Putting off Persistence

Lauren Voswinkel

Presented by: Lauren Voswinkel

@laurenvoswinkel

Talk Synopsis

In Rails, we have a beautiful framework that can take us from a blank slate to a fully-functional app in little time. However, doing things "The Rails Way" has a lot of implicit dependencies, including persistence. Are you really equipped to make one of the largest decisions about your app before any of your code has even been written?

By putting this decision off you can get a feel for your domain before ever committing anything to a db schema. This means fewer migrations and fewer db-related hacks. Also, these practices encourage encapsulation and interchangeability, which means you get the ability to choose which datastore is best for you. Not just on an application level, but on a per model level as well!

During the talk we’ll be walking through simple examples at different points in application lifecycle. These snapshots will address the biggest pain points of a persistence free process and leave you in a position to put off persistence in your own app development!

Biography

Lauren has been doing web development for nearly a decade. Spending the first five years of her time in front-end development, she has since started diving deeper into the stack. She is currently burning her spare time by working on a project aiming to make organizing events or hangouts less of a pain. When she isn't programming, she can be found teaching courses or TAing with Girl Develop It! Pittsburgh, discussing queer and gender theory, encouraging tech diversity in whatever way she can, doing trick shots with a whip, or fire spinning.