As promised in previous posts, we want to share with you our experience and views from this year annual Ruby conference Euruko. Maybe “our” is too much to say, since we only sent one developer there. So to be precise, these are Josef Reidinger’s experience and views on the conference.

This year Euruko took place in Sofia, capital of Bulgaria. It turned out to be a great conference place. Public transport works very well, everyone speak English and even when it uses Cyrilic alphabet, almost everything is written also in Latin one.

That being said, let’s talk about the conference content. Fortunately all the presentations were recorded so you can watch them yourself. But since it would be quite some hours of video to go through, we have reviewed some presentations for you including access to the corresponding videos.

Highlights

Let’s start with the three presentation Josef specially recommend to watch.

Keynote by Matz

He speaks about how Ruby 3 will probably look in distant future. With “distant future” meaning “for sure not in next two years”. If you cannot wait, it’s worth mentioning that Ruby 2.4 will be released on December.

Ruby 3 will use guild membership concurrency model. The most interesting part of the talk is digging into rationale of typed versus non-typed languages and what can be the Ruby future in that regard.

Rules, Laws and Gently Guidelines by Andrew Radev

Interesting view about common design principles, common mistakes when applying them and looking to them from different angles. Also explaining how to handle situations in which several design principles seem to contradict each other.

Elixir by Jose Valim

Interesting intro to Elixir language. What it is, why it make sense to use it and what are its benefits. Josef’s impression was that Elixir’s idea is similar to isolated micro-services communicating via messages, with nice introspection and scalability.

But we have more team members with something to say about Elixir. Like Imobach, who has been playing with Elixir (and Phoenix) for some time now. And Imobach really likes Elixir, so he would like to add some more bits of information for those who are interested.

For example, he would like to highlight that Elixir uses BEAM, the Erlang virtual machine, so great support for concurrency is backed in the platform. Concurrency sits on the concept of Erlang processes and it’s pretty common to use them for all kind of tasks (from computation to storing state, etc.). Imobach would like to encourage all developers out there to take a look to OTP (Open Telecom Platform). Who needs micro-services at all?

Last but not least, take into account that Elixir is a functional language, so if you have an object-oriented mindset (like most Ruby developers) it will take some time to wrap your head around it.

Other presentations

Little Snippets by Xavier Noria

Summary of common inefficiency in small snippets. Small things that matter, although most of them should be already known by the average Ruby developer. (Video)

Since we mention the topic, some YaST team members has found this cheat sheet by Juanito Fatas about Ruby optimization to be quite useful.

Rails + Kafka by Terence Lee

Apache Kafka is yet another messaging system. This talk did not manage to convince Josef to use it, but maybe it makes sense in some scenarios like HPC or HA. (Video)

Graphql on Rails by Marc-Andre Giroux

The typical REST setup is sometimes not scalable enough due to the excess of endpoints. The Graphql language is designed to specify what resources are needed from a server in a single query. The result is returned as JSON and the request specification looks also similar to JSON. Caching is done on client side. Interesting for web stuff and already used by Facebook, Shopify and others. (Video)

Evolution of engineering on call team by Grace Chang

How to maintain services, how to scale when the grow, preventing burnout and so on. Specially interesting for us since there are many similarities with YaST maintenance. Maybe the end of the talk is a bit theoretic and idealistic. (Video)

Sprockets by Rafael Franca

Not specially interesting intro to assets generation used by Rails. People doing some assets generation with Rails would most likely already know all the content. (Video)

Contribute to Ruby core by Hiroshi Shibata

Presentation about Ruby core development infrastructure, rules, etc. Certainly not the best talk ever. (Video)

Consequences of insightful algorithms by Carina C. Zona

Interesting presentation about conflicts between algorithms and real humans, especially with data-mining. Unfortunately, the second half turned to be too emotional and not technical enough for Josef’s taste :). (Video)

Viewing Ruby Blossom – Hamani by Anton Davydov

Introduction to yet another Ruby web framework. Not that interesting for us. (Video)

A Year of Ruby, Together by Andre Arko

Introduction on how the open source community infrastructure behind Rubygems and Bundler is ran. How they get money to improve stuff, how they maintain their servers… Good talk about hard times keeping open source infrastructure alive. Interesting talk for any open source project. (Video)

What I Have Learned from Organizing Remote Internship for Ruby Developers by Ivan Nemytchenko

Talk describing an attempt to scale internship for a lot of students. Josef had a small chat with the author about Google Summer of Code after the presentation. He looked interested. (Video)

The Illusion of Stable APIs by Nick Sutterer

Not Josef’s cup of tea. The presenter probably went a little bit too far trying to be funny all the time. The core of the presentation was about three examples of API that needed to be changed “just” because the rest of the world changed. So the whole presentation can be shortened to one sentence – your API will only remain static if the world remains static. (Video)

Conclusion

That was all from Sofia. See you again in approximately one week, just in time for the report of our 28th Scrum sprint.