant to Rails, although there certainly are areas in which a “custom” parsing solution is needed. You’d be more likely to use this material if you are developing libraries, tools, or plugins. If you’re a beginner in Ruby, you can still understand the topic. It helps if you have some genuine background in computer science (or at least have an understanding of what “parsing” really means).

Hal: Everyone’s pitfalls will be different. One of my biggest weaknesses is the “fear of complexity.” This is why, although I am a Ruby expert, I am still a newbie in Rails myself. (Yes, they are different! Ruby existed more than 10 years before there was any “Ruby on Rails.”)

My best advice is:

Read books. Read a LOT of books. Not just how-to books, but theory-based books and the classics such as Refactoring by Martin Fowler and Object-Oriented Software Construction by Bertrand Meyer. And (as one of my college computer science textbooks recommended) read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Take actual coursework if you can. There is no substitute for having a human teacher who can answer questions.
Read other people’s code, especially the “best” developers you can find.
Pair-program whenever you can. Even if the other person is less skilled than you, you will still learn from the experience.
Contribute to open-source projects as you find the time and the skill.
Experiment! Try the tools and libraries and techniques that you read about. Write little tools for your own use. Imitate other people’s ideas and try to improve on them.

Hal: Such a hard question! :) Obviously mobile technology is getting more and more important. Inter-operating and syncing between different devices and applications is a growing concern.

As for what specific technologies we should watch – that is an even harder question. No one can see the future. In 2006, I thought RSS was going to be very important; but it did not grow as much as I expected.

A friend gave me a rule to follow: Wait until you hear of a new piece of technology for the third time – then go and read about it.

Also, I tend to favor more “open” solutions where technology is concerned (although we can’t dismiss some of the less-open tech such as Apple’s iOS).