RailsConf 2021
2021-04-12..2021-04-15
-- 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 developers, backend engineers, full stack developers, engineering managers, devops and platform engineers, test engineers, open source maintainers
topics
Rails microservices data sync; API payload minimization; serverless Rails architectures; test parallelization and CI scaling; Rails application profiling; Hotwire interactive UIs; write-heavy Rails API scaling; safe Rails database migrations; service objects in Rails; decoding Ruby metaprogramming; typography and CSS for UI
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Keynote | Aaron Patterson | 01h 24m |
Announces concrete perf work: a Ruby JIT and async queries for deferring DB loads, a smart preloader that collapses duplicate queries, and a rewritten… | ||
| Keynote: Chatting with David | David | 01h 03m |
Launch recounts: Hey launches badly then recovers, built an email service that required writing Active Record encryption into Rails, an internal Ruby mail… | ||
| All the Things I Thought I Couldn't Do | Eileen M Uchitelle | 01h 09m |
Implements granular connection swapping for Active Record by moving role tracking into a shard→pool_config map and adding a pool manager, plus a public API… | ||
| Hardware/Software Co-design: The Coming Golden Age | Bryan Cantrill | 01h 02m |
Argument: hardware and software must be co-designed because economics and capability are changing, not the topic. Moore’s Law decelerates economically while… | ||
| Game Show: Syntax Error | Adam Cuppy | 53m |
A live RailsConf game show quizzes crowds on concrete Rails facts and gives tangible prizes: a signed Aaron Patterson headshot, a not‑fully‑transferable NFT of… | ||
| Hiring is Not Hazing | Aja Hammerly | 45m |
Compares whiteboard, take‑home, and portfolio screens with concrete fixes: prefer one‑sentence prompts like write a function that takes input X does Y and… | ||
| What Poetry Workshops Teach Us about Code Review | Andrew Ek | 38m |
Code review borrows concrete practices from poetry workshops: break work into small, fast cycles so reviews catch defects before divergence, record… | ||
| The Trail to Scale Without Fail: Rails? | Ariel Caplan | 01h 03m |
Cloudinary runs 15 billion requests per day and relies on a CDN to serve ~95% of traffic, a tiny Go service called seget (Go) handling 85% of cache misses, and… | ||
| Effective Data Synchronization between Rails Microservices | Austin Story | 38m |
Claim: a Kafka-based message bus lets data engineers produce Avro-validated operations and Rails apps consume them through importers that run real domain… | ||
| Self-Care on Rails | Ben Greenberg | 30m |
Claim: practical Rails work solves family problems. Built a Rails birthday app that uses WebRTC via Vonage/Twilio to create watch‑party video rooms so kids… | ||
| Debugging: Techniques for Uncertain Times | Chelsea Troy | 20m |
Claim: debugging skills that reduce uncertainty also improve coping with rapid life changes. Concrete techniques include switching from progress mode to… | ||
| Realtime Apps with Hotwire & ActionMailbox | Chris Oliver | 44m |
Builds a customer‑support app that wires Hotwire Turbo streams to ActionMailbox so posts broadcast over websockets appear instantly. Uses Turbo Streams and… | ||
| Designing APIs: Less Data is More | Damir Svrtan | 25m |
Designs a minimal blogging platform (authors, posts, comments) and claims smaller APIs save real work: exposing an email field forces deprecation cycles and… | ||
| Lightning Talks from Steffani Brasil | Steffani Brasil | 04m |
Recommends choosing rails API-only when the client is a single-page app mobile app or another rails app that takes responsibility for the UI and when the API… | ||
| Lightning Talks from Robson Port | Robson Port | 05m |
Argues that keeping a programming logbook speeds debugging by forcing hypotheses, timestamps and final discoveries, and by serving as an audit trail; shows a… | ||
| Lightning Talks from Emily Harber | Emily Harber | 04m |
Early career developer recounts concrete outcomes: self taught then bootcamp trained under Socratic coaching, hired at Shopify and paired with a senior on the… | ||
| Lightning Talks from Dorian Marie | Dorian Marie | 05m |
Claims that Ruby on Rails code gains modularity by enforcing package boundaries using the pack work gem, shows the actual files and config needed (a… | ||
| Lightning Talks from Brandon Shar | Brandon Shar | 05m |
Describes a Rails Inertia implementation that lets server controllers render JavaScript components and behave like an SPA using React Vue or Svelte, claiming… | ||
| Lightning Talks from Sarah Sausan | Sarah Sausan | 04m |
Claims geothermal gives reliable 24/7 power, uses little land, and emits only water as a byproduct yet remains uncompetitive because access and development are… | ||
| Lightning Talks from Lauren Billington | Lauren Billington | 04m |
A team uses a rebase workflow and a misused git pull causes production master to diverge from the repository because git pull calls git merge so merges rewrite… | ||
| Serverless Rails: Understanding the pros and cons | Daniel Azuma | 31m |
Argues that “serverless” is a misleading label and drills into concrete trade-offs: CPU and disk are not part of the function abstraction, so Lambdas/Cloud… | ||
| Make a Difference with Simple A/B Testing | Danielle Gordon | 25m |
Claims a practical Rails-friendly A/B system that proves tests can be quick to add, easy to update, and trivial to remove. Builds an experiments class per… | ||
| Speed up your test suite by throwing computers at it | Daniel Magliola | 58m |
CI runtime falls from tens of minutes to minutes by running tests across many machines and shaving startup costs. Practical moves: parallelize by splitting… | ||
| The Power of Visual Narrative | Denise Yu | 34m |
Argues that drawing technical updates wins attention: switching email updates to sketchnotes increases opens and results in fewer interruptions from teams… | ||
| When words are more than just words: Don't BlackList us | Espartaco Palma | 33m |
Argument: replace exclusionary words in code tests docs with concrete alternatives, and expect friction not ideology. Action items: replace "master" with… | ||
| How to A/B test with confidence | Frederick Cheung | 33m |
Recap of concrete rules and gotchas: compute sample size and power (if calculator says a million but there are only a thousand users the test is infeasible)… | ||
| Profiling to make your Rails app faster | Gannon McGibbon | 41m |
Uses rack-mini-profiler to find that checkouts slow because payment capture and email hit remote services and moving those to ActiveJob makes requests fast… | ||
| Why I'm Closing Your GitHub Issue | Henning Koch | 27m |
Maintains many projects and reports each app pulling in 200 ruby gems and 900 npm packages, so issue noise becomes a second job and leads to burnout. Stated… | ||
| Hotwire Demystified | Jamie Gaskins | 34m |
DHH’s Hotwire from Basecamp claims real interactive apps with minimal JS: it sends HTML Over The Wire using three components—turbo frames, turbo streams, and… | ||
| Engineer in Diversity & Inclusion - Tangible Steps for Teams | Jeannie Evans | 38m |
Engineers get concrete steps: add preferred naming fields (implemented at Snapdocs, shipped after months of work), run accessibility checks with WAVE Chrome… | ||
| A Day in the Life of a Ruby Object | Jemma Issroff | 36m |
Creates one billion objects (40 bytes each) on a 16 GB machine and shows it completes because C Ruby’s GC reclaims unreferenced slots, with GC.stat reporting… | ||
| Stimulating Events | Jesse Spevack | 34m |
Shows three live‑coding examples using Rails + Stimulus JS and Tailwind CSS to build a working dropdown that highlights items, updates button text, toggles… | ||
| Strategic Storytelling | Jessica Hilt | 43m |
Claims and concrete evidence anchor the method: a framework of the truth the audience the narrative and a structural tool (Freytag’s arc) used to build… | ||
| ViewComponents in the Real World | Joel Hawksley | 34m |
Claims concrete wins: adoption of ViewComponent built on Rails 6.1, migration at GitHub that quadruples component usage, and unit tests that are ~100x faster… | ||
| Beautiful reactive web UIs, Ruby and you | Jonas Jabari | 43m |
Claim: a library called mate stack builds reactive Rails UIs without writing custom JS by composing pre-built Ruby components (form, action, async, cable… | ||
| Refactoring: A developer's guide to writing well | Jordan Raine | 37m |
Teaches concrete tactics for better pull request write‑ups: open with a clear lead, assume readers know less, walk through triggers and fixes step‑by‑step, use… | ||
| "Junior" Devs are the Solution to Many of Your Problems | Josh Thompson | 46m |
Claim: hiring and onboarding Early-career Software Developers shortens time to first value and boosts team capacity. Concrete steps: open a Jira/GitHub ticket… | ||
| Exploring Real-time Computer Vision Using ActionCable | Justin Bowen | 31m |
Concrete claim: a Rails app integrates OpenCV with ActionCable & Sidekiq and Python services to analyze cannabis leaf area and bud-site area in real time… | ||
| Implicit to Explicit: Decoding Ruby's Magical Syntax | Justin Gordon | 37m |
Claim: Rails DSL is just Ruby and the talk converts implicit syntax into explicit calls. Demos use binding.pry and Pry shortcuts to inspect self, show-source… | ||
| The History of Making Mistakes | Kerri Miller | 34m |
A sequence of concrete failures anchors the talk: a 3,100 BCE clay tablet records 135,000 liters of barley and a copyist’s digit error across a 37‑month… | ||
| How to teach your code to describe its own architecture | Kevin Gilpin | 30m |
Claims that code becomes the source of truth by auto‑generating architecture artifacts from tests and runtime traces, with survey numbers to justify it (68%… | ||
| High availability by offloading work | Kerstin Puschke | 33m |
Shopify handles tens of thousands of jobs per second and peaks from BFCM 2020 hit over 5 billion USD in sales with peak rates above 100 million USD per hour… | ||
| Engineering MBA: Be The Boss of Your Own Work | Kevin Murphy | 41m |
Covers three MBA courses distilled for developers: situational leadership with four concrete styles (directing, coaching, supporting, delegating) and when to… | ||
| ho Are You? Delegation, Federation, Assertions and Claims | Lyle Mullican | 47m |
Compares concrete tradeoffs: SAML assertions are XML and large with artifact resolution and XML signature pitfalls, versus OpenID Connect uses compact JWT ID… | ||
| API Optimization Tale: Monitor, Fix and Deploy (on Friday) | Maciek Rząsa | 48m |
Migrating a billing client from REST to GraphQL, the team adds feature flags, fallbacks and custom request instrumentation that logs method, args, stacktrace… | ||
| Using Rails to communicate with the New York Stock Exchange | Martin Jaime | 26m |
Claim: a Rails app handles real-time NYSE traffic by decoding JSON-over-TCP through a VPN, queuing updates in RabbitMQ and using RPC to map responses back to… | ||
| rails db:migrate:even_safer | Matt Duszynski | 45m |
Covers concrete, battle‑tested techniques for live schema evolution: using ignored_columns workaround to avoid prepared statement cache failures, adding… | ||
| Rescue Mission Accomplished | Mercedes Bernard | 41m |
Argues that rewriting rarely wins and shows a repeatable stabilization path that salvages three of four Rails repos while one is discarded because it has no… | ||
| Writing design docs for wide audiences | Michele Titolo | 32m |
Design docs claim to scale technical decisions by recording concrete requirements, tradeoffs and milestones rather than vague examples. Use a time-boxed… | ||
| How Reference Librarians Can Help Us Help Each Other | Mike Calhoun | 35m |
Applying reference-librarian practices to engineering teams claims to lower barriers to asking for help by doing concrete things: maintain a… | ||
| A Third Way For Open-Source Maintenance | Nate Berkopec | 33m |
Argues a "third way" between paying every maintainer and leaving projects alone: treat maintainer work as encouraging contribution not doing everything, break… | ||
| Can I break this?: Writing resilient “save” methods | Nathan Griffith | 40m |
A concrete claim: improbable failures happen often enough to cost real money—one example is a job that charged a customer 12 times—so extract the persistence… | ||
| How to be a great developer without being a great coder | Nicole Carpenter | 33m |
Claims that you can be a great developer without being a great coder by using concrete strategies: tolerate slow technical progress, use an apprenticeship or… | ||
| New dev, old codebase: A series of mentorship stories | Ramón Huidobro | 52m |
Mentorship here centers on concrete wins: learning Ruby on Rails and Mac OS X tooling from a loaned Big Nerd Ranch book leads to paid freelance work; practical… | ||
| Missing Guide to Service Objects in Rails | Riaz Virani | 31m |
Argues that service objects must show the actual sequence of steps and tradeoffs not just a label, demonstrating an OO OrderCreator class versus a functional… | ||
| Accessibility is a Requirement | Ryan Boone | 41m |
Claims that the web now has 61 million accessibility errors (WebAIM) and 3,550 new ADA suits in 2020 (up 23%), shows urgency; demos fixable specifics… | ||
| You Are Your Own Worst Critic | Ryan Brushett | 30m |
Claim: habitual self-deprecation and qualifiers sabotage career progression — it convinces others you're struggling and costs real opportunities (a roughly one… | ||
| All you need to know to build Dynamic Forms (JS FREE) | Santiago Bartesaghi | 33m |
Shows a concrete Rails implementation that renders DB-driven forms, validates and persists submissions (creates a Reference record), and supports repeatable… | ||
| How To Get A Project Unstuck | Sumana Harihareswara | 43m |
Case studies show concrete moves that unstick projects: consolidating scattered todo lists and choosing the platform most active contributors use, adding… | ||
| Growing Software From Seed | Sweta Sanghavi | 34m |
Daily observation catches root causes: a white butterfly lays eggs that hatch into caterpillars eating kale, and reading the Ruby error no implicit conversion… | ||
| Scaling Rails API to Write-Heavy Traffic | Takumasa Ochi | 56m |
Mobile-game backends serve tens of millions of users and millions of DB transactions per minute by using multiple databases with sharding, manual read/write… | ||
| What is Developer Empathy? | Tim Tyrrell | 01h 01m |
Claims specific steps that change outcomes: psychological safety raises retention, trust and productivity; implement a six-week anonymous survey with explicit… | ||
| The Curious Case of the Bad Clone | Ufuk Kayserilioglu | 52m |
A two-line Sorbet sig triggers a 150% slowdown by causing about 1,600 method_added calls during cloning. Investigation uses CPU profiles, bundle open edits… | ||
| The Cost of Data | Vaidehi Joshi | 32m |
Data centers consume an estimated 200–500 TWh/year, about 1–3% of global electricity, with the UK using ~303 TWh for comparison. AWS pledges 100% renewables by… | ||
| Frontendless Rails frontend | Vladimir Dementyev | 35m |
Claims that Rails can be full-stack again with concrete tools and examples: uses ViewComponent classes for isolated templates and previews, combines… | ||
| What the fork()? | Will Jordan | 39m |
Explains how fork actually powers Spring and Puma: file descriptors travel via send_io / recv_io and are reopened with dup2, Puma balances workers by adding… | ||
| Talmudic Gems For Rails Developers | Yechiel Kalmenson | 39m |
Ancient Talmudic rulings map to practical habits: concrete claims include havruta as peer programming, 100 repetitions as consistency that makes skills… | ||
| Turning DevOps Inside-Out | Darren Broemmer | 26m |
Argues DevOps must flip to be driven by customer signals not CI scripts and shows concrete tactics: instrument with Ahoy and Blazer, mount Blazer and query… | ||
| The Rising Storm of Ethics in Open Source | Coraline Ada Ehmke | 22m |
Claim: open source is complicit by design because the open source definition permits use for any purpose, including abuses. Evidence: a new licensing option… | ||
| Processing data at scale with Rails | Corey Martin | 35m |
Builds a real Rails pipeline that ingests ~1M lobbying records by scraping zipped XMLs, unzipping to S3, fanning out jobs so each Sidekiq worker handles a… | ||
| Type Is Design:Fix Your UI with Better Typography and CSS | John Athayde | 01h 18m |
Claims that typography drives roughly 90% of what users see visually on the web and that small typographic tweaks change comprehension guide the concrete… | ||
| 10 Years In - The Realities of Running a Rails App Long Term | Anthony Eden | 34m |
DNSimple starts in April 2010 on Rails 2.3 and runs Rails 6.0 today, with an iterative evolution that documents what changed and what failed: early fat models… | ||
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