RubyConf 2018
2018-11-28..2018-11-30
Los Angeles, United States
RubyConf ·
[RubyConf 2007, RubyConf 2008, RubyConf 2009, RubyConf 2010, RubyConf 2011, RubyConf 2012, RubyConf 2014, RubyConf 2015, RubyConf 2016, RubyConf 2017, RubyConf 2018, RubyConf 2019, RubyConf 2020, RubyConf 2021, RubyConf 2022, RubyConf 2023, RubyConf 2024, RubyConf 2026]
who it's for
Ruby developers, web developers, engineering managers, technical leads, game developers, maintainers of libraries and gems, technical writers
topics
JRuby real world performance; mruby ROM usage; subclassing Ruby Hash behavior; live mob refactoring techniques; simulating production incidents; web-based board game development with Ruby; designing physical products with Ruby; running long-lived Ruby applications in government; documentation tradeoffs and good commits; refactoring the technical interview; ethical data collection practices; empowering early-career developers
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Ruby is the Best Javascript | Kevin Kuchta | 35m |
Claims Ruby can be made to look and behave like JavaScript by abusing syntax and metaprogramming: defines Javascript-style var and console.log, builds… | ||
| RubyPlot - Creating a Plotting Library for Ruby | Pranav Garg | 39m |
RubyPlot claims a usable plotting stack for Ruby built on the C-based GR Framework with a custom Ruby C extension after FFI and Fiddle proved inadequate; it… | ||
| Beating Mastermind: Winning with the help of Donald Knuth | Adam Forsyth | 38m |
Implementation of Donald Knuth’s Mastermind procedure in Ruby: the code builds the Cartesian product of 1–6 four times, precomputes every guess/answer score… | ||
| Building a Memex (with Ruby!) | Andrew Louis | 38m |
A personal Memex built in Ruby actually stores and queries a timeline of life data: 10M data points, dozens of importers, Postgres as a graph DB. Live demo… | ||
| Building Generic Software | Chris Salzberg | 39m |
A concrete claim: a pluggable protocol (backend + plugin) makes translation gems reusable without coupling storage and access logic. The author shows Mobility… | ||
| Branch in Time | Tekin Suleyman | 27m |
A concrete claim: a well-crafted revision history is as important to maintainability as picking the right abstraction, demonstrated by a bug where an… | ||
| Ruby is the Best Javascript | Kevin Kuchta | 35m |
Claim: Ruby can be made to look and run exactly like JavaScript by abusing metaprogramming. The talk shows concrete tools — method_missing, instance_eval… | ||
| High-speed cables for Ruby | Vladimir Dementyev | 44m |
Title indicates the topic but specifics sell it: Action Cable shows linear latency growth — benchmarks hit ~10s delivery with 10,000 clients and huge memory… | ||
| Cheating with Ruby | Cameron Dutro | 39m |
A Ruby script called PetDetector RubyGem analyzes a game screenshot, uses RMagick for image ops, phashion perceptual hashes to identify pets and houses, probes… | ||
| Building Serverless Ruby Bots | Damir Svrtan | 33m |
A working Ruby bot that scrapes Njuskalo for new apartment listings and sends Mailgun e-mails is reimplemented to run serverless despite no native AWS Lambda… | ||
| Building web-based board games only with Ruby | Yoh Osaki | 35m |
Claims that full front-end work runs in Ruby using Opal (Ruby→JavaScript) and several author-created gems. It shows a Ruby virtual DOM (Hyalite virtual DOM)… | ||
| Cache is King: Get the Most Bang for Your Buck From Ruby | Molly Struve | 33m |
Uses Ruby to cut external hits: implements bulk serialization so 300 vulnerabilites go from 2,100 MySQL calls to seven (roughly 7,000 calls per 1,000 down to… | ||
| Eiffel's Tower | Nickolas Means | 36m |
Recounts how Gustave Eiffel actually gets a 300‑meter centerpiece built for the 1889 exposition: precise offices produce 1,700 general and 3,629 part drawings… | ||
| The New Manager's Toolkit | Brandon Hays | 38m |
A practical playbook: roughly 20 tools collected through real failures and wins, including weekly one-on-ones, a revamped interview process (first run tanks… | ||
| Humans Aren't APIs And Your Request Is 400 Denied | Jennifer Tu | 31m |
A practical framework centers on three observable variables: understanding, agreement, willingness. Concrete examples—unit tests in every change request—show… | ||
| No Title Required: How Leadership Can Come From Anywhere | Jim Liu | 41m |
Claims a junior, remote, non-manager role can co-lead an engineering effort and gives examples: a half-day test outage caused by MySQL exclusive table locks… | ||
| Q&A with Matz | yukihiro Matsumoto 'Matz' | 48m |
Claims concrete improvements: CPU-bound OptCarrot benchmarks run 2.5× faster than Ruby 2.0 while Rails gains are modest because I/O stays OS-limited, JIT work… | ||
| d[-_-]b REPL-ELECTRIC | Joseph Wilk | 24m |
Live coding performance links Sonic Pi to Unity 3D via Open Sound Control (OSC) and a Ruby server, driving visuals and audio (live synthesis, SuperCollider… | ||
| Keynote: Unlearning - The Challenge of Change | Jessie Shternshus | 45m |
Unlearning is framed as a concrete skill with three levels—individual, team, organizational—and two scenarios: habits absent or deeply ingrained; retraining a… | ||
| Hijacking Ruby Syntax in Ruby | Satoshi "Moris" Tagomori, Tomohiro Hashidate | 34m |
Demos show concrete hacks: using Binding to read and set local variables at runtime, using TracePoint to rewrite return values and detect class-definition end… | ||
| JRuby 2018: Real World Performance | Thomas E Enebo, Charles Oliver Nutter | 40m |
JRuby 2018 claims concrete wins: an Oj port (originally ~20,000 lines of C) now as Java at half the code and running about 3x faster on JSON; invokedynamic and… | ||
| The New Design of Ruby's Documentation | Itoyanagi Sakura | 35m |
Claims a pure‑Ruby replacement for GNU Readline called Reline exists and is being merged for Ruby 2.7, it implements Emacs and Vi bindings, reworks Unicode and… | ||
| The Games Developers Play | Andy Croll | 27m |
Claims that naming patterns reduces repeat conflict and that awareness improves responses to emotional triggers The talk maps Eric Berne’s transactional… | ||
| The secret power of Ruby 2.6: JIT | Takashi Kokubun | 40m |
Ruby 2.6’s MJIT is usable with --jit (or RUBYOPT="--jit") and can speed some workloads ~2.5× (Optcarrot to ~60 FPS) but also makes Rails/Sidekiq slower when it… | ||
| ROM: the final frontier of mruby | Masayoshi Takahashi, Yurie Yamane | 27m |
mruby is restructured so class data, symbol tables and some bytecode live in Flash ROM instead of RAM reducing runtime memory pressure and letting mruby run on… | ||
| Parallel programming in Ruby3 with Guild | Koichi Sasada | 39m |
Guild is a new concurrent abstraction for Ruby 3 that prohibits sharing mutable objects by default and defines four kinds of shareable values plus copy and… | ||
| Pointers for Eliminating Heaps of Memory | Aaron Patterson | 39m |
Covers concrete changes in Ruby 2.6: uses Malloc Stack Logging on macOS to find where mallocs come from, patches the loaded_features cache to share and… | ||
| Make Ruby Write Your Code for You | Alex Stephen | 33m |
A Ruby based code generator called Magic Modules takes a YAML word bank plus ERB templates and emits real Ruby and also Python and Go clients that integrate… | ||
| Documentation Tradeoffs and Why Good Commits Matter | Greggory Rothmeier | 29m |
Argument: put documentation effort into git commit messages because they balance accessibility (editors show git blame, git log, VS Code and Atom integrations)… | ||
| Code Review, Forwards and Back | Sumana Harihareswara, Jason Owen | 34m |
A staged play shows concrete outcomes: commit messages and tiny commits prevent missed intent, adding a linter and RuboCop flags style violations, using git… | ||
| Refactoring the Technical Interview | Mark Siemers | 37m |
Argues for replacing contrived puzzles with real diffs and production snippets, showing candidates read and improve code rather than recite algorithms; uses… | ||
| BDD: Baby Driven Development | Allison McMillan | 43m |
A survey of a few hundred parents finds concrete patterns: surveyed a few hundred parents, 11 mothers versus 48 fathers in a 16,000‑person bootcamp sample, and… | ||
| Running a Government Department on Ruby for over 13 Years | Jeremy Evans | 40m |
13 years of Ruby as the exclusive stack, small projects delivered fast (most initial features in about a week, almost all initial builds under a month), and… | ||
| Practical guide to benchmarking your optimizations | Anna Gluszak | 29m |
Argues that slowness usually comes from unbenchmarked design choices and shows concrete fixes: use Ruby’s Benchmark module (BMBM) with a rehearsal run… | ||
| Let's subclass Hash - what's the worst that could happen? | Michael Herold | 34m |
Shows concrete failures from subclassing Hash: an indifferent-access merge that returns a plain Hash until code injects the module (fixed by applying the… | ||
| Trash Talk: A Garbage Collection Choose-Your-Own-Adventure | Colin Fulton | 40m |
A whimsical choose‑your‑own‑adventure frames a concrete tour of Ruby’s garbage collector: how pages and malloc behave, why Ruby keeps pages instead of freeing… | ||
| It's Down! Simulating Incidents in Production | Kelsey Pederson | 27m |
Built a Faraday middleware called response_modifier and a run_gameday feature flag, toggled by rake tasks to add a dozen users, then flip the flag to simulate… | ||
| What poker can teach us about post-mortems | Cory Chamblin | 38m |
Argument: post-mortems often mistake unlucky outcomes for bad decisions; variance means you can do everything right and still lose. Poker specifics show how to… | ||
| Keynote: How to Build a Magical Living Room | Saron Yitbarek | 48m |
Builds a real community: launches a CodeNewbie Twitter chat with three rules and disgustingly nice moderation, spins that into a podcast series (about 190… | ||
| Lightning Talks | Michael Hartl | 01h 18m |
A rapid sampler with clear takeaways: a finished introductory tutorial called Learn Enough Ruby to be Dangerous that includes Sinatra, shell scripting and gem… | ||
| Retrospectives for Humans | Courtney Eckhardt | 36m |
Seattle’s Lacey V. Murrow bridge story anchors the talk: crews store hydrodemolition runoff in pontoons, eight pontoons sank in a storm after leaks and… | ||
| Optimizations in Multiple Dimensions | Jamie Gaskins | 34m |
Starts with concrete claims: JIT warmup makes later runs faster, MRI allocates 16KB pages for objects, small hashes use a flat array until 3 keys, and a… | ||
| Live Mob Refactoring | 27m | |
Live mob refactoring builds a working Poker Dice hand scorer by iterating on Ruby code and RSpec tests, starting with 32 tests 29 pending and driving behavior… | ||
| Reducing Enumerable - An Illustrated Adventure | Brandon Weaver | 34m |
Claims that reduce can reimplement many Enumerable operations and then shows it: concrete code for map via reduce, select via reduce, find by breaking with a… | ||
| Uncoupling Systems | Jeremy Hanna | 40m |
Kenna Security migrates a monolith into queues, background workers and materialized views, using Redis as a readthrough cache, ElasticSearch for search indices… | ||
| The Ruby Developer's Command Line Toolkit | Brad Urani | 34m |
Lists exact tools and recipes: switch Bash to zsh, add aliases and functions (g → git status, mcd creates+cds), install fzf for fuzzy file and history search… | ||
| The Developer's Toolkit: Everything We Use But Ruby | Noel Rappin | 43m |
Argues that usefulness is specifics not slogans and demonstrates actual hacks: aggressive use of zsh command history plugin and Jump to avoid memorizing paths… | ||
| The Anatomy of a Ruby Gem: Going From Zero to Sharing Code | Tony Drake | 29m |
Explains exactly what a gem is and how to ship one: gems are gzipped Ruby file bundles with a gemspec that lists name version files dependencies and… | ||
| Inheritance, Composition, Ruby and You | Cody Stringham | 28m |
Argues that Ruby’s method lookup surprises (overriding puts, attr_reader order, Kernel removal) show why inheritance couples classes and complicates unit… | ||
| The Case of the Missing Method — A Ruby Mystery Story | Nadia Odunayo | 34m |
Finds that a missing class method isn’t lost but stored on the class’s singleton class, discovered by inspecting ancestry and using a small where method to… | ||
| Wafflebot: Cloud Connected Artificially Intelligent Waffles | Jonan Scheffler | 38m |
Builds a waffle-making robot from Raspberry Pi boards, stepper drivers, high-torque servos (and many servos murdered), a solenoid valve and pump fed from a… | ||
| Yes, You Should Provide a Client Library For Your API | Daniel Azuma | 37m |
Claim: shipping a client library measurably improves safety, security, readability, and developer happiness, especially for concerns like auth, retry, batching… | ||
| Ruby-us Hagrid: Writing Harry Potter with Ruby | Alex Peattie | 30m |
Claims that Ruby writes a new Harry Potter automatically using basic NLP are demonstrated with concrete code and empirical results: plain text books tokenized… | ||
| Cats, The Musical! Algorithmic Song Meow-ification | Beth Haubert | 28m |
Meowifier converts audio files into cat-meow melodies and is a working command-line prototype that sometimes fails: melody extraction proves noisy so different… | ||
| Ruby for Makers: Designing Physical Products With Ruby | Andy Glass | 24m |
A Ruby program generates laser-ready vector files and a small ecommerce flow: templates and items render to PDF/AI using Prawn + prawn-svg and measurement… | ||
| Graphics and Simulations (and Games), Oh My! | Ryan Davis | 38m |
A new Ruby gem called graphics gem (beta, install with --pre) provides a single-gem framework for visualizations, simulations and simple games with a… | ||
| Keynote: Who and What We're Leaving Behind | Bianca Escalante | 40m |
A plea to stop leaving people and ideas out of software creation backed by concrete examples: an Open Source script for automated account creation fuels… | ||
| Ruby Family Fued MC: Evan Phoenix | Evan Phoenix | 27m |
A comic, nontechnical Family Feud sketch that stages Twitter-surveyed answers rather than arguments or code, so expect lists not explanations: it reports… | ||
| The Atonement of J. Robert Oppenheimer | Caleb Thompson | 28m |
Recounts concrete moral failures and attempts at repair: an intern builds a WiFi hotspot tracker repurposed to find people, Los Alamos builds a bomb that… | ||
| Building For Gracious Failure | James Thompson | 38m |
Systems need concrete practices not platitudes: Bugsnag exposes spikes (231,000 vs ~2,000 and ~10,000 errors), SignalFx and custom metrics show jobs started ≈… | ||
| Opening Keynote | yukihiro Matsumoto 'Matz' | 41m |
A personal account of Ruby’s history names concrete milestones: development begins in 1993, a mailing list reaches 200 members, the Pickaxe book sells 20,000… | ||
| Secrets of a Stealth Mentee | Katherine Wu | 42m |
Concrete tactics for getting mentorship: always be mentee-ing by running short, goal‑oriented relationships; ask for experiences not platitudes (Cal Newport)… | ||
| Empowering Early-Career Developers | Mercedes Bernard | 32m |
Teams assign each developer rotating ownership of a feature so they run client communication, write user stories, document decisions in Google Drive docs, and… | ||
| The Dangers of Tribal Knowledge | Annie Sexton | 36m |
Tribal knowledge creates bottlenecks and real liabilities, so document the actual fixes: keep a tiny crash course (Heroku uses three onboarding articles called… | ||
| Designing an engineering team: Making room for everyone | Jack Danger | 34m |
Argues for hiring by mapped skills not vague titles, showing concrete comparisons (2017 had zero commercial jet deaths after role-based fixes), recommending… | ||
| Sweat the Small Stuff | Aaron Harpole | 43m |
Gives concrete tactics for scaling: extract an OAuth2 provider by moving the Doorkeeper Rails engine into a standalone app with zero‑downtime, incremental… | ||
| Ethical Data Collection for Regular Developers | Colin Fleming | 34m |
Describes how the DC Abortion Fund’s case‑management software actually works: teams shred personally-identifiable information after a set time, build… | ||
| The Psychology of Fake News (And What Tech Can Do About It) | Cecy Correa | 34m |
Fake news spreads six times faster than true stories, MIT's analysis claims, and deepfakes plus Adobe Project Voco can synthesize believable video and audio… | ||
| Unraveling the Masculinization of Technology | Audrey Eschright | 19m |
Tracing computing's gendered history from women as early "computers" to a masculinized industry, it cites 36% peak in 1991 and current company stats like… | ||
| Being Good: An Introduction to Robo- and Machine Ethics | Eric Weinstein | 41m |
Three concrete failure modes decide whether to watch: a medical irradiator (Therac-25) replaces hardware interlocks with assembly code and concurrent bugs and… | ||
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