RUG::B

Let's talk about open source, distributed, federated social networks. Mastodon, for example, is rather new and has learned a lot from the mistakes of the past and from similar projects. The nice thing: at its core it's a standard Rails app, so we should feel right at home. But what is the magic that goes into federation, the essential piece so that you can be on one Mastodon instance and get updates from people on other instances? Well, this is what this talk will be about.

Great visuals are essential for many web projects. On a tight budget, you can accomplish a lot with photos and images that are available for free under Creative Commons licenses. In this talk, we can explore the following questions:

• What are Creative Commons (CC) licenses, and which varieties exist?
• Where can you find images under CC licenses?
• How do you correctly use and attribute CC images in your web project?
• In brief: How can you model CC attribution in Rails?

Property-based testing changes the way we look at our test suites. Instead of specifying test cases one after another, this advanced testing technique enables us to automatically generate a stream of inputs. Despite its potential, property-based testing still remains under the radar within the Ruby community. Let’s try to uncover its strengths together.

The talk will discuss how property-based testing compares to traditional testing methods and demonstrate its principles with simple examples. In order to bust the myth of the inapplicability of property-based testing in a real-world setting we’ll bring up some use cases from industry. Finally, we’ll wander into the world of concurrency and the automation of race condition detection.