Our traditional Charity Day, just before the conference on Thursday 28 June, is looking extra-special this year: so far we have a scheduled a Groupon Advanced Rails Workshop, and a User Experience workshop from The Heavies
We do not take any money for the charity day, but very strongly suggest a minimum donation of £75 to the Children's Hospice Association Scotland. We suggest the following registration workflow:-
- Register for the workshops here.
- Make your minimum £75 donation to the Children's Hospice Association Scotland here.
Advanced Rails Design: Use Fancy OO Techniques Without Turning Ruby into Java
The talented Groupon Engineering Team will be leading one of their famous workshop days; this time the subject is Object Oriented Rails.
Level
Intermediate to advanced
Abstract
As Rails applications have grown and become more complex, limitations of the classic "Fat model, skinny controller" architecture have become evident. Large model classes and tight database coupling become difficult to maintain and slow to test. There have been many attempts to manage this issue. Overgeneralizing, these structures tend to add additional architecture layers that use ActiveRecord as a dumb model and use some form of dependency injection to allow for more dynamic management of object relationships.
All this sounds great, but if you came to Rails precisely because it didn't have the kind of architectural overhead that more complex frameworks required then you're probably looking at these ideas with some skepticism.
In this workshop, we'll show how to apply these models to your daily Rails development without burying you in a pile of complicated overhead. We'll talk about dependency injection, role or service based architecture, and how to use these to make your ongoing development life easier. We'll also cover how these techniques make it easier to write low-overhead super-fast tests to make your TDD process fly.
Led by Noel Rappin
Noel Rappin (@noelrap) is a Senior Engineer in the Engineering Talent Development department at Groupon. His team is responsible for internal training and coaching, recruiting, and external outreach. Before joining Groupon, Noel was a Senior Consultant at Obtiva, where he lead teams on a variety of web development projects for clients.
Noel has authored four technical books including "Rails Test Prescriptions" and has taught about web development topics around the country.
Heavies: User Experience Workshop
How can you get clients and users to love your apps? This hands on workshop will demonstrate tried and tested techniques you can take back to your team and start using straight away.
In the morning we’ll (quickly!) cover:
- User centred design
- Agile UX - How can this work?
- Design thinking
- How to draw (well enough)
- Prototyping
- UX != Design
- Design basics
- Typography basics
- Guerrilla Testing
- Help your product owner see the value of UX
In the afternoon:
- Hands on practice of the techniques covered in the morning.
Dave Thomas: Advanced Ruby
Pragmatic Dave Thomas (yes that Dave Thomas) takes us through advanced Ruby Concepts such as the Object Model and Metaprogramming. More details to follow.
