Talks & speakers

Revisiting the Hotwire Landscape after Turbo 8

Hotwire has significantly altered the landscape of building interactive web applications with Ruby on Rails, marking a pivotal evolution toward seamless Full-Stack development.

With the release of Turbo 8, the ecosystem has gained new momentum, influencing how developers approach application design and interaction.

This session, led by Marco, a core maintainer of Stimulus, StimulusReflex, and CableReady, delves into capabilities introduced with Turbo 8, reevaluating its impact on the whole Rails and Hotwire ecosystem.

The Boring Bits Bite Back

Big is better right? Big data, big features, big customers. With those big customers comes requests for big acronyms like SAML, SCIM and RBAC. Getting those implemented depends on a strong foundation. The boring bits that were glossed over when building the company. Users, Accounts, Authorization, Billing… We can prevent heartache, tech debt and stress by getting a handle on them early on. I’ll talk about how to think about these basics as you go without overthinking it so hopefully you spend less time re-building the basics and more time creating products that wow people.

Lessons learned from running Rails apps on-premise

37signals recently published a new software called Campfire. The main catch of it is "you only pay once and can host it yourself." For our customer, we have been shipping three Rails apps for years to their customer's on-premise environments. Since these environments tend to be very different from each other, the deployment process is optimized for Linux and Windows systems, PostgreSQL, and Microsoft SQL servers, as well as installation without any internet access. In this talk, I'd like to share how we approach this, lessons learned over the years, and how you might apply this to your apps.

Ask your logs

Logging is often an afterthought when we put our apps in production. It's there, it's configured by default and it's... good enough?

If you have ever tried to debug a production issue by digging in your application logs, you know that it is a challenge to find the information you need in the gigabyte-sized haystack that is the default rails log output.

In this talk, let's explore how we can use structured logging to turn our logs into data and use dedicated tools to ask — and answer — some non-obvious questions of our logs.

The Very Hungry Transaction

The story begins with a little database transaction. As the days go by, more and more business requirements cause the transaction to grow in size. We soon discover that it isn't a little transaction anymore, and it now poses a serious risk to our application and business. What went wrong, and how can we fix it?

In this talk we'll witness a database transaction gradually grow into a liability. We'll uncover some common but problematic patterns that can put our data integrity and database health at risk, and then offer strategies for fixing and preventing these patterns.

How to Accessibility if You’re Mostly Back-End

When we think about “accessibility”, most of us associate it with design, HTML, CSS - in other words, the front-end. If you work primarily on the back-end of the tech stack, it’s easy to assume that your role is disengaged from accessibility concerns.

In fact, there are multiple ways back-end devs can impact accessibility, both for external users and for colleagues.

In this talk, we’ll walk through everything from APIs to specs to Ruby code to documentation, using examples throughout, to demonstrate how even those of us who rarely touch HTML can positively impact accessibility for all.

The Power of Crystal: A language for humans and computers

Crystal is a language with a focus on developer happiness, like Ruby. The syntax and OOP model resemble that and any Ruby developer feels right at home.

It's statically typed and compiles to native code, making it intrinsically type safe and blazingly fast. Built-in type inference makes most type annotations unnecessary, resulting in easy to read and clean code.

It can be a good asset for performance-critical applications and is very approachable for Rubyists

Crystal is a joy to work with and having it in your tool box is an asset, even when writing Ruby code.