For the last few years hardware manufacturers have driven increasingly powerful multi-core processors into consumer-grade computing hardware. Power which twenty years ago was restricted to a handful of government-funded research institutes is now available on the desktop, introducing many developers to the conundrum of how best to use it with languages implemented primarily for sequential environments. In this presentation we'll use code to explore the various traditional models for concurrent execution supported directly by Ruby - such as Threads, Processes and Fibres - and their limitations before turning to the approaches pioneered in other languages and seeing how many we can bring into the Ruby fold. We'll present characteristic examples of techniques drawn from a variety of languagesand demonstrate how to construct similar architectures in Ruby using its native features and libraries such as EventMachine or RevActor.

Opening Keynote by Carl Lerche - Arrrrcamp 2010.10

You start a brand new Ruby project. You elegantly glide around your application sprinkling it with tests using tools like Cucumber. Time passes, test numbers grow and suddenly you find yourself wading through the thick sludgy swamp of a 1-hour test build. Your ability to deliver code in a timely manner gets difficult. Discipline gets slack ?Well I know that fix will turn the build green, just deploy it anyway?. Commit code now, find out in an hour if it breaks. Joseph Wilk will examine pioneering ways to battle performance problems with tests and some of the new developments he has been making around intelligently reducing tests sets down to 'those that matter'. He will be focusing examples around Cucumber though the ideas and principles apply to many testing frameworks. He will be demonstrating how tools like Hydra and TestJour can be used to distribute Cucumber features over many machines. Coping with the gremlins of Javascript testing with in-memory browser tools such as Celerity and Johnson/Envjs. Looking at ways of caching SQL activity in a Trie based on test cycles and breaking up large systems upon domain boundaries.

A small intro talk about Prawn, a pdf generator for Ruby