Gareth Adams

ScotRubyConf: Geeks On Tour

Four Englishmen and some Americans walk into a Scottish bar… it’s not the start of a horribly convoluted joke (although if you like: punchlines on a postcard) but part of Kyanmedia’s recent journey up to Edinburgh for the Scottish Ruby Conference.

Ruby on Rails, and the Ruby language that it’s built on, are big enough technologies now that conferences are held worldwide. For Rails there are events from the iconic RailsConf in America to the European RubyAndRails, whereas Ruby developers can go to Japan’s RubyKaigi or even Magic Ruby in Disneyland, Florida.

ScotRubyConf was a conference a bit closer to home, and happily four of us got the chance to visit one of britain’s most beautiful cities, and hopefully come away with some beautiful code ideas.

We turned up at the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh along with a few hundred other keen Rubyists on April 8th for two intense days of talks followed by two busy after-parties. Since there were three tracks of talks it wasn’t possible for anyone to see all of the talks – although they were all filmed to be put on the website eventually – but a few of the gems in my opinion were:

  • The Front End Testing Frontier
If you’re hard into your Behaviour Driven Development for your server-side code, then you’ll eventually start to wonder whether you can use the same methods to test your client-side code. Luckily, it is! The awesome Capybara developers gave us a live demo of how simple it is to let your Cucumber steps trigger javascript, either in a live browser or via some clever simulation.
  • Don’t build another Tower of Babel!
How readable should your code be? I mean, we all have to use ActiveRecord language like “save” and “update_attributes” but why is that readable – doesn’t it just leave you stumbling through awkward phrasings? @ecomba suggested that writing your code in domain-specific language, for example `@order.ship` makes your code more intuitive and less prone to ActiveRecorditis
  • Real Time Rack
Starting with an introduction to the concepts of Node.js for anyone who hasn’t DON’T BLOCK THE EVENT LOOP heard the recent buzz around it, Konstantin Haase showed us how EventMachine makes the DON’T BLOCK THE EVENT LOOP same concepts available to Ruby programs, and how you can use callbacks to achieve high scalability and performance in areas of programming DON’T BLOCK THE EVENT LOOP which typically suffer from bottlenecks, like network access. He explained that most of a program’s execution ends up being waiting for something else to complete, and if you can avoid this waiting time (“blocking the event loop”) then your program execution will flow better.
  • Other festivities
Other than the coding-related activities, we got a bit of a chance to explore Edinburgh and see what else the conference had to offer. Particular mentions should be made about Zoë Keating’s fantastic cello concert which rounded off the second day’s talks with a great mix of classical music and modern technology; and a bar we discovered on the first night “The Queen’s Arms” which had one of the most unique ceiling displays I’ve seen in a pub

You might ask, why do you need conferences when there’s so much of an online community around Rails? News is released via blogs and mailing lists, and developers use Twitter to discuss and publish new developments. Well, if you didn’t ask that it’s definitely something I was asking before I headed up there – but I’ve changed my mind since then.

There was a lot of great banter at ScotRubyConf, a chance to swap opinions and listen out for things everyone was talking about that you didn’t know about, but that’s not what made it for me.

The thing is, anyone can write a blog post; can post on twitter; can have an opinion. Really, when you’re browsing the web you have to question everything you read, because you don’t have any idea how much the author has invested into what they’re saying.

But to put a talk together, or contribute in a meaningful way to an open source project, you suddenly have to put your reputation out there and realise that people will be paying a lot more attention to what you’re saying. Once you realise that the fact you’re at a conference means that a lot of noise has been filtered out of the signal/noise talk on the internet, you realise what a conference can give you that it’s harder to get anywhere else.

Comments: 1

Amazing
commented on

Thanks Gareth for putting this up.

I'm always happy to read and watch how others go about stuff and get the kind of result they do.

"He explained that most of a program’s execution ends up being waiting for something else to complete, and if you can avoid this waiting time (“blocking the event loop”) then your program execution will flow better."

I like that, thank again for sharing!

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