Last month I had the fortune to go to Railsberry, a Ruby conference in Kraków.
The experience
The event was amazing — I’d expected (and found) talented speakers giving great talks to cool fellow attendees; what surprised and impressed me was the enthusiasm of the conference organizers, expressed through the incredibly detailed theme of the conference. The berries on the tables, the flying pink unicorn on stage, animations at the breaks, the T-shirts, yard decorations, conference booklets: the Railsberry spirit was organic, genuine, and infectious, and quickly spread to the audience. (Did I mention the delicious raspberry vodka?)
It’s hard to describe in text the cumulative effect of all this effort. It was magical, in a way I didn’t expect a conference (even a Rails conf) could be.
A dump of unlabeled photos of Krakow
The setting matched the conference: Kraków is beautiful. I’d never been to Poland before, and I was impressed. The streets are lined with Altbaus; the people are friendly; the old town absolutely gorgeous and scenic; the castle huge and satisfied towering above the city; the food delicious. (If you go there you must go to Miod Malina. Don’t argue, just do it. You won’t regret it.) That everything was significantly cheaper than even Berlin was a nice bonus, too.
Honestly, Kraków felt much more like my vision of “central European city” than almost everywhere I’ve been. I’m excited to go back someday to see the salt mines and explore the the surprisingly alive Jewish sector, which we barely got to.
The Conference
Among all the meeting of cool new people, eating of delicious food, drinking of tasty beverages, and exploring of scenic streets, I did manage to learn a few things.
Tom Stuart gave the talk that most impacted my thinking, on “developing from the outside in”. He spoke about the value of building systems not from the inside (database schema as, models) but from the outside (the external libraries that use it with mock responses etc. then controllers and routing). It’s a logical and effective way to approach certain design, and I’m excited to try it on some suitable problems in the near future.
A number of other talks also stuck with me:
- Yehuda Katz on why Rails is hard, a reminder of the difficult challenges the framework handles under the hood (for instance, string encoding and CSRF) and why the extra size and complexity of Rails is often justified.
- Konstantin Haase and Josh Kalderimis on Travis’ new pull request testing and on their funding model — such an amazing project. I’ve been using it for Koala for nearly a year, and it’s made such a huge difference. (I’m slightly ashamed to say, I still need to contribute.)
- Tammer Saleh on service oriented architecture antipatterns, a very timely talk given our recent work at 6Wunderkinder.
It looks like slides and video aren’t up yet, but when they are I’ll link them.
Lightning
At the conference I had the opportunity to give a lightning talk, which as always was fun. I spoke about some experimentation I’d done with Rails’ render method to inject certain options into your API on a consistent and universal level. Check it out:
Slides here.
The coolest part came afterward: I mentioned in my 5 minutes that I wasn’t sure about the approach, and Yehuda (yes, wycats) came up to me afterward. His first reaction, he told me, was the same as mine: wrapping render seemed like a bad idea.
After thinking about it for a moment, though, he realized it was fine: Rails Metal overrides render, and if the framework does that, it’s okay for app developers as well. Moreover, the signature of render is stable, so this approach won’t make your code brittle.
This was awesome: clearly I done something interteresting and my approach was right (a big relief since I’ll be talking in more detail on API uniformity in Barcelona in September).
In conclusion
Conferences are great. I’ll be going to three(!) more this year, and will post more about that and over the next few months.
Cheers,
Alex
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