As promised few days ago, I publish materials from a presentation I gave at IT Underground Conference in Prague, Czech Republic.

Here’s a slideshow with full speaker’s notes. Spread the word ;)

Tomorrow I will be speaking at IT Underground Security Conference and Workshop in Prague, Czech Republic. That is three day long event that starts today.

I will give a talk on “Websecurity through conventions and best practices” which will be focused on securing web applications from the most common attacks with examples from Ruby on Rails web development framework.

Expect to see materials from the conf here in few days.

Last month the netguru team has been invited to Corporate Responsibility and Information Technology Conference organized by AIESEC (international student organization) which took place in Częstochowa, Poland. We went there and gave some talks on various topics and I think some of you may find materials from this conference quite interesting.

First, we led an unofficial discussion on “The (fading) differences between desktop and web applications”. We introduced the topic to our hearers and then let them express themselves, it was quite successful.

On Day 2, we organized Ruby on Rails workshops which consisted of “Introduction to RoR” talk and one-hour live-coding session during which a simple twitter like application has been developed. You can find the results on our Github account.

We finished Day 2 with a talk on Enterprise 2.0 and on Day 3 we talked about “Developing a web-development company (startup)”, which was quite different from what people heard on earlier talks gave by the representatives of big corporations. I have no materials to share on this, though. Sorry.

Ruby and Python Conference (RuPy) took place in Poznań, Poland this weekend. It was second edition of the RuPy and I must say that the event was great.

I have not written a single line of code in any of those languages before, but I was seriously considering switching to Ruby (and Rails) soon. I am fortunate enough that next project I will be working on will be written in Ruby on Rails, so this will be even bigger motivation to learn it. And I must say that after the conference my motivation is sky high.

There were many interesting talks, for me, rails-developer-wannabe however the most interesting was live-coding session given by Rida Al Barazi, who was trying to answer the question “Is Rails as agile as advertised”. I saw him in action for about two hours as he was developing simple movie database web application and I admit, it’s very agile indeed. At least when you compare it to Cake, which I like very much when I develop in PHP.

Other lectures was I liked was : “Test driven developement in Rails” by Andrzej Krzywda, “Correlations and Conclusions” by Zed Shaw, “Business Natural Languages” by Jay Fields and “Caching in Rails” by Wiktor Schmidt.

Python part of the conference was taking place at the same time in another room. I didn’t attend it as I decided to focus on Ruby. Maybe next year.

Videos and other materials from RuPy should be available soon on conference’s website.

Surely I will be posting here about Ruby too in future. Of course, I am not going to give up Cake completely anytime soon. There are several Cake-powered projects I am still involved in.