RailsConf 2023
2023-04-24..2023-04-26
Atlanta, United States
[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, ruby developers, senior backend engineers, engineering managers, tech leads, test engineers, site reliability engineers
topics
Turbo Streams and ActionCable; ActiveRecord encryption; PostgreSQL techniques for Rails; zero downtime Rails upgrades; Rails performance monitoring; WebAuthn passwordless authentication; Rails-powered progressive web app; building Ruby head for Rails; microservices patterns for modular monoliths; migrating large Rails monoliths; dynamic ActiveRecord query pattern; Capybara testing practices
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Keynote – Eileen Uchitelle | Eileen M Uchitelle | 44m |
A clear inventory of what Rails actually does: it uses Railties initializers and on_load hooks to wire components and establish the initial DB connection, it… | ||
| An imposter's guide to growth in engineering | Ebun Segun | 39m |
Defines imposter syndrome as feeling inadequate despite evident success and links it to low serotonin; maps three root feelings to a comfort/weird/growth zone… | ||
| Mentorship Panel | Shana Moore, John Sawers, Ebun Segun, Erik Guzman, Adam Cuppy | 55m |
Panelists offer concrete practices: set expectations up front and co-create a short learning plan, timeboxed to an hour or two a week or an intense daily… | ||
| Upgrading the Ruby Community | Pat Allan | 36m |
Calls to retire MINASWAN and stop idolizing tech heroes sit alongside concrete steps: pick data centers and regions powered by renewables, donate regularly to… | ||
| Managing the Burnout Burndown | Anjuan Simmons | 44m |
Claim: burnout is the ongoing feeling that today’s resources aren’t enough for tomorrow’s demands and it hits about two thirds of full‑time workers (23% very… | ||
| How We Implemented Internal Salary Transparency (And Why It Matters) | Hilary Stohs-Krause | 49m |
At 10 Forward Consulting the company publishes a career progression doc with salary ranges, stores data in an internal Wiki with a historical-data tab, runs… | ||
| Building a more effective, bidirectional mentor-... | Andy Andrea, William Frey | 46m |
Claims backed by numbers and concrete practices make this worth watching: mentorship raises retention to 72% for mentees and 69% for mentors versus 49% for… | ||
| Keynote – Aaron Patterson | Aaron Patterson | 54m |
A tiny Ruby language server called refreshing actually runs in-process with Rails and uses the Language Server Protocol over stdio to provide hover for… | ||
| Taylor’s Guide to Big Rewrites | Andy Croll | 33m |
Argues that a risky monolith rewrite succeeds when concrete practices guide it: a team of four spends 18 months building a separated data-collection service… | ||
| Mentorship in Three Acts | Adam Cuppy | 46m |
Claims a mentorship program needs three concrete parts: planning (set the outcome), practice (agree roles), and review (what did we learn). It names three… | ||
| Keynote: The Power of Improv: Unlocking Your Creative Potential as a.. | Gary Ware | 49m |
Claims that applied improvisation (improv techniques) measurably boosts creativity, collaboration, psychological safety, problem solving and resilience, citing… | ||
| Keynote: Leading through Change - When two cultures combine | Shani Boston | 38m |
A marketing product org navigates a $12 billion acquisition and dozens of leadership changes while merging product visions and processes; headcount jumps 1600… | ||
| Rails Performance Monitoring 101: A Primer for Junior Developers | Rishi Jain | 45m |
Walkthrough of concrete debugging steps and tools for slow Rails apps: APM dashboards and rack‑mini‑profiler surface request queue 20–50 ms problems and top… | ||
| Lightning Talks | 01h 52m | |
A rapid sequence of five-minute demos names concrete wins: a citizen‑science site uses images from the Dark Energy Camera and reports 2.5 million users and 250… | ||
| Hacking Your Emotional API | John Sawers | 45m |
Models emotions as an emotional API with hardwired endpoints and messy middleware that gets refactored; claims unprocessed feelings create “emotional debt”… | ||
| Keynote: Investing in the Ruby community | Rafael Mendonça França | 47m |
Shopify describes concrete investments: a four year effort to upgrade a 3 million lines codebase and enable frequent deploys that yields four deploys per day… | ||
| A Ruby Community Podcast Live! | Brittany Martin, Jason Charnes, Paul Bahr | 46m |
Panel records a live podcast with four named guests including two chosen by the community via live audience poll and an online vote, and invites audience… | ||
| Beyond CRUD: the PostgreSQL techniques your Rails app is missing. | Shayon Mukherjee | 34m |
A production outage drops hourly jobs when redis schedules temporarily vanish and a race crashes the scheduler; the fix moves dynamic schedules into Postgres… | ||
| Functional Patterns in Ruby | John Crepezzi | 41m |
Claims concrete Ruby implementations of three OCaml ideas and shows they work: a funter module that uses Module.new proxy and dynamic method defs to supply… | ||
| Rails as a piece of birthday cake | Vladimir Dementyev | 46m |
Rails claims that three core elements (Model View Controller) are insufficient long term and shows concrete fixes: extract a GitHub web hooks mapper, move… | ||
| Accessible by default | Joel Hawksley | 42m |
GitHub makes a concrete claim: a 15‑year‑old, 1,435‑controller Rails monolith with ~2,000 screens becomes more accessible by embedding axe in dev and CI to… | ||
| Exploring the Power of Turbo Streams and ActionCable | Kevin Liebholz | 37m |
Builds a real-time tic-tac-toe using Turbo Streams and ActionCable, with turbo frames for local updates and HTML-over-the-wire broadcasts. Demonstrates three… | ||
| Hotwiring My React Brain | Aji Slater | 32m |
Claim: a React-style snappy UI is achievable with Rails 7 using very little JavaScript. Uses Hotwire (Turbo + Stimulus controllers), turbo_frame_tag… | ||
| Terms of Deployment: The Process of Evaluating Hatchbox, Fly and... | Jordan Burke | 27m |
Headway evaluates Hatchbox, fly.io, and Render by deploying real client projects and measuring the three costs that decide everything: knowledge cost… | ||
| Building Workplaces for Caregivers: Supporting Parents in Tech | Kinsey Durham Grace | 23m |
Evidence that workplace change actually happens: a GitHub ERG pushes policy and the company adopts 20 weeks paid leave plus family-forming benefits… | ||
| Teaching Capybara Testing - An Illustrated Adventure | Brandon Weaver | 30m |
Shows how end-to-end specs actually look and run: config a Selenium Chrome driver with an env var to toggle headless, use binding.irb to interactively discover… | ||
| Zero downtime Rails upgrades | Ali Ibrahim | 32m |
Claim: upgrades happen with zero downtime by making them incremental, measurable, and repeatable. Steps: target the next minor version, fix deprecations per… | ||
| A custom design pattern for building dynamic ActiveRecord queries | Justin Daniel | 36m |
A concrete pattern replaces a 230+ line SQL concatenation file with named query classes, builders, nodes that return ActiveRecord relations, use Ruby and Rails… | ||
| Rails on Ruby: How Ruby Makes Rails Great | Noel Rappin | 38m |
Rails uses Ruby metaprogramming to turn language features into concrete framework behavior: five tricks that actually ship Rails features. Examples include… | ||
| A Picture Is Worth a 1000 Lines of Code | Rich Steinmetz | 38m |
A clear claim: a tiny reproducible visual framework turns non‑drawers into effective explainer‑builders. Tools actually used are pen and paper, whiteboards… | ||
| The End of Legacy Code | Daniel Huss | 39m |
Argues that “legacy code” is solvable by an Eternal Onboarding mindset and concrete practices not rhetoric: inventoryed app setup, onboarding docs, factories… | ||
| How Rails fosters a diverse and competitive tech ecosystem in the era of big tech | Jordan Trevino | 42m |
A client with hundreds of millions in funding, ~50–75 engineers, a ~300,000‑line single-page app and about 20 microservices proves the claim that big‑Tech… | ||
| A pragmatic and simple approach to fixing a memory leak | Vincent Rolea | 28m |
A Rails background worker on Heroku grows past 1GB despite scaling to 2.5GB and splitting queues; concurrency 25 lowered to 15 still shows slow growth… | ||
| ActiveRecord::Encryption; Stop Hackers from... | Matthew Langlois, Kylie Stradley | 38m |
GitHub adopts ActiveRecord::Encryption, implements a custom key provider that reads semicolon‑delimited base keying material from Vault, derives AES‑GCM‑256… | ||
| Bridging the Gap: Creating Trust Between Non-Technical... | Kevin Gorham | 40m |
Claims a measurable way to build stakeholder trust by shipping repeatable metrics: extracts accepted stories between Sprint start and end using the Pivotal… | ||
| Faster websites: integrating next-gen images in your... | JP Balarini | 28m |
Claims a consistent saves ~1s load time by switching image assets to WebP, reports typical 30–40% size reduction with handpicked cases up to 90% smaller, and… | ||
| Deep End Diving: Getting Up to Speed on New Codebases | Allison Hill | 34m |
A short checklist of what actually changes onboarding: results from a 20-person survey that highlights stress management, readable patterns, and mentorship… | ||
| Breaking the Grind: Crafting Your Ideal Software Engineering... | Ole Michaelis | 42m |
Maps software-career skills onto an explicit skill tree, borrowing the Final Fantasy X skill tree metaphor and the Career Vectors framework (Hands‑On… | ||
| Forecasting the Future: An Introduction to Machine Learning for... | Landon Gray | 21m |
Claim: you can train build and deploy a weather forecasting model entirely in native Ruby. Tools shown are iruby for Jupyter notebooks plus Numo, Daru, and… | ||
| Demystifying the Unionizing Process | Colin Fleming | 35m |
A practical playbook: get a core organizing team, call a parent union for a paid organizer, run one‑on‑ones and collect cards, aim far above 50 plus one of… | ||
| 10x your teamwork through pair programming | Michael Milewski, Selena Small | 33m |
Claims tenfold team productivity by demoing TDD on a React to‑do: write app.test.jsx and item.test.jsx, add a remove-item callback prop, add a DOM button in… | ||
| Strategies for saying no | Elle Meredith | 30m |
Makes the claim that saying no prevents burnout and improves focus and then shows how with five acts that map the problem to concrete responses including… | ||
| How to Upstream Your Code to Rails | Hartley McGuire | 26m |
A concrete how-to: shows a real upstream of an immutable validator -> read-only validator, adds tests, updates the changelog, and runs a Benchmark.ips script… | ||
| Go Passwordless with WebAuthn in Ruby | Braulio Martinez | 39m |
WebAuthn replaces passwords with public‑key credentials and the webauthn-ruby gem implements server‑side verification: origin and challenge checks, signature… | ||
| The Math Every Programmer Needs | Joel Quenneville | 38m |
Claim: discrete math (Boolean algebra, combinatorics, graph theory) is the most practically useful CS class for day-to-day Rails work. Concrete tools: use… | ||
| Merged PRs: An Untapped Resource for Practice and Exploration | Thomas Countz | 35m |
Argues that studying merged PRs from the Rails codebase gives repeatable, low‑stakes debugging practice: clone the repo, checkout the merge parent, run bundle… | ||
| Applying microservices patterns to a modular monolith | Guillermo Aguirre | 35m |
Claims that microservices patterns can enforce data consistency inside a modular monolith by using Saga choreography, a transactional outbox and… | ||
| Migrating Shopify’s Core Rails Monolith to Trilogy | Adrianna Chang | 38m |
Shopify migrates its Rails monolith from mysql2 to Trilogy, implements multi-statement support and a com_set_option path in the C API, and updates the… | ||
| Offsite planning for Everyone | Allison McMillan | 36m |
Three practical decisions decide whether to attend: set clear goals (pick 1–3 outcomes you must achieve together, not just “hang out”), lock logistics like… | ||
| Don’t be afraid of the scary red error messages;... | Shana Moore, Kait Sewell | 36m |
Argues red error pages are helpful and shows concrete workflows that work: inspect the interactive Rails error page, read the stack trace, spot a Shuffle typo… | ||
| Building an offline experience with a Rails-powered PWA | Alicia Rojas | 37m |
Turns a Rails 7 app into an installable PWA that survives no-network field use by farmers: a Chile government survey app stores complex form records in… | ||
| Building Ruby Head for your Rails App | Maple Ong | 34m |
Claim: run Ruby head on CI so regressions surface before production. Actual work: build Ruby head with ruby-build inside a Dockerfile, push images to Docker… | ||
| Who Wants to be a Ruby Engineer? | Drew Bragg | 43m |
A live Ruby game show runs runnable but unsafe snippets, uses multiple choice and pair program or search Stack Overflow lifelines, and demonstrates concrete… | ||
| Off to the races | Kyle d'Oliveira | 43m |
Claim: Rails apps lose increments when two requests do a read modify write on the same row, exemplified by an ideas voting counter that drops votes… | ||
| Forging Your Path to Senior Developer | Ifat Ribon | 30m |
A practical growth framework arrives: three pillars—technical, problem‑solving, leadership—and three scales from familiarity→mastery, dependency→autonomy… | ||
| Using Rails Engines to Supercharge Your Team | Austin Story | 43m |
Doximity extracts GraphQL into a mountable Rails engine that supplies GraphQL Playground served from the engine, CI hooks that run a schema printer and publish… | ||
| Let's Standardize Rails, Once and For All! | Justin Searls, Meagan Waller | 47m |
A preconfigured Ruby style gem called Standard claims to spare teams bike-shedding and now targets Rails specifically by depending on RuboCop and… | ||
| Building a world class engineering organization — learning from... | Shane Becker | 46m |
Compares longevity of Brewarrina Aboriginal Fish Traps (40,000 years), White Horse of Uffington (3,000 years) and Stonehenge to software: longevity comes from… | ||
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