The fourth Svitla Ruby Conference (aka RubyC) took place as usual in Kiev on the 4-5th June. Organized by Svitla Systems, RubyC once again proved to be the biggest Ukrainian event devoted to Ruby, Ruby on Rails, and related technologies, having gathered almost 400 developers from all over Europe. For the first time, RubyC became a fully English-speaking conference and a truly international one. It was included in the Top 10 International Ruby events of the year, so no wonder Ruby developers and experts not only from Ukraine, but also from Italy, Germany, Serbia, Slovenia, Russia, Poland and Belarus participated in RubyC this year.
In two days, RubyC presented 13 speakers, who gave wonderful and insightful speeches, outlining the hottest topics and latest changes in Ruby. We thank them all for coming and presenting on RubyC-2016 and gladly share videos for everyone interested.
RubyC expresses its kindest gratitude to Ruby Sponsors - N-iX, DataArt and Global Logic for their support!
Robert Pankowezki (Poland) introduced Saga Pattern and “killed” the audience with his knowledge and many-many-many examples of code. After his speech it was hard to resist applying in practice all this information to one’s legacy app.
Andy Pike (Great Britain) discussed how not to become a zombie while maintaining your Rails app. If you wonder how Star Wars, unicorn, and sumo wrestler can relate to Rails, just ask Andy Pike. Supported with bursts of laughter, the presentation contained living illustrations and useful recommendations on how to escape complex and unmaintainable code that will finally lead to the “heat death of university”.
Aaron Cruz (USA/Austria) understands that nothing lasts forever and someday Ruby also will need an alternative. Aaron sees the best and nearest candidates in Go, Elixir and a newcomer Crystal. In his presentation, he showed code examples and discussed features and peculiarities of each of them.
Adam Niedzielski (Poland) is not a person to waste time and money in vain. He always works for perspective though he confessed that he’d never prototyped anything! The aim of his presentation was to share with the audience how to select the right (read «long-term perspective») gems for your app to make it quickly and at the same time keep in mind how this app will look like in 5 years.
Elena Morgun (Ukraine) presented microservices as a solution that helps split application into smaller parts. Of course, there is nothing innovative in splitting system into separate blocks for developers, however, microservices bring a new breath of air in this context. Well-structured speech was very well received.
Yorick Peterse (Netherlands) introduced GitLab and told about its problems connected with performance. He shared the experience of how they overcame the issues in their Rails application. Those who face similar problems with Rails apps received solutions to be taken to use in their own projects.
Miha Rekar (Slovenia) was a speaker with a secret topic, which turned out to be “Flame Graphs” – something definitely new and useful in terms of performance analysis. Miha explained how to read flame graphs to find the hot spots where your Software performance is low and optimize them.
Michael Serdyuk (Ukraine) started his speech putting a philosophic question in front of the audience: “For whom is the code written?” And the answer was not the client or product owner. First of all, it is you and your colleagues, keeping in mind new people and yourself in the future. Michael took most of his principles of good code from real life and his presentation was insightful and full of wisdom.
Мichael Bortnik (Ukraine) is a person absolutely in love with mRuby, who doesn’t stop exploring and having fun doing it. It was interesting to hear about embedding of mRuby into other languages and launching it at micro-controller devices.
Andrey Savchenko (Ukraine) showed in real examples an easy approach to simplify your code. One of his advice was to avoid metaprogramming all possible ways. This provoked a kind of disagreement among the audience. Andrey is always striving to create simple code that will be understood by everyone and easily tested.
Bozhidar Batsov (Bulgaria) right from the start won over the audience with his warm and simple manner, singing “Hakuna Matata” and making a funny quiz about himself. Bozhidar encouraged Ruby developers, who are in their way from novice to master with valuable advices and handy insights, mentioning also aspects one cannot go on without during the travel to perfection.
Dmitriy Zimin (Ukraine) shared his personal experience about a project that combined ASP.Net platform, Ruby language and Cucumber as a testing tool. Dmitriy was glad to present his non-trivial approach to make it all work. The presentation ended with a friendly arm-wrestling duel between him and anyone, who dared to ask questions.
Ben Lovell (Great Britain) did not leave anyone indifferent about his full of humor presentation. The message Ben tried to deliver is that everyone uses OpenSource software; however, nobody guesses how one can contribute to them. Ben shared the ways YOU can help, and it is not all about money.