RailsConf 2013

I just wrapped up my first RailsConf in Portland. Overall, it was a great experience with a lot of learnings, mingling with whole bunch of people and getting good beers every night.

here are my notes on the lectures that were worth sharing. the orders are by my best interests.

there are quite few good talks about APIs and gave me few useful tips that we could add to our API.

- How to Write Documentation for People That Don't Read Kevin Burke

https://gist.github.com/naoyamakino/5492945

tips about writing good documentations for both internally and publicly. Kevin is from Twilio and an engineer of their API. There are good examples from various API docs that we can take good practices (eg: error reference page, breaking up the contents by verbs..) Highly recommended to check the note and the slides.

- "Designing great APIs: Learning from Jony Ive, Orwell, and the Kano" via @jondahl

https://gist.github.com/naoyamakino/5505375

another API engineer from Twilio. API is an interface. looking from an API user perspective, he talked about how API can delight users. some suggestions are API wrapper, request logs, sandbox API, API builder (Zencoder API Builder). None of them are necessities, but having things like those will differentiate from other APIs and will delight API users. 

- Using Elastic Search with rails app via Brian Gugliemetti

https://gist.github.com/naoyamakino/5497556

Search is hard, how can we make our search less suck? this is worth checking.

- How Shopify Scales Rails via @JohnDuff

https://gist.github.com/naoyamakino/5505169

Moved away from DelayedJob to Resque, use of Redis, MySQL tuning, caching gems etc. (presentation video link attached in the end of the note)

- Rails vs. The Client

https://gist.github.com/jamesgary/5491098

- Dissecting Ruby with Ruby - Richard Schneeman

https://gist.github.com/jamesgary/5504424

described few tipis on how to debug through rails code and potentially become a bug reporter to bug fixer!

- Building Extractable Libraries in Rails via Patrick Robertson

https://gist.github.com/naoyamakino/5499134

- Testing HTTP APIs in Ruby

https://gist.github.com/jamesgary/5485061

The word of the conference was from James Duncan Davidson's keynote.

"Create more value than you capture" via Tim O'Reilly. 

He emphasized the importance of contributing to OpenSource communities and help make a world better place. 

The whole conference was surrounded by very positive atmosphere and felt a lot of open source community love, which was different from Goolge I/O that I attended last year.

Last not least, witnessing Aaron merging one of our teammates' pull requests to rails/rails was one of the most memorable moments of this week.

Time to go enjoy a last night with Portland beer.