EuRuKo 2024

After the lunch break, Dmitry Pogrebnoy's talk titled "Demystifying Debugger" continued. Under the motto "Know the tool you are using," he explained how specific debuggers work and how to use them to find and fix errors in the code. His approach was to help the audience turn the routine task of debugging into an expert skill.

Afterwards, our web developers listened to Tim Kächele's presentation on how to write less CPU-intensive Ruby programs. Tim pointed out that developers should not only focus on good code structure, but also optimize for performance. Because when writing, it's easy to forget that at the end of the day, it's not the code but the CPU that bears the entire load.

The last item on the agenda before the evening came to a close was a panel discussion titled "Fireside Talk" on the topic of companies' participation in Open Source projects. The discussion revolved around whether companies should allocate a time slot for their developers to work on Open Source technologies. Additionally, there was a conversation about whether agencies should provide a budget to their development teams to contribute to Open Source projects, similar to a travel budget. The exchange of ideas during the Fireside Talk was open, without leaning towards a pro or con direction.

Afterwards, the Lightning Talks followed for our webits, in which topics are discussed and solution impulses are given in rapid succession. One of our favorites was a lightning talk about a memorable visualization of code structures that fulfill too many tasks or have become too large over time. This was followed by a talk comparing microservice and monolithic architecture. It was pointed out that neither of the two is objectively better, as ultimately a good code structure makes the difference, which is why more and more companies are returning to the monolith. The Lightning Talks concluded with a brief presentation of Ruby Europe, a very interesting initiative for networking the Ruby community throughout Europe.

After a nourishing lunch, we attended Maple Ong's talk on Rails infrastructure for growing applications. Maple is a Product Infrastructure Engineer at Gusto, which uses one of the largest Ruby applications in the world, and shared many insights on managing such a comprehensive system.

Joel Drapper's talk focused entirely on creating fast, easy-to-maintain UI elements. For this purpose, he recommended Phlex, a library that allows writing HTML components directly in Ruby, similar to other component-based systems like React or Vue. Although the library is still quite young, we have already gained experience with the method described by Joel and were able to further deepen our knowledge in this area.

At the end of EuRuKo Thursday, there was a look beyond the horizon, as it was exceptionally not primarily about Ruby. José Valim, the creator of the Elixir programming language inspired by Ruby, presented his new project Livebook. With this tool, Elixir code can be easily visualized and prototyped. Additionally, it uses simple AI models, with which, for example, a chatbot can be created directly in the tool. It was interesting to see how technologies can enrich each other through exchange and bring forth innovations.