More fun, less pain: a strategy for writing maintainable Rails admin backends

10.30 - 11.30, rooms.last

The Rails ecosystem features many full-fledged solutions to generate administrative interfaces (ActiveAdmin, RailsAdmin, you name it...). Although these tools come very handy to bootstrap a project quickly, they all obey the 80%-20% rule and tend to be very invasive (and incredibly painful to test). A time always comes when they start getting in the way, and all the cumulated saved time will be wasted to solve a single, trivial problem with ugly workarounds and EPIC FACEPALMS. This talk will walk through an alternative strategy for building administrative backends: we'll make use of well-known gems like Inherited Resources and Simple Form, the Rails 3.1+ template-inheritance feature and a mix of some good ol' OOP patterns to build an (arguably) more maintainable, testable and modular codebase, without sacrificing the super-DRY, declarative style ActiveAdmin and similar gems offer.

Stefano Verna

I'm a full-stack web developer obsessed with OOP, Ruby, JavaScript and BDD/TDD. Currently CTO at @teamcantiere and cofounder of @welaika.