Jens Ravens

I'm a Berlin-based iOS and Ruby on Rails developer working for nerdgeschoss. I'm obsessed with application architecture and maintainable code bases in Swift and Ruby on Rails.

You can follow me on Twitter or send me an email.

Turn it up to 11 - Scaling Rails to 100k rps

Conference Talks - RUG::B 2020

We've all heard the 'Rails can't scale' myth, but how far can we scale Rails? This is a story about a one year project scaling a REST API for concert ticketing and e-commerce to huge presale events and the lessons learned on the way.
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End-to-End Encryption in Rails with Stimulus and OpenPGP

Nowadays, the news is full of data leaks, breaks, and hacks and one thing is clear - you don’t want to be the one who leaks all your customer data to some hackers on the internet. Learn how to encrypt your content end-to-end with Rails and PGP
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The Last Guide To Parsing JSON You Will Ever Need

Conference Talks - swift.berlin

Swift 4 finally contains a mechanism for easy serialization. This talk explores the basics of Codables.
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Server Side Swift - AppBuilders 2017 Edition

Conference Talks - AppBuilders 2017

Hooray, open source Swift finally arrived on Linux in December. Let's see how easy it is to use Swift for your backend and why Swift is a good choice for safe and fast development.
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Prototyping with Storyboards

Conference Talks - SwiftConf 2016

Storyboards have grown in functionality over recent years and have become a great tool for prototyping your next app idea.
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Server Side Swift

Conference Talks - SwiftConf 2016

Learn what Reactive Programming means, why it doesn’t have to be functional and why everyone is so excited about the ideas behind it.
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Introduction to Reactive Programming Workshop

Conference Talks - Swiss Mobile Developers Association

Learn in this workshop what Reactive Programming means, why it doesn’t have to be functional and why everyone is so excited about the ideas behind it.
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Introduction to Reactive Programming

Conference Talks - Mobilization 2016

Learn what Reactive Programming means, why it doesn’t have to be functional and why everyone is so excited about the ideas behind it.
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What's new in Interstellar 2

Conference Talks - swift.berlin 2016

See how reactive programming can make your code shorter, easier to read and more elegant with the next major version of the Interstellar framework.
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Hipster Oriented Programming

Conference Talks - Mobilization 2015

Not sure if you should order a burrito or a monad for lunch? Get a quick overview of Object Oriented, Functional and Protocol Oriented programming in Swift 2 and learn what all that fuss is about and why you should care. (Talk from Mobilization 2015 in Lodz)
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Object Oriented CSS with SASS

Over time almost all css projects turn into a mess of selectors and strange sizing. Here is my approach of dealing with it.
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Demystifying the Server

Web Development in Swift - Part 1

Servers aren't a magical black box - they're just programs spitting out http responses. Let's have a look how a usual server infrastructure works.
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Wrapping View Controllers in Signals

Functional Reactive Programming in Swift - Part 6

Signals aren't just only great for handling model state - you can use them as well to plan your applications' flow.
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The Signal, Threading and You.

Functional Reactive Programming in Swift - Part 5

Multithreading can be hard - let's make it a bit easier by using signals.
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Sending A Signal To Space

Functional Reactive Programming in Swift - Part 4

We've already seen how to handle a chain of failable, synchronous function calls. Next up we explore the missing piece: Async callbacks.
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How to use Functional Reactive Programming without Black Magic

Conference Talks - UIKonf 2015

During UIKonf 2015 I gave a talk about how to implement your own ReactiveCocoa using ideas from Swift like generics and value types.
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How To Train Your Monad

Functional Reactive Programming in Swift - Part 3

Let's put all the previous stuff together to achieve our goal: Chaining synchronous transforms with error handling unix style.
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Transforming The World Into A Better Place

Functional Reactive Programming in Swift - Part 2

If you ask a developer what a program is he is likely to respond: A sequence of commands. Value oriented programming takes a step back and lays the focus on something different: The content of your application instead of the actual commands.
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A Swifter Way Of Handling Errors

Functional Reactive Programming in Swift - Part 1

Handling errors is something most developers try to avoid. But error handling got way more important on mobile devices where the user constantly switches apps, the network connection drops in the middle of a transfer or the application is terminated by memory pressure.
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Hello World

Last week I've attended UIKonf. One of the amazing speakers there was Ash Furrow who talked about Teaching and Learning and how this experience helped him. In the end he had a taks for everyone in the audience: Start a blog.
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