Top 5 Talks at Barcelona Ruby Conference 2014 [Videos]
BaRuCo is one of the biggest and most recognized annual Ruby conferences. Thanks to EL Passion I had the pleasure of visiting Barcelona to attend this three-day event.
I’m a RoR developer for a little over a year now, so I’m fairly new to it. I liked BaRuCo because apart from the talks, I could compare notes with other attendees. I also had interesting conversations with the speakers during the coffee breaks and parties.
This conference is not the only reason to come to Barcelona — you can also think about vacationing after the event. The city has perfect weather, great architecture, lively nightlife, exceptional food — I couldn’t ask for more. I’ve been there only three days, but I managed to enjoy all of the mentioned.
After attending every talk on the list and watching them online, I picked five talks that I found most intriguing. Although there are many more worth seeing, here are my Top 5:
Matt Aimonetti — Go Auth Urself
When using Ruby on Rails you get a lot of security-related issues taken care of by the framework. But nothing is ever perfect and clearly marshalling your cookies sounds like kind of a loose end. Usually it’s not a threat, but many people working on your project have access to your application’s secret token. Add default cookie salt to that and you got yourself a recipe for disaster.
Matt Aimonetti discovered this cookie injection vulnerability when writing a Go-powered API that could handle session data stored by his Rails application. In this video you can listen a story about it, wrapped in a gripping, witty narrative.
Erik Michaels-Ober — Writing fast Ruby
Majority of Ruby developers don’t lose much sleep over their code’s performance. Ruby is a high-level language and it’s designed to make programmers happy. We prefer to make our code highly decoupled and maintainable rather than searching for every trick that would make it a little bit faster. Needless to say, such tricks may affect code readability in a bad way. But there are some optimizations that don’t do that and it’s really good to know them. The regular Ruby doesn’t have a compiler that could optimize some of our code for us and it’s almost effortless to make a habit of using them. That’s why you should master these micro-optimizations.
Tom Stuart — Refactoring Ruby with Monads
Have you heard about monads? Well that doesn’t really matter anyway, because even if you have, there’s a chance you don’t understand them.
There’s absolutely no shame in that — monads are a difficult concept. If you do know monads, you probably think they belong with functional programming. While that’s not entirely wrong, we can learn a great deal from them and apply that wisdom to Ruby. That can relieve our beloved OOP language of some headaches and make programming more fun.
Julian Cheal — Dancing with Robots
If you happen to like Ruby and robots, this one will be a blast for you. Julian Cheal had a great presentation at BaRuCo. He introduced artoo — a Ruby DSL for robots and physical computing.
Why would you want to write code for your robot or embedded device in C or JavaScript when you can do that in Ruby? It comes with integrations of 15 popular platforms and drivers for other devices. If you’re interested but don’t want to test all these appliances yourself, Julian did that for you in quite a spectacular way.
Leon Gersing — Keep Software Weird
It’s the least technical talk in the set, but the most thought-provoking one. Leon Gersing is an excellent talker and a very charismatic person. The presentation is about seeking your own path to achieve your goals — in programming or not.
It begins with a story how (the dominant) software development culture evolved. Leon explains how the emerging of counter culture induces adapting new ideas, and that requires some outside-the-box thinking. See what happens next:
There were other great talks at the event and you can find all BaRuCo 2014 clips here. If you attended the conference or watched the videos online, let me know in the comments below who made your top 5 list.
