Inside EuRuKo 2017: Ruby talks & more

This year, the YOPESO Ruby department attended EuRuKo — the annual European Ruby Conference, held in Budapest. We highlighted the best moments and shared with you our thoughts on it.

Ruby is famous for its amazing community and it is easy to see why. With close to 700 attendees from all over the world and presentations on diverse and interesting subjects (both technical and non-technical), this year’s conference was an incredible experience.

The 3x3 Goal, JRuby and GraphQL or the changes that we are facing.

The conference was kicked off with a talk by Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, the creator of the Ruby language. Matz seemed a bit concerned with how well the community will adopt new versions of the language yet he also presented an exciting possibility: the MJIT project developed by Vladimir Makarov. It could be used for just in time compilation in Ruby and could bring the language closer to the 3x3 goal. Heard of it? Matz has the ambition of having Ruby 3.0 three times faster than Ruby 2.0. And while that is being developed, we are delighted to try the new updates.

One of the updates is on JRuby presented by Charles Nutter. Good news! We are closer to having solutions to all issues with running Rails 5. JRuby is an implementation of Ruby on the Java Virtual Machine. As YOPESO is ”home” to many Java developers, we are always happy to see these two worlds integrate in harmony.

We are excited about the possibilities of GraphQL and we’re dying to use it in a project, so it was nice to see the positive results reported by Netto Farah. Erik Sasha Romijn delivered a highly relevant message about empathy and the importance of codes of conduct. And let’s not forget about exploring Machine Learning and how Arafat Khan brought TensorFlow in the Ruby ecosystem.

Future directions and more on how Ruby evolves.

The closing talk by Bozhidar Batsov, addressed several issues present in the language and expressed some concerns with future directions. The sarcastic tone coupled with relevant examples made the closure entertaining yet not oblivious to the message.

That made us think on how we contribute and engage in Ruby evolution. Though we are pretty sure that as community, we are already a breeding ground for future updates.

See you next year in Vienna to catch up on new features!