Being eager to quickly develop our applications and libraries, we often skip over technologies and techniques that have existed for years. Particularly where relational databases are concerned, Rails encourages us to do as much as possible in Ruby, even when our database has the same functionality built-in. This talk will take a step back and see what existing technologies we've reinvented, and compare them with the performance of tried-and-true approaches.
Mat Brown has been programming in Ruby and Rails for three years, and is the creator of several open-source libraries, most notably Sunspot. He thinks Ruby's patternmatching constructs are underappreciated. Mat currently works as the lead engineer for Clique.
John Crepezzi is a Rails developer at Patch Media in New York City. He created several popular gems, such as IceCube, TrackHistory, and EasyTranslate. He loves traveling and talking about how much he loves to code/solve problems