RailsConf 2020 CE
2020-05-04..2020-05-05
-- online --
[RailsConf 2009, RailsConf 2011, RailsConf 2012, RailsConf 2013, RailsConf 2014, RailsConf 2015, RailsConf 2016, RailsConf 2017, RailsConf 2018, RailsConf 2019, RailsConf 2020 CE, RailsConf 2021, RailsConf 2022, RailsConf 2023, RailsConf 2024, RailsConf 2025]
who it's for
rails engineers, backend engineers, full stack developers, engineering managers, site reliability engineers, security engineers, tech leads
topics
Rails controller construction; ActionText model attachments; ActiveStorage image serving; Webpacker internals; Sorbet static type checking; Arel SQL query construction; ActiveSupport performance analytics; GraphQL authorization patterns; Rails response lifecycle; incident response for APIs; identity management and syncing; mentorship and onboarding practices
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Keynote Interview | David Heinemeier Hansson | 59m |
Claims a return to a server-rendered core with lots of native wrapping: a majestic monolith handling HTML with small native layers, using Turbolinks web views… | ||
| Keynote: Technically, a Talk | Eileen M Uchitelle | 41m |
Rails adds first-class multiple-database support upstreamed from GitHub and it actually works in real apps: the work totals over 100 pull requests, turns… | ||
| Variety Show! | Aaron Patterson | 56m |
Hacks and numbers, not jokes: reverse‑engineers an Olympus OM‑D Wi‑Fi protocol by SSH‑tunneling the camera through a Raspberry Pi, writes a Ruby WEBrick proxy… | ||
| Measure Twice, Cut Once | Alec Clarke | 28m |
Woodworking teaches concrete practices that map to code: use a jointer and thickness planer to prep lumber, build a table sled jig to cut eight identical… | ||
| Building a Rails Controller From Scratch | Alex Kitchens | 27m |
Replaces ActionController with two minimal classes and shows exactly what is implemented: a class method dispatch that instantiates and calls the action, a… | ||
| Deeper Understanding & Better Communication through Art | Anna Rankin | 27m |
Argues that hand‑drawn sketches turn fuzzy mental models into testable artifacts; demonstrates using pry + binding.pry and Rails guides to confirm behavior… | ||
| Debugging: Techniques for Uncertain Times | Chelsea Troy | 20m |
Claim: debugging skills transfer to rapid life changes by teaching how to investigate uncertainty. Emphasize acknowledging lack of understanding, switching… | ||
| Enterprise Identity Management on Rails | Brynn Gitt, Oliver Sanford | 31m |
Customer contract covers 5000 seats and reality is 100 hires or departures per week, so the app implements SCIM 2.0 and SAML with OmniAuth multi-provider… | ||
| Advanced ActionText: Attaching any Model in rich text | Chris Oliver | 42m |
Shows how ActionText attaches @mentions and YouTube embeds by having the browser request a Signed Global ID from Rails, then inserting an ActionText attachment… | ||
| Building a Performance Analytics Tool with ActiveSupport | Christian Bruckmayer | 21m |
Builds a tiny production-ready performance analytics pipeline called active monitoring that actually records response times and each SQL query using… | ||
| Blank Page Panic! Creating Confidence with Test Driven ... | Elayne Juten | 33m |
Combines Test-Driven Development, pseudocode, and RSpec in Ruby to resolve blank‑page panic by writing failing specs, following error messages, and adding the… | ||
| Successfully Onboarding a Junior Engineer in Three Steps | Emily Giurleo | 23m |
Claims a reproducible, three-step onboarding: set expectations by publishing a three-month roadmap and assigning mentors; deliver feedback with specific… | ||
| Wrangle Your SQL With Arel | Eric Hayes | 17m |
Claims raw SQL can be replaced by composable Ruby query objects built with Arel, and demonstrates concretely: building a date_trunc month-first-gift subquery… | ||
| Static Type Checking in Rails with Sorbet | Hung Harry Doan | 31m |
Claims Sorbet finds real bugs early, processes ~100,000 lines/sec, and integrates with editors; the team adds Sorbet to a 2,500-file Rails codebase in six… | ||
| Why we Worry About all the Wrong Things | Hilary Stohs-Krause | 36m |
Claims land with numbers: only about 12 of 40,000 spider species pose harm, spiders kill ~7 people/year vs cows ~20; major airline accident odds ~1 in 5.4… | ||
| Achieving Inclusivity Through Remote Work | Jameson Hampton | 40m |
Claims that remote work reduces barriers for marginalized people include concrete evidence and tactics: 12% full-time remote (2019) and 53% prioritize remote… | ||
| Inoculating Rails Auth Against Bug Bounty Hunters | Jason Meller | 45m |
Kolide shows concrete bug‑bounty outcomes: a chained exploit of five weaknesses that earned a $1,350 payout and a smaller $250 report, found via HackerOne. The… | ||
| Mistakes Were Made | Jesse Spevack | 19m |
A payments-related feature is extracted from a Rails monolith into a Kotlin + Akka microservice, and the team admits four concrete failures: Kotlin and Akka… | ||
| Encapsulating Views | Joel Hawksley | 37m |
Rails views compile into methods on ActionView::Base so templates share instance variables and execute in a global scope, which makes unit testing and… | ||
| Webpacker, It-Just-Works, But How? | Justin Gordon | 37m |
Explains how the Webpacker gem actually orchestrates webpack to produce manifest.json and public_output_path and the static JS/CSS assets Rails serves, using… | ||
| Tidy First? | Kent Beck | 16m |
Thesis: software design is an exercise in human relationships, primarily between waiters vs changers and among changers themselves. Practical claim: sequencing… | ||
| Fake It While You Make It | Kevin Murphy | 36m |
Builds SWEATHR on a real weather API then walks four concrete approaches: live requests (slow, flaky), Webmock stubs (fast but brittle), a Sinatra fake web app… | ||
| Inside Rails: The Lifecycle of a Response | Krystan Huffmenne | 27m |
Shows exactly how a Rails app turns an HTTP request into a three‑part response array: status, headers, body, and what components actually make that happen… | ||
| Communicating with Cops | Kyle d'Oliveira | 31m |
Claim: Rubocop can codify not just style but behavioral rules and auto-correct them so reviewers stop leaving hundreds of PR comments about formatting and… | ||
| Can ActiveStorage Serve Images for the Modern Web? | Mark Hutter | 25m |
Active Storage can serve modern images but the details matter: lab tests use Google PageSpeed/Lighthouse, a demo app scores 73 to 99 after changes, on-the-fly… | ||
| The Circle Of Lifecycle Events | Nelson Wittwer | 48m |
Argues that the crucial claim is: callbacks should only modify their own model, not create or update associated records; uses ActiveRecord::Transaction for… | ||
| Authorization in the GraphQL era | Nikolay Sverchkov | 27m |
Walks through concrete Rails examples and code: keeps Devise login outside the graph, passes current_user in context and shows using GraphQL Ruby visibility to… | ||
| Building a Mentorship Program | Noel Rappin | 25m |
Builds a company mentorship program at Root Insurance by surveying volunteers, recruiting mentors first, then mentees, and matching by experience and stated… | ||
| The Sounds of Silence: Lessons from an 18 hour API outage | Paul Zaich | 26m |
An 18‑hour outage fixes concrete lessons: a backfill corrupts records so nullified foreign keys in two screening tables cause ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound and… | ||
| Why You Should Avoid Identity Sync Like Wildfire? | Seyed Nasehi | 36m |
Engineers build a BoostAuth SSO that initially copies users between dual databases and implements a fragile SCIM subset, which produces UUID mismatches… | ||
| Peeling Away the Layers of the Network Stack | Ufuk Kayserilioglu | 36m |
Explains concrete mechanics: MAC addresses are six bytes, IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses (examples 192.168.1.2 and 192.168.10.10), subnet masks and default gateway… | ||
| Monoliths Between Microservices | Vladimir Dementyev | 40m |
Rails apps split into component-based monoliths using Rails engems (engines + local gems) and a concrete recipe: namespace isolation, Gemfile eval_gemfile… | ||
| nothing matches | ||