Last Thursday three of our dev team went to the May edition of the #VanRuby meetups, in Vancouver.

The #VanRuby meetups are a great way for us to stay in touch with our local developer community. Once a month #VanRuby organizes a meetup at a different location and either co-ordinates guest speakers or, in the case of May’s meetup, encourages participation from attendees.

Our favorite #VanRuby social lightning talk

This month’s theme invited speakers to give a summary of their favorite RailsConf talks. We were really impressed by Loki Meyburg’s recap of ‘Rails Insecure Defaults’ because Rails is considered to be one of the most secure web application frameworks available; however, this talk showed us that when you dig a little deeper it’s easy to find situations where Rails in built behavior could be more secure. A great example here, from Florent:

“when you launch a Rails application it has to be launched on a specific IP, so it can be accessed it in your browser. But if you use an IP like 0.0.0.0, it means that other people can also access it if they want to, from their browser”

We also attended RailsConf back in April, so Piotr and Suman both offered to share their insights with the Ruby community.

Piotr ended up giving two talks, a ‘micro-talk’ (as he put it) on strong parameters and a full lightning talk on API testing.

Suman’s lightning talk was a recap of Sandi Metz RailsConf talk ‘The Magic Tricks of Testing’ and suggested that developers are writing too many tests and testing the wrong kinds of things. Sandi’s original RailsConf talk ‘The Magic Tricks of Testing’ is available on SpeakerDeck.

Lightning Talks are 2-10 minute talks where speakers show a short slide presentation or code in a repl.

The #VanRuby meetup location

This month the meetup was hosted at Medeo, a Vancouver-based telehealth utility that makes it possible for patients to connect with their doctors via their computer, phone or tablet. We were fascinated by what was being achieved at Medeo, they’re reinventing the house-call and making healthcare easier and more convenient for everyone. It was a pleasure to be hosted by them.

Modeo is free to download from the Apps store

Did you attend the recent #VanRuby meetup, too? Please leave a comment and let us know which talks you enjoyed.