A RubyDay in Verona
On April 11th and 12th, Neill Pearman and myself we were in Verona for two days of conference organized by the Grusp collective. The first day, labelled RubyDay, was dedicated to the Ruby programming language while the second, VueDay, was about the Vue.js javascript framework. In 2017, we had already participated in RubyDay, which was then held in Florence. We were amazed by the quality of the presentations and the smooth organization, so when we learned that RubyDay would be organized again this year we immediately wanted to take part.
As a developer, visiting conferences either as a speaker or as a simple attendee is always an enriching experience. It allows you to meet other developers using the same tools as you, to be informed of the latest news and to measure the dynamism of the community. We generally come back energized with a strong desire to implement what has been newly learned.
This year again, RubyDay did not disappoint us. The talks were of an excellent technical level, given by top notch speakers.
We were particularly impressed by the opening keynote of Xavier Noria, core team member of the Ruby on Rails framework, the framework that we use at EPFL Extension School to develop the teaching platform as well as to teach web application development. Xavier Noria recently worked on a new autoloader for Ruby, called Zeitwerk, which will be integrated in the next version of Rails (v6.0). He offered us a beautiful dive into the mysteries of the modularity of Rails, demonstrating at the same time how his new autoloader will offer better performance while having a reduced memory footprint. While the previous version of the Rails autoloader was based on a proprietary implementation of the #const_missing method by Rails, Zeitwerk will leverage the native Ruby Module#autoload and can therefore be used in any Ruby project, not just in Rails applications. During lunch, we had the nice surprise to see Xavier sitting at our table and were able to ask him all kinds of questions and he patiently and kindly took the time to answer. We were therefore also able to learn more about the organization and functioning of the Rails core team.
Emily Stolfo, currently senior software engineer at Elastic, then shared her experience in developing libraries interfacing with distributed systems such as MongoDb or ElasticSearch. She explained how such libraries manage to abstract the complexity of these underlying systems through good error handling, and the use of idempotent code.
Luca Guidi, creator of the Hanami framework, then shared with us his plans for version 2.0 of his project, emphasizing simplification and accessibility for new developers. One of the ways to achieve this would be, according to him, a better mix between functional and object-oriented programming strategies. An alchemy that should exploit the best of both worlds. His very clear and enthusiastic presentation really made us want to develop something with Hanami.
Elia Schito gave us a demonstration of Opal, a Ruby to Javascript compiler, showing us how to develop in a small amount of code, a minimalist version of the Tetris game, first in the command line and then in the browser.
At the end of the day, Bozhidar “Bug” Batsov gave us his vision of what Ruby’s next version will be (3.0) and the promise that this version would be 3 times more efficient than the current version. He showed us how the Ruby core team is trying to reach this figure (tl;dr they probably won’t).
The second day dedicated to the Vue.js Javascript framework, a competitor of React, Angular and other JS frameworks. It was an opportunity for us to get to know Vue.js because neither of us currently uses it (we use React.js at the EPFL Extension School). And of course, we’re also coming back with a great desire to use it in some of our projects, the main reason being that Vue.js approach to interface development seems to be quite in line with the Ruby on Rails way of doing things. The enthusiasm of the community and the energy released by the presenters is also no stranger to this motivation.
Finally, we would like to take our hat off to the organizing team for these two days which did an impeccable job! We are definitely very motivated to come back next year (the dates are already announced). We would have no excuses since Verona is easily reachable by train from Geneva.
See you next year!
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About the EPFL Extension School
The EPFL Extension School teaches digital skills in data science, machine learning, web application development, UI development with React.js, and more. Please visit our website, reach out to us by e-mail or Twitter, and most importantly: go get those digital skills!
