RubyConf Brasil Overview

Ruby is awesome, and its community is better than ever. This year’s RubyConf Brasil is the perfect example of that. Whitesmith was there in São Paulo for the whole event and now that it’s over, let me run you down what I considered most impressive.

In this post, I’ll talk about what I got most interested in and/or found more fascinating. I wasn’t able to attend to all talks, so I probably missed some great stuff…

Day 1

I couldn’t help but notice at the great organization of the event. Even with around 500 ~ 700 enthusiasts (from my rough estimations) there was hardly any waiting lines to get in, or to get the headphones (required for the “open” talks), or even the coffee breaks! Each one of us was given two coupons per day, and we just had to trade the coupon for a small package with the food. On top of that, there was unlimited coffee and water, major kudos for Locaweb and Codeminer for this accomplishment!

Highlights of the day:

Code quality

Bryan Helmkamp has been doing this talk for some time now but still has something more to add, and it’s always a please to listen to him.

Sequel

Adriano Dadario demonstrated this awesome alternative to Active Record, with unparalleled performance, and with a large community supporting it. I’ve never used it, but now I’m eager to use it on my next project! It fits wonderfully for simpler API apps. Have a look: https://t.co/MNdwSjrWBt

Ruby concurrency

Jerry D’Antonio, author of the concurrent-ruby gem explained how Ruby 3 will create a foundation, to build upon and work with concurrency, with the introduction of “guilds”. What is important to know is that this will not replace existing gems (sidekiq, sucker punch, concurrent-ruby), or even require them to do major re-writes. Instead, it will allow them to improve the programming abstractions they already provide. Here’s the video: https://t.co/SteKd8erMb

Day 2

Caching in Web Apps

Jean Carlo Emer, a developer at Globo.com, went deep into the various caching mechanisms and techniques. From the web browser, to the network, server, and finally your app, here are some examples of what you can do: https://t.co/eFmZdKMPER

Security in Rails

Diego Rossini Vieira goes from the most common flaws to some very disturbing that probably never crossed your mind… like taking advantage of the response time of your API to find out if a resource exists… yep, go see it for yourself: https://t.co/UuvggAaxO8

Why (still) Ruby?

The closing talk was reserved to Akira Matsuda. In his funny presentation, he wraps this year’s edition with thoughts on what was accomplished with Ruby and what is there to come. Have a look: https://speakerdeck.com/a_matsuda/why-still-ruby

Sayōnara Akita

Fabio Akita has been the main organizer for RubyConf Brasil for a whole decade now and announced that he has met his goal, and it’s time for a new endeavor. You can read more about his farewell notes here: http://www.akitaonrails.com/2016/09/26/the-next-10-years

Honorable mentions

There were some talks that I got to see, which are not directly related to Ruby, but still very relevant since we, rubyists, often talk about Rails and all the things about web apps and their development.

Progressive web apps

This one got me really hyped for the future, the concept for progressive web apps is sooo awesome. Sérgio Lopes showed how he easily developed a very simple app, in plain HTML and a couple of JS lines, and it looked just like a native mobile app. Check it out here: https://t.co/Ld2RYZjDpN

Angular 2 + Typescript

If you’re coming from AngularJS, and are eager to jump into Angular2, then this talk is for you. William Grasel gave a quick rundown on what to expect from Angular2 and it’s major conceptual differences towards AngularJS. Slides here: http://slides.com/williamgrasel/desbravando-angularjs-2-e-typescript

Wrap-up

Ruby is awesome, and it’s so fun to work with! This year we’ve seen that the community is experimenting a lot with languages and frameworks inspired by Ruby and Ruby on Rails. Such as Crystal, Elixir, and Phoenix. These all seem to be in very good shape, and I was particularly impressed how Phoenix is maturing fast as a production-ready framework.

These adventures, might lead to some of you to think that Ruby is dying and the community is moving towards new stuff. This is far from true. Ruby is stronger than ever, and very important updates are to come in the following years. In fact, the whole ecosystem can benefit is benefiting a lot from the new concepts and novel ideas emerging in Crystal, Elixir, and Go.