This year’s European Ruby Conference EuRuKo was held about a bit more than a month ago in Sofia, Bulgaria. High time for a short summary.
On 22 September, our Development-Team delegation flew from Zurich to the Bulgarian capital, Sofia. We were looking forward to 3 days of good food, friendly people and, above all, plenty of interesting presentations.
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The conference took place in the National Palace of Culture. This impressive building was built in the early 80s to serve as a centre for conferences and culture.
The lectures
As in years past, EuRuKo had a high-calibre line-up in store. We were excited to hear presentations from “Matz”, José Valim and other Ruby and Ruby on Rails core team members. We’d like to present our favourites to you now.
Keynote (Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto)
Matz’s keynote explored the future of Ruby: Ruby 3.0. He illustrated the three main issues which the core team wants to focus on in the upcoming major version. Still, at this point Ruby 3.0 remains “vaporware”, meaning it only consists of vague ideas as of yet.
- Performance: Ruby 3.0 is intended to be three times as fast as its predecessor.
- Typing: Ruby 3.0 is expected to feature some kind of typing system. This will presumably be achieved with type inference (similar to Go and Swift).
- Concurrency: In 1993, in the days before multi-core processors, concurrency wasn’t yet an issue. Today, however, it’s standard for computers to have multiple cores. Ruby also plans to take advantage of this. This is intended be implemented using Guilds.
You can watch the presentation on Youtube.
GraphQL on Rails, Marc-André Giroux
Facebook developed GraphQL to be a new method of defining APIs. It doesn’t deal with the software itself, but with a protocol. The biggest advantage of GraphQL is that APIs no longer need to be versioned. Clients can decide for themselves what they want to receive in the results. The benefit of this is that traffic is reduced and the server can react to specific queries with ease. Marc-André explained how easy it is to integrate a GraphQL API into your application. We’ll be sure to check out this new technology at nine.ch and perhaps implement it ourselves soon.
You can watch the presentation on Youtube.
A Year of Ruby, Together, André Arko
André Arko maintains the “Bundler” gem and is an administrator at rubygems.org. Both projects are essential parts of the Ruby community. In his presentation, he demonstrated the challenges that large open-source projects like these face and how to operate these infrastructures on very little money.
This presentation is also available on Youtube.
More recommended talks
- Little Snippets: Xavier Noria explains best practices using small practical examples.
- How Sprockets Works: A first-class introduction to the magic and the future of asset management in Ruby on Rails from Rafael França, a maintainer.
- Idioms for Building Distributed Fault–Tolerant Applications with Elixir: A glimpse outside the box with José Valim. He shows us various idioms for using Elixir and Phoenix Web Framework. A very interesting project.
To wrap things up
Every year, EuRuKo is organised by a different group of “Rubyistas”. Despite this, everything proceeded with great professionalism and the two days of the conference passed by in a flash.
Even after almost 25 years, the Ruby community is still full of life and at an exceptionally mature level. The conference gave us some fresh inspiration and there’s no doubt that a nine.ch delegation will be going to Budapest next year for EuRuKo 2017.
