I didn't give a talk here, but they let me introduce the lightning talks, which was fun, here's my brief introduction.

Rails is powerful, but it doesn't do everything. Sometimes you want to build your own tool that adds functionality to Rails. If it's something that might be useful for other people, you can write a Ruby Gem and distribute it. In this workshop, we will go through the entire process of creating a gem, starting with `bundle gem` and ending with how to publish it with `gem push`.

Ruby puts the Ruby in “Ruby on Rails”! It’s the Ruby language that makes Rails flexible, powerful, and with a developer-friendly API. How does Rails take advantage of Ruby’s flexibility and metaprogramming to make it so useful? And how can you take advantage of those features in your Rails app?

The 2021 remote version of my workshop on building front-end apps with Hotwire.

Mentorship is a great way for a newer developer to benefit from the experience of a more senior developer. While there are lots of available resources on how to be a good mentor or mentee, there are far fewer guidelines on how to set up a mentoring program within your engineering organization.

RSpec is often described with the word “magic” by both its users and its detractors. Understanding how RSpec matchers, doubles, and specifications work will help you as an RSpec user. You will be able to take advantage of RSpec’s flexibility to make your tests clearer and more expressive. You’ll also get some exposure to new RSpec features, like compound matchers.

This is a panel discussion featuring Ben Orenstein, Bree Thomas, Jeff Casimir, Jen Meyers, Kathryn Exline, and Liz Abinante about how best to bring new developers into the field, and what kind of knowledge they will need to be successful. What can we, as a community, do to improve our management of new developers? What can new developers do to give themselves the best chance of success?

In this workshop, we'll focus on two specific problems that plague testing complex systems: how do I create useful test data, and how do I limit my test to only the part of the system that I want tested. We'll cover data creation tools like factories and fixtures. We will also talk about how to effectively use mock objects. And we'll do all that against some code that shows off potental testing problems.

Another talk about the mechanics of testing. Introducing the tortured acronym SWIFT for the five habits: Simple, Well-Defined, Independent, Fast, Truthful