RubyConf AU 2018
2018-03-08..2018-03-09
Sydney, Australia
[RubyConf AU 2013, RubyConf AU 2014, RubyConf AU 2015, RubyConf AU 2017, RubyConf AU 2018, RubyConf AU 2019, RubyConf Au 2020, RubyConf AU 2023, RubyConf AU 2024]
as the organisers put it
RubyConf AU is known for its fabulous social events, and this year is no exception!
who it's for
Ruby developers, backend engineers, platform engineers, site reliability engineers, engineering managers, developer experience engineers, technical writers
topics
distributed tracing for debugging; operational feature flags and switches; Ruby socket and device protocols; UTC storage and IANA timezones; technical writing for engineers; hiring and mentoring juniors; Ruby performance game pipeline; blockchain development in Ruby; machine learning basics in code; code archaeology with git; psychological safety and persuasion; dyslexia accessibility tooling
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Keynote 'You Are Insufficiently Persuasive' | Sandi Metz | 44m |
Argument that workplace unhappiness often stems from failed persuasion and broken team norms, backed by specifics: researchers harvest half a million emails… | ||
| Machine Learning explained to humans | Paolo "Nusco" Perrotta | 33m |
Concrete example: a Python script using numpy and plotting libraries implements linear regression to predict pizzas sold from reservations, computes mean… | ||
| Consider Crystal | Andy Nicholson | 44m |
Did you hear about this great Ruby-like language built in South America? No, not Elixir. Crystal! We’ll take a look at its syntax, design choices, its… | ||
| High performance Mario Kart on Ruby | Michael Morris | 35m |
A working Ruby pipeline captures Switch video over an HDMI→Ethernet dongle, ffmpeg pulls UDP frames at ~2 fps, and a Ruby pHash-based frame detection module… | ||
| Here,s to history: programming through archaeology | Eleanor Kiefel Haggerty | 23m |
Argues that archaeological methods clarify messy commit histories and demonstrates using git log, git bisect and git blame plus a regression test to locate a… | ||
| A Human Approach to Functional Programming | Ken Scambler | |
Functional programming has made great strides in the popular imagination, yet adoption of FP languages has often been challenging for companies, sputtering in… | ||
| Hiring Juniors | Ryan Bigg | 45m |
Clear case for hiring and training juniors with concrete results: Culture Amp runs a 6‑month junior program that onboards and mentors new developers so they… | ||
| Building the World's Largest Studio at Netflix | Lauren Tan | 32m |
Studio engineering builds production tooling and microservices to turn spreadsheets into platformed apps: a 60-person team bootstraps apps with Newt, gives… | ||
| Knobs, Levers and Buttons: tools for operating your application at scale | Amy Unger | 24m |
Seven operational controls are described with concrete implementations and tradeoffs: maintenance mode (env var) as a single hard switch, read‑only mode for… | ||
| Outside the Web Box: Using Ruby for Other Protocols | Danielle Adams | 44m |
Claim: Ruby handles non‑HTTP hardware protocols in production. Uses the Ruby socket library to open TCP sockets and TCPServer, offloads work to a Sidekiq… | ||
| Dyslexia and Developers | Tom Gamon | 19m |
Claim: dyslexia affects processing not IQ and appears in about 3 to 7% of people, with a 2004 study suggesting programming can exploit dyslexic strengths… | ||
| Building with Blockchains in Ruby | John Feminella | |
Blockchains are a new kind of data structure offering an intriguing property: immutability through cryptography. We’ll use Ruby to explore the intriguing… | ||
| UTC is Enough for Everybody, Right? | Zach Holman | 38m |
Argues for storing timestamps in UTC everywhere but also persisting the full IANA time zone id alongside them, uses ISO 8601 for APIs, and recommends… | ||
| Tackling Technical Writing | Alaina Kafkes | 39m |
Talk lays out a five‑phase writing process and ten specific tips tied to brainstorming, drafting, editing, publishing and reflecting, not platitudes. It shows… | ||
| The Good Bad Bug: Fail Your Way to Better Code | Jessica Rudder | 39m |
Concrete examples and actionable rules: FAA-style incident reporting that treats accidents as system failures, a cited statistic of 3.1 car deaths versus 0.5… | ||
| Debugging Your Services with Distributed Tracing | Stella Cotton | 34m |
Concrete account of rolling out distributed tracing at Heroku: proven white‑box tracing using Zipkin on Heroku, instrumentation via rack middleware + Faraday… | ||
| Politics? In My Technology? | Merrin Macleod | 26m |
Technology is political: it is made from ideas and power and changes who has power. Examples tie claim to specifics: Ruby on Rails is the framework early… | ||
| JavaScript is Awe-ful | Katie McLaughlin | |
JavaScript: the language developers love to hate. It is full of WATs, UGHs, and other annoyances; and yet this 22-year-old programming language is the… | ||
| nothing matches | ||