I was lucky enough to get one of the limited number of tickets for Brighton Ruby 2022, so off I trotted down to Brighton for a long weekend in the very comfortable Brighton Surf Guest House.
Outside of the talks
- Met some nice people and had some nice conversations. Thanks to Hans, Benjamin and Kelly for letting me awkwardly approach their table for some pre-talk chatter. All of them had travelled a lot further than I had to be there, so I’m glad they made it. The guy I had a nice chat to about software as a medical device, the necessary paperwork that goes with it, and the joy of CE markings. And Mark, with whom I had a lovely chat about IndieWeb stuff, so it only feels appropriate to plug his site.
- Andy Croll made a brief plea for the community to hire and mentor junior members of the Rails community. After all, seniors don’t grow on trees.
- Got some exceptionally nice conference swag:
- A really nice coaster.
- A Brighton Ruby sew-on patch.
- A printed copy of _why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby, courtesy of Consonance. Wow!
The talks
Encapsulation. React. Entropy.
Joel Hawksley and his talk about getting GitHub’s 40k lines of custom CSS (sort of) under control with their design system, Primer.
- Bundle splitting & Chrome’s CSS coverage tools
- “TDD but the T is Twitter”
- Falling into the Pit of Success - Jeff Atwood
- CSS linting as a CI step
- Sending data to Datadog for custom dashboards
Billions. Redis. Efficiency.
Kelly Sutton–who I met at “breakfast”–talking about latency based Sidekiq queues. The idea is that you queue your jobs by expected latency (queue: :within_thirty_seconds) instead of priority which is ambiguous, and that way your auto-scaling and alerting can respond appropriately. A writeup will potentially be landing on the Gusto engineering blog some time in the near future. They also introduced me to the idea of having specific read-only queues for high throughput tasks that won’t overwhelm the primary database with writes.
Patterns. Enthusiasm. Adoption.
Tom Stuart talked about Ruby 2.7+’s pattern matching feature, a powerful but under-hyped feature which to my understanding provides functionality similar to named regular expression captures, but for abitrary objects. He included several examples of how this can be used to reduce the amount of code required to do certain things.
Instance. Shapes. Performance.
Jemma Issroff presenting on object shapes and how the concept can potentially be applied to Ruby. This is the sort of “under the hood” improvement that I’m not so familiar with, and eager to learn more about. There’s an open issue on the Ruby tracker covering it in more detail.
Elusive. Rules. Clarity.
Roberta Mataityte on the 9 rules of effective debugging, from the book Debugging: The 9 Indispensable Rules for Finding Even the Most Elusive Software and Hardware Problems by David Agans. A really useful talk, given how easy it is to get lost in the woods while tracking down a problem. I can’t personally vouch for the book, but Roberta’s take on the material definitely made it sound like a worthwhile read, so I’ll probably grab a copy at some point.
Dust. Legacy. Story.
Emma Barnes on legacy and the context in which we create and use our tools. Amazing talk, but you probably had to be there.
Nil. Maybe. Same.
John Cinnamond on the maybe monad, the null object pattern, and how learning different perspectives helps us truly understand ourselves. Sometimes I suspect that people are using programming to trick me into learning deeper lessons about the human condition. Tricksy.
Reframe. Support. Embrace.
Naomi Freeman on her framework (Freemwork?) for building psychologically safe teams. Unfortunately by this point I’d stopped taking notes on my phone because I didn’t want to appear disinterested, so I can’t remember the individual points.
Looking forward to next year.
