#arrrrcamp

When someone asks you what makes your company special, you'll probably say you create something that has beauty, quality and innovation... The problem is, thats what all companies say. You think you are, or want to be better than the rest, but when are you better than the rest? Metrics is everything, without numbers there's no way to tell if you're getting better at what you do, there's no way to tell (and show) if you're better than your competition. But how do you measure the beauty of your designs? The quality of your software? The innovation of your products?

Every pirate likes to play games. Whether to pass the time during long sea voyages or entertain fellow pirates around the drinking table, games are a wonderful pastime. Unfortunately the captain does not always understand. Would it not be great to have a proper defense when the captain scolds you for idling away time? This talk will provide you with enough gun powder to counter any attack your captain launches on you for playing games on deck. We will dive into the seven seas of computational complexity and discuss a uniform means of understanding them: games! We show that playing games corresponds to certain types of computations. And as every captain knows, before finding the treasure you have to compute where X marks the spot. We will use ruby to demonstrate the correspondence between computations and games by creating specific games that perform certain computations and playing them life.

Inside every programmer there are two conflicting personalities, a hacker who gets things done quickly but sometimes leaves a messy codebase behind and a perfectionist who crafts beautiful code but sometimes gets paralyzed finding the best solution. In this talk you will not only be exposed to this crazy theory but also will know how Ruby encourages the cooperation between those internal programmers. Starting from syntax and moving to higher level topics like structured vs OOP vs functional approaches to problems.

This year we launched a new product in 6 weeks - from initial commit to accepting customers. We could have used a number of languages to build KBSimple, but we chose Rails to bootstrap it. The reason is simple: Rails is still the best framework for bootstrapping new web applications. In this talk I'll go through the 6 week evolution of the product, talk about the various gems and techniques that were essential in reducing the amount of time it took to launch, and talk about some of the challenges we faced along the way.

sidenote: i love that little pirate mascot dude.