What is EMEA on Rails?

The Trail to Scale Without Fail: Rails?

Let's be blunt: Most web apps aren’t so computation-heavy and won't hit scaling issues.

What if yours is the exception? Can Rails handle it?

Cue Exhibit A: Cloudinary, which serves billions of image and video requests daily, including on-the-fly edits, QUICKLY, running on Rails since Day 1. Case closed?

Not so fast. Beyond the app itself, we needed creative solutions to ensure that, as traffic rises and falls at the speed of the internet, we handle the load gracefully, and no customer overwhelms the system.

The real question isn't whether Rails is up to the challenge, but rather: Are you?

Storytelling for Tech People

Remember the last conference talk that put you to sleep? It probably had a really catchy title, too. It's time to change that standard. It's time to learn how to turn our technical content into a beautiful story.

In this workshop you'll learn how to think differently about your topic; how to craft a story that will capture and impress your audience.

Self-Care on Rails

This past year has been one of the most challenging years in recent memory. The pandemic has taken a toll, including on children.

Adults used their professional skills to help make the year a little better for the kids in our lives: Therapists counseled, entertainers delighted, teachers educated... and Rails developers developed!

In this talk, I'll share the apps I built on Rails that helped my kids and me cope, celebrate and persevere through the year.

In 2020, tech was pivotal in keeping us going, and for my kids, Rails made the year a little more manageable.

Democratizing the fight against Ruby memory bloat

Ruby apps can use a lot of memory, but not for the reasons you think. I've discovered that as much as 70% of the memory usage is not caused by Ruby, but by the system's memory allocator! The good news is that there are technically simple solutions. So why isn't everybody using them? That's the bad news: they're cumbersome to deploy. We can say that the solutions are not "democratized".

I'm on a mission to allow everyone to easily get rid of Ruby memory bloat. In this talk I'll explain where Ruby memory bloat comes from, what the solutions are, and how I'm working on democratizing the solutions in the form of Fullstaq Ruby. I will also talk about my efforts to make Fullstaq Ruby a sustainable open source project.

Beautiful reactive web UIs, Ruby and you

A lot of life changing things have happened in 2020. And I'm obviously speaking about Stimulus Reflex and Hotwire and how we as Rails devs are finally enabled to skip a lot of JS while implementing reactive web UIs. But what if I told you, there's room for even more developer happiness? Imagine crafting beautiful UIs in pure Ruby, utilizing a library reaching from simple UI components representing basic HTML tags over styled UI concepts based on Bootstrap to something like a collection, rendering reactive data sets. Beautiful, reactive web UIs implemented in pure Ruby are waiting for you!

API Optimization Tale: Monitor, Fix and Deploy (on Friday)

I saw a green build on a Friday afternoon. I knew I need to push it to production before the weekend. My gut told me it was a trap. I had already stayed late to revert a broken deploy. I knew the risk.

In the middle of a service extraction project, we decided to migrate from REST to GraphQL and optimize API usage. My deploy was a part of this radical change.

Why was I deploying so late? How did we measure the migration effects? And why was I testing on production? I'll tell you a tale of small steps, monitoring, and old tricks in a new setting. Hope, despair, and broken production included.

A History of Nairuby and Tech Development in Africa

What is a tech community? Why should you join a tech community? How can you add value to a community you are a member of? Nairuby has come a long way and so has the tech ecosystem. Reminiscing about the community journey will guide us for the next few decades.

Zerus & Ona: A warm welcome to the world of technology

Young children are growing up highly surrounded by technology without knowing what's behind it. How do we spark their curiosity and introduce them to the world of technology to not only use it as consumers but to start seeing themselves as creators?

In this workshop, you'll get to know Zerus and Ona, a 0 and a 1, living inside your computer and sharing their adventures in The Binary World. Along with Miriam, you'll create a new story from scratch that will inspire every child to learn more about technology and start gaining superpowers.

New dev, old codebase: A series of mentorship stories

Mentorship in software development carries a lot of responsibility, but plays an integral part in making tech communities as well as individuals thrive.

In this talk, we'll go over some of my mentorship experiences, adopting techniques and learning to teach, so we can teach to learn. Anyone can be a great mentor!

Making the Leap into Tech Leadership

Taking on a technology leadership role is a tough transition for any developer, because only part of the skills and experience you had as a developer prepares you for the expectations of a new role. In this talk I will share common challenges new tech leaders face and how to tackle them.

The Curious Case of the Bad Clone

On Sept 4th 2020, I got pinged on a revert PR to fix a 150% slowdown on the Shopify monolith. It was a two-line change reverting the addition of a Sorbet signature on a Shop method, implicating Sorbet as the suspect.

That was the start of a journey that took me through a deeper understanding of the Sorbet, Rails and Ruby codebases. The fix is in Ruby 3.0 and I can sleep better now.

This talk will take you on that journey with me. Along the way, you will find tools and tricks that you can use for debugging similar problems. We will also delve into some nuances of Ruby, which is always fun.

Frontendless Rails frontend

Everything is cyclical, and web development is not an exception: ten years ago, we enjoyed developing Rails apps using HTML forms, a bit of AJAX, and jQuery—our productivity had no end! As interfaces gradually became more sophisticated, the "classic" approach began to give way to frontend frameworks, pushing Ruby into an API provider's role.

The situation started to change; the "new wave" is coming, and ViewComponent, StimulusReflex, and Hotwire are riding the crest.

In this talk, I'd like to demonstrate how we can develop modern "frontend" applications in the New Rails Way.