Wroc_love.rb 2017 — Ruby conference, subjectively.
Wroc_love.rb is the biggest Ruby conference organized in Poland and probably also in central Europe. It’s called “the best Java conference in the Ruby world”. The main goals that are behind this conference are:
The ideas presented at our conference are very advanced. They are meant to inspire the way we write code, the way we help our clients and users. Our goal is to ensure a good environment to learn and discuss. We love confronting ideas, even when it’s uncomfortable to the Ruby status-quo. We love experimenting with new formats of talks and discussions, like fights, fishbowls and crowd-moderated discussion panels. Everything that can inspire the Ruby programmers is more than welcome at our conference.
Motivations
Last year’s edition of wroc_love.rb conference was my first big conference, in which I participated with my best friend, also a Ruby developer. It was the first time we’ve heard of DDD, CQRS, Event Sourcing, UUID, ROM. A year later I can still remember the talks “From legacy to DDD” by Andrzej Krzywda, “The Saga Pattern” by Robert Pankowecki and “Opal.rb” by Elia Schito. The Ruby community was strong and growing, and I was proud to be part of it. In summation, the event gave us a tremendous amount of inspiration, knowledge, and motivation to constantly improve as Ruby developers.
I was excited to implement all the fabulous solutions that I learnt during the conference, and for the next year I would constantly encourage my team to make use of all the good practices, patterns and tips. They have worked great — improved architecture, cleaner code and faster delivery. Feeling like Vikings after discovering lands in the West and returning home with a hefty plunder, my friend and I knew we would be coming back for more. When the time came to sign up for the next edition, our colleagues wanted to join, so this year Briisk and Appchance were represented not by two, but four developers.
Expectations
Our expectations were flying high. Even more so, due to the emergence of Elixir! It has become a “mature” language, and there has been a clear trend among Ruby developers to move to Elixir. As a person who enjoys learning new technologies and trying out new stuff, I jumped at an opportunity to try Elixir with Phoenix. So I was super excited to see “Panel — Elixir vs. Ruby, fight” on the agenda — I was curious how Ruby community would react to Elixir.
Talks
From my perspective, the two most interesting talks this year were “The Overnight Failure” by Sebastian Sogamoso and “Karafka- place where ruby, rails and kafka meet together” by Maciej Mensfeld. Sagamoso shared the story of one of his biggest fuckups, in detail, with a little bit of drama. Something like this does speak to imagination! Mensfeld, on the other hand, spoke about Kafka — a distributed streaming platform/messaging system and its implementation in the Ruby world. I made a mental note to try it out at the earliest opportunity.
Some other notable speeches were:
- “Fault tolerance in Ruby” — Hubert Łępicki
- “The babel fish is data: a case study” — Norbert Wójtowicz
- “Machine learning for the rescue” — Mariusz Gil
Battle
And finally, the thing I was waiting for — “Panel — Elixir vs. Ruby, fight”.
There were two representatives for each side.
In Elixir team:
- Hubert Łępicki — Co-owner of AmberBit, Ruby developer, manager, architect.
- Michał Muskała — Elixir & Ruby Developer at Woumedia, Elixir’s Ecto core-team member.
In Ruby team:
- Andrzej Krzywda — Arkency founder and CEO, Ruby on Rails developer, DDD expert. An influencer in Ruby community especially in Polish one.
- Robert Pankowecki — Ruby Developer at Arkency (one of the main supporters of wroc_love.rb conference)
The first thing that the audience heard from the stage was “Remember, this is the day when Elixir dies!” articulated by Andrzej. I thought that was a joke made to make us feel that this was really a battle, while in fact everybody knew the two communities were friendly towards each other. But I was mistaken — what ensued was a barbaric slaughter. The Elixir team was calm and tried to answer the questions the Ruby team shot at them. The tactic of the Ruby team seemed to be avoiding addressing inconvenient issues by attacking the opponents with prepared offensive questions.
And how did the Ruby team deal with questions they were asked, for instance, about the biggest advantage of Elixir over Ruby, which is scalability and concurrency? — They said they “Just don’t need it”. No comment.
One of the most ridiculous things I heard from the Ruby team was comparing the appearance of CoffeeScript in the JavaScript world to the appearance of Elixir in the Ruby world. CoffeeScript is just syntactic sugar for JavaScript, but Elixir is a whole new environment based on the Erlang platform, so they are incomparable!
I was flabbergasted by the accusation made by the Ruby team that there is a negative and offensive attitude from the Elixir community towards Ruby. I regularly read blog posts, listen to speeches and search forums and I haven’t found any evidence to that. This panel, though, was evidence to the contrary — it is the Ruby community that is negative and offensive towards Elixir.
I noticed that in the hearts of Ruby/Rails developers grows a fear that one day they could become treated like the PHP community. They are afraid that all they achieve in the Ruby world will become useless, because there won’t be anyone who could use it. I was distasted by how emotional and lacking substance the panel was.
Conclusions
Even though general organization of the conference was of a high standard (big thanks to all organizers and supporters), I had a feeling that in comparison with the previous edition there was much less content. I found some consolation in the awesome Ruby socks :)
Our expectations were probably too high. Also, for each developer there comes a time when he’s heard so much stuff, that it’s hard to get impressed. At the end of the day, it’s people that count. I would like to say thanks to all people I had a chance to meet and talk to. It’s because of you that I will participate in the conference next year.
See you there!
