RailsConf 2018 Recap

Our engineering team at SalesLoft was super excited to be a sponsor at RailsConf 2018, easily the largest gathering of Rails developers in the US and the premiere event for the Rails community. Being a Rails shop, we thought this would be a great way to meet other Rails developers across the country and engage with the community.

So we brought together 8 engineers from different product teams and different experience levels — from our newest software engineers, to engineering managers, to our principal architect. Then we packed up and headed to Pittsburgh, by way of Atlanta.

Most of our team had not been to RailsConf since 2015, when the conference was held in Atlanta. A few members of our team hadn’t even attended RailsConf before. So we had a range of expectations going into day one and the conference exceeded all of them. There were so many amazing takeaways for our team. Here are just a few highlights from our experience at RailsConf.

Keynotes

Day one began with a keynote from DHH. He opened with a discussion around “Conceptual Compression”. He described how the Basecamp’s engineering team dreaded having to implement sharding — splitting data across multiple databases, as the demands on their application continued to scale. The team kept putting the problem off, until advances in hardware mitigated the need for sharding at Basecamp altogether.¹

Conceptual compression is the idea of taking a concept and simplifying it so that a developer is able to get 80% of the value with 20% of the effort. The ORM ActiveRecord is a good example of getting significant value with minimal effort. Rather than focusing on writing performant sql queries, developers can focus on higher level problems.¹

DHH concluded by saying the story of Rails has been one of conceptual compression and it is this story that makes him most proud because conceptual compression lowers the barrier to enter the development world. It decreases the amount a person needs to know to get started.¹

Sessions

The first session talk I attended was The GraphQL Way: A new path for JSON APIs. As the engineering manager for our API and Integrations team, this session held particular interest for me.

We are always looking for ways to find issues in our app before our customers do. Ryan Laughlin proposed an interesting way of thinking about this in his session, The Doctor Is In: Using checkups to find bugs in production. He mentioned that this was his first conference talk. He did a great job and the audience cheered him on even more after he mentioned that. That’s just one example of how welcoming this community is to newcomers, whether they’re new to speaking or development as a whole.

Another talk that was well attended by our team was Devly, a multi-service development environment.

Other Major Takeaways

Brand recognition within Rails Community

We were able to introduce SalesLoft to the RailsConf audience as the #1 Best Place to Work in Atlanta! This allowed us to showcase both our culture and the larger Atlanta tech community, which appealed to lots of attendees. Many engineers noted that they take a company more seriously when they see them at this type of event. Additionally, we were sharing the space with companies like Heroku, Google, and Github. Those are good names to be associated with in people’s memory.

Investment in growth and career development

By sending a team of engineers to RailsConf, we let our team and the RailsConf audience know we seriously value our team’s career growth and we are willing to invest in them.

Education/ Inspiration

We all learned so much from the conference, which we plan to share with our larger engineering team in a series of lunch and learns and blog posts.

Biggest Takeaways for the Team

• There is a real desire in the community to not only solve problems brilliantly, but have effective relationships with the people you work with. I loved the amount of talks that we’re non technical and spoke about being a good teammate and integrity.
• The routine of the things we don’t think about as an engineer creates unconscious confidence that allows for better more confident coding. I was able to take away key insights and knowledge around kafka — how it works and why its so cool. The universe is about people 😃
• Webpacker has a ton of momentum and official support in Rails. There were 2–3 talks about webpack and each promoted the webpacker gem. The Rails Doctrine or “Rails Way” of convention over configuration, optimizing for programmer happiness, and pushing up a big tent still influences major communities today. At the same time some aspects are being forgotten. For example, one session walked through DHH’s classic “Build a Blog in 15 Minutes” exercise, but this time using React and the Webpacker gem instead of plain Rails. At the end of 30 minutes barely 2 out of 4 CRUD operations were completed
• We already have thread pooling in Melody as it’s a dependency for ActiveRecord. The “living space” mental model for software development makes a lot more sense for SaaS than the “construction” one does.The tech industry is just as much about people as it is about tech; there were several stellar talks about the showing empathy, making a team successful by giving them value and making them feel safe, collaboration through pairing is extremely valuable
• The tech industry is just as much about people as it is about tech; there were several stellar talks about the showing empathy, making a team successful by giving them value and making them feel safe, collaboration through pairing is extremely valuable

Other Recommended Talks

• Leveling up a Heroic Team
• Pairing: a guide to fruitful collaboration
• Debugging Rails Itself by Sean Griffin
• PRPL on Rails
• Ten Year of Rails Tutorials by Michael Hartl (for nostalgia reasons)
• Broken APIs Break Trust by Alex Wood
• So You’ve Got Yourself a Kafka: Event-Powered Rails Services
• Ruby: A Family History
• Building a Collaborative Text Editor
• Mechanically Confident
• Stating The Obvious
• Lessons in Ethical Development I Learned From Star Wars

Community and Team building

We found such great opportunities to bond and learn from each other in groups outside of our everyday product teams. We also had engaging conversations and sought out learning opportunities with so many other RailsConf attendees. As a bonus, we were also able to forge deeper relationships with many of partners and customers who attended.

Resources

1. RailsConf 2018 Keynote recap by Jesse Spevak
2. RailsConf 2018 Session Videos