A few weeks ago was Brighton Ruby here in the UK. This post is a brief overview of all the talks from the day. Andy will put the full videos up on the Brighton Ruby site when they are ready, and you should check them out when he does. The talks were all fantastic and covered a range of topics.
Getting to Two Million Users as a One Woman Dev Team
Nadia Odunayo kicked off the day with her tale of success getting The Story Graph off the ground. The Story Graph is a Rails application that serves over 2 million users. Nadia told us how she used user testing, simple technology, and low costs to achieve success. The applause and many gasps from the audience made for a fantastic start to the day.
Making Work (& Life) Less Stressful
Nicky Thompson walked us through how to make better decisions to make our lives easier. Nicky based much of her talk on “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman. I love these topics and often talk about my lizard and monkey brains. Your life will change when you realise which brain is in control. You can stop and see if there is a more logical route to take.
Ractors are Ruby’s Goroutines
Daniel Vartanov gave a great introduction to Ractors. His talk was one of the most accessible presentations of Ractors that I’ve seen. He took the time to explain different scenarios and how they compare to other approaches. I would love an excuse to play around with concurrency in Ruby. There were some interesting topics about this subject in the hallway track.
Litestack: Unleashing the power of SQLite
Mohamed Hassan took us through his Litestack gem series for SQLite. Recently, there has been a resurgence in talk surrounding SQLite. Mohamed maintains a series of gems to help Rails developers make the transition.
Database Troubleshooting for Developers
Karen Jex continued the database topics after lunch. This time, we talked about potential debugging issues with PostgreSQL. There were plenty of great tips and tricks here. Karen made the talk accessible to all experience levels.
Mapping Concepts into Code
Chris Oliver explained how he used metaprogramming and domain modelling to build Noticed. Learning how people develop products and seeing their thinking progress is always great. Chris has a fantastic knowledge of Rails, and the DSL he built was beautiful.
Lighting Talks
As always, the quality of lightning talks at Brighton Ruby was at an all-time high. The subjects ranged from Minitest to philosophy! I always learn much and wonder what people could say with a 25-minute talk. They are always impressive.
Revisiting the Hotwire Landscape after Turbo 8
Marco Roth is a big fan and proponent of Hotwire. He maintains many libraries and created the Stimulus LSP for Visual Studio Code. Marco explained what the latest release of Turbo means for Rails developers. He is looking for help from the community to increase awareness and documentation.
Who Wants to be a Ruby Engineer?
Drew Bragg brought his excellent game show to the south coast of England. I’d heard good things through the grapevine, but the show was even more impressive in real life. The knowledge of some members of the community was astounding. There was much conferring between me and the person sitting beside me. We gave a good account of ourselves.
Appreciation
This year was my fifth visit to Brighton Ruby. Andy continues to impress me every time with the quality and range of speakers. The talks covered everything from Ruby concurrency to successful product development. I love that the conference is one track in one day and that I get to see all my #RubyFriends. Next year will be fantastic again, and I look forward to it.
