
Below I put together my personal list of best RailsConf 2011 presentations that have online slides or PDFs. I put my comments next to each. Click on the link, then click on the "slideshow" or "PDF" links for each talk.
- ActiveSupport 3: What We Should Know About What We Don't Know - how to use ActiveSupport in your ruby apps and get lots of behaviors and useful stuff for free
- Building Bulletproof Views really decent presentation on state of views in general, and best practices. Recommended reading.
- Building Pageless Apps with Rails and Backbone JS is a great presentation on a new up and coming JS client side framework for building reach apps on the client using pure MVC.
- David Heinemeier Hansson -- keynote, worth watching
- From 1,000 Transactions a Month to 1 million in a Day: Lessons in Credit Card Processing from LivingSocial - cool presentation on how BrainTree API is used to encrypt card data in JavaScript before submitting to BT for processing. Lots of other useful tidbits on credit card processing.
- How To Handle 1,000,000 Daily Users Without Using A Cache most interesting presentation for performance junkies, on how they outgrew MySQL and explored various other solutions to scale to 1M daily users. Highly recommended.
- KnowSQL: Database Tricks To Make Your Life Easier this is a PostgreSQL heavy presentation on how to get the most out of your database engine. Recommended to anyone who wants to learn more about using a real database =)
- OmniAuth from the Ground Up a really good presentation on OmniAuth - a generic authentication gem that supports a lot of options, including OpenID, LDAP, etc.
- Open Source E-Commerce With Spree VERY interesting presentation on this open source e-commerce platform. Great examples on using engines, customizable CSS, and many more. URL: https://github.com/spree/spree
- Rails Performance Tools - system tools such as lsof, strace, ltrace, gdb, perftools, memprof, etc to identify bottlenecks in your ruby apps that NewRelic can't, by Aman Gupta.
- Sass: The Future of Stylesheets a great overview of SASS and compass, with examples of @extend and @include.
- Stateful, Scalable Servers with EventMachine and Rails a talk by Aman Gupta (again) on EventMachine and writing non-blocking high concurrency but single-threaded TCP/IP servers. Highly recommended.
- The Holy Grail (of Databases) Overview of SQL, key-value stores and other NoSQL storage options. Highly recommended.
And if you are feeling sentimental, and added bonus:
- 50 in 50 is a really zany presentation on computer science achievements in the last century. Great meditative presentation, and goes way over 1 hour. No relationship to ruby/rails, but everyone will get something out of it
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