Backend-as-a-Service (or BaaS for short) is a powerful new class of tools that is fast becoming essential to developers, especially for mobile projects.
Lightning talks are quick, 5-minute presentations that run one after the other. Lightning talks are a great way to grab a quick overview of many subjects so you can decide which ones to investigate further.
Many web developers came to Ruby through Rails. Ever since Rails came out, the watch has been on for the "Rails of X". Meteor (http://meteor.com/) may be the Rails of JavaScript, and it's not unreasonable to expect some ideas coming full circle back to Ruby on Rails in the future.
From its introduction in May 2012, RubyMotion has seemed like a dream come true. Finally, Rubyists can build real, native iPhone and iPad apps from the comfort of their favorite editor, without the pain and hassle of using (or even learning) the Objective-C language or Apple's Xcode IDE.
But there's a lot that's valuable, even delightful, about Objective-C and Xcode...
Rails as a framework is famous for helping you get your application up and running quickly, but the very paradigms that make it so easy at the start can lead to maintenance nightmares down the road. How do you solve the problem? By breaking the app into smaller pieces that communicate via APIs.
Rails applications can contain real security vulnerabilities. The presenters will show how to improve security in Rails apps, and they will introduce several tools that can be used to help to identify issues during development.
In the realm of edgy new database technologies, Redis is the new kid on the block, but how to best use it for your app can be a daunting question. Redis excels at super-fast caching, but what if you need to cache something more complicated than just text?
Relational databases and NoSQL document stores are generally considered to be at opposing extremes. Akiban Server is an open source database that brings document stores and relational databases together.
