Welcome, RailsConf-goers!

Hi! Thanks for dropping by, and for watching my talk, “A Deep Dive Into Sessions.”

Here are some extras, resources, things that didn’t quite fit in. Consider them a gift to you, for spending your time with me.

First, here are the slides for my talk:

With those, you can check out all the session best practices and debugging techniques I shared in the talk, without having to race me through slides.

But you shouldn’t grab the code snippets from that. You have better things to do with your time than copy-and-paste code from a PDF.

Instead, I’ve created a gem, CookieDecryptor, to help you peek into encrypted sessions. Include that into your Rails app in dev mode, and you can dig into your app’s session cookies. Check it out!

During the talk, I mentioned a few links and files:

If you want to learn more about sessions and Rails, I highly recommend the Ruby on Rails Security Guide and the Sessions section of the Action Controller Overview.

Here’s the article of mine that spawned this talk, How Rails Sessions Work.

I’ve also collected a few of my best articles below. They’ll help you write cleaner code, find and fix performance problems, write better tests, and more:

Read through them – I know they’ll help you out.

And finally, I’m running a sale on my book, Practicing Rails, for RailsConf! Until 11:59PM on April 30th, use this link to get a copy for $34, 30% off the normal price.


If you want to write high-performing, high-quality, successful Ruby apps, there’s a lot you’ll need to know. It feels impossible to keep up. But if you don’t seek out new knowledge, you’ll start to fall behind.

To help you write great Ruby and Rails apps, I’ll send you an email tutorial every week. You don’t have to find them, they’ll come right to you. Sign up below, and you’ll learn how to speed up your apps, discover new Rails features, write more effective tests, write code more quickly, and become a better Ruby developer.

And as a bonus, as soon as you sign up, I’ll send you the first chapter of Practicing Rails, my book about learning Rails without being overwhelmed, free: