I know Ruby Midwest 2013 was a month ago, but now that Confreaks has all the presentations online I thought I’d share a few of my very favorites. I plan to do something similar for Railsconf once those are available. In the order they’re listed on Confreaks:

Failure for Fun and Profit!

Note to self: Don’t include the word failure in a talk’s title unless you, yourself, are ready to handle glitches. Kerri Miller did so like a champ. It’s hard to present without slides these days. I’m glad to see more developers thinking about how we learn, and recognizing that it’s cool to not be right all the time.

Rails Application Security in Practice

If Bryan Helmkamp’s talk on the ways a would-be bad guy can break into your Rails application doesn’t scare the shit out of you, I should either congratulate you on a well-secured app or suggest you watch the talk a second time. I love practical talks like this that give you a clear to-do list of things to do.

Functional Principles for OO Development

I’ll admit, I need to go back and watch Jessica Kerr’s talk another time or twelve to better grasp the content. But that won’t be a problem–Jessica’s presentation style is a joy to watch and a much-needed respite from some of the dry, monotone deliveries you’ll no doubt see at a given conference. I believe Jessica is giving this presentation elsewhere; I recommend checking it out if you see her name on a schedule.

Lightweight Business Intelligence

This was probably my favorite technical-leaning talk of the event. Corey Ehmke did a great job of dispelling some of the murkiness of business intelligence, particularly by providing starting points without diving headfirst into NoSQL, Hadoop, and the like. (Hint: Denormalize!)

The Most Important Optimization: Happiness

I said this much on Twitter just after this session: Ernie Miller’s talk on what really matters could have been a keynote. Great message, well-executed delivery. Even if you’re not a developer-type, please take the time to watch this talk.