RUG::B

At LaborVoices we're building a platform for collecting feedback from laborers in developing countries about their working conditions. Because our work is global and ever expanding, we recently started work on breaking up our platform into smaller connected systems.

One of the challenges we faced was how to effectively secure our public facing APIs, so that we can have a robust and distributed system. The key challenge was to have a scalable solution for Authentication AND Authorization. We eventually came across JSON Web Tokens, which met and exceeded our expectations.

I would like to share our experiences of building an Ember JS front-end and Grape/Sequel API secured with JWT for the Symphony platform. I hope to inspire someone to try JWT for themselves.

In this talk I'll discuss the perils of managing secret materials like passwords, access keys and certificates in your Rails app. Most production apps need to handle secrets somehow, but until recently, most of the available solutions were either expensive or only solved part of the problem. I'll present Hashicorp Vault as a potential solution and explore some of its useful features.

Ruby empowers us to create unique and successful apps. All of us rely on the complex infrastructure that goes with it. It's easy to forget how deep that dependency is until something goes awry. Such as that time when RubyGems.org went down for several days; all of us paid for that through lost hours, cranky customers, and lower business income. Ouch.

Billions of dollars, euros, and yen are being gambled on an unspoken bet that Ruby infrastructure is stable, secure, and moving forward. It's not sensible for that much responsibility to hinge on a few dozen volunteers' ability to indefinitely devote personal time in a labor of love. What is sensible: community funding of the communal resources that are essential for keeping our ecosystem strong.

Ruby Together is a new nonprofit NGO devoted to stable community-based funding for Ruby community open source infrastructure maintenance and development. In this talk you'll learn about Ruby Together, the community-first values that underly how it's structured, the team, our detailed roadmap, and the significant progress we've already made. You'll learn how you too can support this important mission.