I thought I knew how to build Rails apps. Then I joined a new company and discovered an entire architectural approach I never knew was possible in Rails: event sourcing with Commands, Deciders, Event Stores, and temporal queries.

This talk covers what event sourcing actually is, why major tech companies and financial institutions have built their systems around it, and when this pattern makes sense versus traditional CRUD. We’ll look at real Rails code examples and practical implementation options available in the Ruby ecosystem.

Whether you’re curious about the pattern or considering it for your next project, come learn alongside me as I share what I’ve discovered about this powerful architectural approach.

Your client wants a mobile app but you only know Ruby on Rails? No problem! In this talk we will explore Hotwire Native and how we can leverage existing code-bases to develop and ship both web and mobile apps to our clients!

Are you building an API? Are you working with External API’s? You should consider rate limits! In this talk I’ll go over some new features in Rails 8 for rate limiting as well was common strategies to handle rate limiting in a Rails app

Reviewing the CRB Feedback Survey Results

Learn how MCP servers and FastMCP boost app development with Tidewave. See live demos using Claude Desktop tools to generate real-time insights, graphs, and data—giving users more value with minimal effort.

Our software sucks. We’re up to our necks in bugs and technical debt, yet we often seem to hit roadblocks explaining things in ways that bring about meaningful change. In this session you’ll learn to gather, analyze, and interpret data in order to create effective presentations to communicate quality, technical debt, and other technical matters in ways that tell a compelling story. You’ll master how to communicate effectively with key stakeholders by taking a data-driven approach blended with storytelling techniques to bridge common gaps between development and business stakeholders. We’ll cover various architectural and analytical processes that can support the decision-making process, justify paying down technical debt, tips for reducing its accumulation in the future, and focusing on improving our software in the areas that need it most.

This talk was tremendously well-received at CodeMash, StirTrek, and as an online course at Pluralsight for some time. Some of the topics of this talk found their way into my first technical book, Refactoring with C#, though that book is more focused on tactical execution in a specific language.

Have you ever searched for “how to authenticate an API call” and been confused by the dizzying array of techniques, terminology, jargon, and acronyms that come back?

This session is designed for anyone that’s struggling to make sense of modern authentication options. You’ll learn the differences between OAuth, API Keys, HMAC, JSON Web Tokens (JWT), SAML, OpenID Connect, and passkeys using Webauthn. Each technique will be explained in a clear, practical, easy-to-understand way.

This session focuses on core concepts, not code, and is accessible to anyone that works with technology.

I’ve been a “security minded” developer for many years and remember being very frustrated and confused when I couldn’t find a clear, easy-to-follow guide to picking an authentication strategy for my apps.

Since then I’ve done a bunch of research and worked with a bunch of different security techniques, so I designed this as the clear, easy-to-follow guide that I so desperately wanted back then. I think it will help a lot of developers (and non-devs) understand how things work at a fundamental level.

GitHub Slides