Velocity Conf knocked my socks off. This was my first O’Reilly conference and I can really see what the hub-bub is all about. Velocity was host to many top industry pioneers like the dudes from Etsy who created StatsD, Mitchell Hashimoto who works on Vagrant, and reps from Opera, Mozilla, and Google, among other big names.

Rails views are typically rendered after some controller action is executed. But the code that powers Rails controllers is flexible and extensible enough to create custom rendering objects that can reuse views and helpers, but live outside of web request processing. In this post, I'll cover what a Rails controller is and what it's composed of. I'll also go over how to extend it to create your own custom renderers, and show an example of how you can render views in your background jobs and push the results to your frontend.