Hello once again dear readers!
Sorry for missing the last week's roundup. I'm kinda contemplating on making these things bi-weekly, for a variety of reasons.
That said, this week absolutely cannot be missed, and that's why: RailsClub happened yesterday! So this roundup will mostly revolve around Ruby and Ruby on Rails.
So, yesterday:
- Richard Schneeman, a Rails and Heroku maintainer, talked about threading in Ruby. A quick recap: threads aren't evil, they're useful even with GVL if you have a lot of IO (like a lot of web apps do), but you need to be careful with global state.
- Piotr Solnica presented the crispy fresh version of rom-rb: 4.0.0rc1. After making his persistence framework extremely flexible and powerful, his new goal seems to be to make it as easy to start using as ActiveRecord. I tried it a bit and, spoiler alert, it's not there yet. Nevertheless, such goal can inspire nothing but respect and admiration!
- Bozhidar Batsov shared a slice of his greatness, describing a long road to Ruby mastery (it really starts around slide 37). Loooooots of new reading material. And re-reading material.
- Nick Sutterer, the author of Trailblazer, gave a talk somewhat pretentiously-titled “Ruby is dead”, a lament on how Ruby itself seemed to give us not ”tools” (i. e. high-level abstractions and features) as much as toys (i. e. syntactic sugar).
- Anton Davydov gave a nice, motivating talk on ecosystem and open source projects. To summarize: don't be afraid to participate and open a pull request, even if it's just docs, even if you think your code is bad and stupid.
Overall, a lot of RailsClub talks this year were about Ruby and Rails' limitations and shortcomings and the ways to overcome them. Rom-rb and dry-rb were mentioned a lot. Hanami had a couple talks dedicated to it (sadly, I wasn't able to visit any of those). Trailblazer got its piece of attention. Overall, it's nice to see new practices and concepts emerging.
So, this is what I think about yesterday's RailsClub! Thank you very much for reading, and please feel free to leave a comment below! See you next time!