Jerry Gulla

Presentations

Using Vagrant

Vagrant is “virtualized development made easy.” If you’re looking to lower development setup time, minimize manual configuration and setup and eliminate the “it works on my machine” excuse, Vagrant is for you.

Vagrant leverages Oracle’s VirtualBox to create virtual machines that are configured via Puppet or Chef. You can use it to create reproducible and stable environments to deploy and test your application without hassle. Don’t hack up your development workstation to try and approximate your deployment config - use Vagrant to mimic the real thing.

RSpec for API Testing

We all know the benefits of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), but it’s not without it’s pitfalls. If you’re providing an API, wether for internal or external use, testing it is essential. Even if you only consume other APIs, testing them to make sure they didn’t change or break can be critical. RSpec is Behavior Driven Development (BDD) testing framework. Although RSpec was born out of the Ruby community, it’s not limited to testing Ruby APIs! It turns out it’s a great way to test ALL your APIs, regardless of language.

This session will cover what RSpec is, how to install it and how to start writing tests. What good are tests if you don’t run them? Not much. We’ll also cover how to integrate your RSpec tests with Jenkins, so you can run it as part of your builds.

Career.Next

We all know that a career in software can be challenging. Keeping up with the latest trends, mapping out career choices and knowing how to stay marketable are critical skills. The speaker, using his own 20+ year career as an example, will talk about techniques he’s used to survive economic downturns, government contracts, technology shifts and even going from engineering to management and back - twice!

Strategies for succeeding in your current organization to positioning yourself for the next will be covered. Participation is encouraged! - We’ll save time for other to share their own experiences and ideas about how to thrive in any environment.

JRuby in the Enterprise

Bring the power of Ruby and Rails to your enterprise! Interested in harnessing the power of Ruby on Rails but not sure how to incorporate it into your existing Java/J2EE/Spring word? In this session, we’ll talk about real-world experiences, lessons learned and best practices for developing a new Ruby on Rails using JRuby.

You’ll learn about how to set up a Rails application using JRuby and deploy it using the industry standard JBoss application server. We’ll use many of the familiar tools and technologies Java developers are used to, such as MySQL and Maven. Also covered will be using JNDI for database connectivity, integrating with custom and 3rd party Java libraries and the use of servlet filters. We'll even dive in to how you can use Liquibase instead of ActiveRecord for database migrations.

Drawing on a real-world Rails/JRuby/JBoss deployment for a major SaaS company, we’ll discuss practical strategies for fitting your new application into existing operational procedures and talk about ways to overcome organizational challenges regarding adoption.