Why did you choose to present “Making GitLab Faster” talk on Rubyc-2016?
The talk is based on my work from the past 8 months or so. A lot of the things learned can be used to improve performance of other Ruby/Rails applications. It also gives some insight in how we work at GitLab to make GitLab faster. Why Rubyc? Well, Ben Lovell persuaded me to submit a talk to Rubyc :)
What was new in 2015?
I actually can't think of anything. There certainly have been interesting events (e.g. Ruby 2.3, JRuby 9.0.0.0) but nothing that I can think of that impacts Ruby as a whole.
What do you anticipate in nearest future?
The Rails developers have finally realized it's good to embrace databases more and as a result have been adding more support for certain database features (e.g. PostgreSQL specific features). I expect this trend to continue in the coming years.
For Ruby one of the things that will change is a bigger focus on performance. With the increasing popularity of languages such as Go and Elixir Ruby will have to improve or it will be forgotten.
Who can beat Ruby?
In order of their popularity: Go and Elixir. Node.js is losing its "coolness" factor and from a technical point of view won't scale as well as Go and Elixir. Over time Go and Elixir will become more and more popular up to a point where they are as popular as Ruby is today.
Do you think video tutorials are good?
Personally I'm not a huge fan of tutorial videos as I can never focus properly when listening to somebody talk, I'd rather take my time reading a text based tutorial.
Are Ruby and Rails really going to extinct?
It's already ending because people are moving to Go, Elixir, etc. In all seriousness, realistically I give both another 10 years at most. This doesn't mean both will cease to exist in 10 years from now, but they will certainly have lost a lot of popularity.