Blue Ridge Ruby 2024
who it's for
Ruby developers, Rails developers, engineering managers, backend engineers, technical writers, early career developers, open source maintainers
topics
Rails validators and ActiveModel; uniqueness constraints and DB indexes; Hotwire with Rails; SQLite save_thread usage; OpenAI Assistant API function calling; multi-agent synthetic surveys (Expected Parrot DSL); replacing Kinesis and DynamoDB with simpler stacks; Shape Up six-week cycles; zettelkasten atomic notes publishing; Ruby-in-the-browser playground; database transaction patterns in Rails; nil handling patterns in Ruby
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Lightning Talk – John Epperson | John Epperson | 06m |
Burnout lasts about seven years here; recovery begins last summer after long daily shower meditation and constant background YouTube and podcast listening… | ||
| Lightning Talk – Daniel Nolan | Daniel Nolan | 06m |
A Lawn and Landscape assistant built on GPT using the Assistant API and function calling controls plant recommendations, garden inventory, and weather checks… | ||
| A Rubyist's Guide to Existential Dread | Jeremy Smith | 21m |
Claims six concrete moves for coping with industry uncertainty including don’t panic, three specific losses to guard against — craft livelihood community — and… | ||
| The Pursuit of Happiness | Dustin Haefele Tschan | 28m |
Income raises reported happiness but measurement matters: a Gallup phone poll with binary mood questions produced a $60–90k plateau because the unhappiest 20%… | ||
| Simplicity: The Key to Software Success | Brian Childress | 38m |
Argues that simplicity wins with concrete moves: replace a sprawling AWS stack (Kinesis, DynamoDB, ML pipelines) by removing about 80% of technologies to meet… | ||
| Lightning Talk – Eric Tillberg | Eric Tillberg | 05m |
Uses ChatGPT to check assumptions and claims that technologists default to a technology-progressive theory of history — progress is assumed, loss is rare —… | ||
| Validate Me! - Demystifying Rails Validators | Rachael Wright Munn | 24m |
Shows that ComparisonValidator merged into Rails and that custom validators can live in app, lib, gem, or Rails itself; explains validators registered via… | ||
| Lightning Talk – Alli Zadrozny | Alli Zadrozny | 07m |
Claims that zle Casten is a practical second brain and publishing pipeline, backed by a personal 2023 myle Casten graph with hubs for Blue Ridge Ruby meetings… | ||
| Narrative Reflections: Transmuting Ruby Code into... | Travis Turner | 34m |
Gives a concise, actionable roadmap for turning Ruby work into publishable writing: claim is that context plus a small repeatable process beats perfect prose… | ||
| Lightning Talk – Giovann Filippi | Giovann Filippi | 05m |
Claim: Shape Up works in a small company after a straightforward rollout. Implementation starts with a single spreadsheet to track cycle dates, teams run… | ||
| Navigating Career Transitions - Stop Second Guessing... | Lauren Auchter | 26m |
Career pivot advice that names the concrete moves and outcomes: enroll in a bootcamp or Thinkful Engineering Flex program while keeping a day job, spend months… | ||
| Lightning Talk – Lee McAlilly | Lee McAlilly | 04m |
Claims a multi-agent GPT synthetic survey can emulate human choices and validate auction and behavioral economics results researchers at MIT observe. Describes… | ||
| Nil - Nothing is Easy, Is It? | Craig Buchek | 41m |
Nil causes expensive runtime errors and the talk gives concrete fixes: use the safe navigation operator (&.) (Ruby 2.3), prefer Array.wrap and .compact for… | ||
| Glimpses of Humanity: My Game-Building AI Pair | Louis Antonopoulos | 44m |
Builds a text‑driven escape‑room adventure called Awaken in Rails, pairing over 140,000 words (≈450 printed pages) with Atheniel‑née‑ChatGPT (ChatGPT‑4). Shows… | ||
| Lightning Talk – Michael King | Michael King | 05m |
Shows concrete concurrency patterns and results: uses Ruby Thread and the Queue class for producer–consumer, demonstrates a Redis list with R push / L pop as a… | ||
| My Rails App is Old Enough to Drink: Over Two... | John Paul Ashenfelter | 35m |
An app runs the same codebase for 24 years and still serves a weekly newspaper feature, originally sending TIFFs on CDs. It starts in ColdFusion and migrates… | ||
| The Very Hungry Transaction | Daniel Colson | 33m |
Shows concrete failures and fixes: Rails ActiveRecord save opens a transaction that can deadlock without an index on SKU, thousands-item orders create hundreds… | ||
| Lightning Talk – Chris Hagmann | Chris Hagmann | 06m |
Shows a quick ERB template that generates and loads Ruby source at runtime and admits it works but creates unmaintainable metaprogramming, warns against taking… | ||
| Refactoring: The ASMR of Programming Talks | Max VelDink | 25m |
A messy util class becomes a focused RecipientIdResolver with instance state and two explicit public methods instead of a symbolic option, reducing ternary… | ||
| Lightning Talk – Cindy Backman | Cindy Backman | 06m |
Confreaks documents conferences since founded 2007 by Ruby programmers, shoots events end‑to‑end and edits for publication, and handles up to 30+ conferences… | ||
| nothing matches | ||