Needs no introduction. Go watch it. It was an excellent introduction to the entire conference which many people that I talked to afterward enjoyed. I feel like people made an effort to be more outgoing in the hallway after watching his talk.
Less about the actual pitfalls of doing zero downtime deploys and more about the configuration aspects of setting up Nginx and Unicorn to do this. Not necessarily much that anyone using Heroku could utilize, but interesting nonetheless.
This talk collected bits of wisdom regarding what is necessary to build effective shared experiences among communities. It wasn't my favorite talk of the conference, but it was thought provoking. Certainly made me think about inviting other random conference attendees along to lunch and whatnot to build those shared experiences.
Definitely enjoyed Brian's talk. It synthesizes a lot of material that was spread across many blog postings and demonstrates the new real time features of Rack and Rails with example applications. Definitely worth watching, but unfortunately not available on Heroku.
I'm not sure that this talk would translate well into video format, but it was a nice break from the generally technical nature of the conference thus so far.
I really enjoyed this talk. Definitely worth watching. Demonstrated how we can get ruby out of its pidgeonholed web app phase. It was actually the first practical use of mruby I've seen... for that alone it was worth it. Also he went into the various limitations of the devices that he brought which I was unaware of, so it acted as something of a buying guide for hardware hacking toys.
Richard's talk was particularly interesting. He works for the Ruby Task Force at Heroku, and it contained a few handy bits that might be useful to us. Most notably was a logging and graphing tool that I was previously unaware of (Luke has the name of it). We can probably use this for caching metrics. He also goes into why it's not a good idea to have the environment available during slug compilation, which I found interesting.
This was Danielle's first conference talk, and was excellent. Lots of discussion generated after the fact among the other conference attendees. She used salary negotiations as her primary example, but I found that the underlying theme is applicable far beyond that.
Excellent talk, though it might take some time to get through simply due to the amount of live coding that Zach did. If you've ever wanted to see what pair programming with a hundred people can look like, watch this talk. Zach took us on a tour through many standard library utilities that I was unaware of, or was aware of and had never seen a practical demonstration of (e.g. curses). As a side note, while I was browsing the ruby source tree, I discovered three great examples of curses that Zak added under samples/curses. One has some animation, another has mouse interaction, and the third is a simple hello world. Check them out!
Bryan's talk was less technical and more process-oriented, but very very good and highly recommended. He has some interesting recommendations for teams to boost the quality of code. One was large-group pairing in front of a projector to spawn discussions about quality practices.
This mostly covered ActiveModel::Serializers and took a little while to get moving, but had some interesting bits in it. I liked the idea of having multiple models in a JSON response for associations and linking stuff together via ids.
I really enjoyed Steve's closing keynote. He took us through a couple of projects that he was working on to demonstrate how things that can potentially be A Bad Idea in production code can still be fun experiments that we should all try out. The whole FRP notion is really fun, though I haven't had a chance to play with Frappucino yet. If nothing else, check out the Gist that Aaron Patterson posted with the IAmAHorriblePerson module. If you've ever wanted to see how to add "Object#unfreeze" or "Object#untaint", this has a quasi-simple implementation.