RailsConf 2011 Best of Sessions
Below I put together my personal list of best RailsConf 2011 presentations that have online slides or PDFs. I put my comments next to each. Click on the link, then click on the "slideshow" or "PDF" links for each talk.
ActiveSupport 3: What We Should Know About What We Don't Know - how to use ActiveSupport in your ruby apps and get lots of behaviors and useful stuff for free
Building Bulletproof Views really decent presentation on state of views in general, and best practices. Recommended reading.
Building Pageless Apps with Rails and Backbone JS is a great presentation on a new up and coming JS client side framework for building reach apps on the client using pure MVC.
David Heinemeier Hansson -- keynote, worth watching
From 1,000 Transactions a Month to 1 million in a Day: Lessons in Credit Card Processing from LivingSocial - cool presentation on how BrainTree API is used to encrypt card data in JavaScript before submitting to BT for processing. Lots of other useful tidbits on credit card processing.
How To Handle 1,000,000 Daily Users Without Using A Cache most interesting presentation for performance junkies, on how they outgrew MySQL and explored various other solutions to scale to 1M daily users. Highly recommended.
KnowSQL: Database Tricks To Make Your Life Easier this is a PostgreSQL heavy presentation on how to get the most out of your database engine. Recommended to anyone who wants to learn more about using a real database =)
OmniAuth from the Ground Up a really good presentation on OmniAuth - a generic authentication gem that supports a lot of options, including OpenID, LDAP, etc.
Open Source E-Commerce With Spree VERY interesting presentation on this open source e-commerce platform. Great examples on using engines, customizable CSS, and many more. URL: https://github.com/spree/spree
Rails Performance Tools - system tools such as lsof, strace, ltrace, gdb, perftools, memprof, etc to identify bottlenecks in your ruby apps that NewRelic can't, by Aman Gupta.
Sass: The Future of Stylesheets a great overview of SASS and compass, with examples of @extend and @include.
Stateful, Scalable Servers with EventMachine and Rails a talk by Aman Gupta (again) on EventMachine and writing non-blocking high concurrency but single-threaded TCP/IP servers. Highly recommended.
The Holy Grail (of Databases) Overview of SQL, key-value stores and other NoSQL storage options. Highly recommended.
And if you are feeling sentimental, and added bonus:
50 in 50 is a really zany presentation on computer science achievements in the last century. Great meditative presentation, and goes way over 1 hour. No relationship to ruby/rails, but everyone will get something out of it