This year, I had the opportunity to attend the Brighton Ruby conference which was one day full of talks. Brighton is a seaside city an hour South East of London. Andrew Croll has been running this conference since 2014.
As with every conference, I had the chance to meet lovely Ruby developers and be a nerd for an entire day.
Personally, I had the chance to say hello to a legend in our community, Chris Oliver. Even better, I watched a GoRails live session.
Chris Oliver
Now let’s talk about some things that captured my attention that I’d like to share:
From Nadia Odunayo, I loved the motto “keep the tech simple” and how she created a beautiful product that replaces Goodreads and focuses on the customer: TheStoryGraph. Seriously, the product is customer-driven.
It was quite interesting to learn about Ruby Ractor and the inspiration from goroutines by Daniel Vartonov. It’s been a while since I’ve heard about GIL or GIV. Ractor allows us true parallelism in Ruby. To be honest, it’s a bit of a mind shift/challenge to think about how to write code that supports parallelism, but it’s good to know.
Another piece of tech that caught my attention was Litestack, presented by Mohamed Hassan. It’s a whole ecosystem or all-in-one solution for web data infrastructure around SQLite. It brings the power of many other tools into one gem.
How cool is it to remove 6 gems and install only one that brings everything together?
litestack gem
Some SQLittle benchmark numbers really surprised me. I remember using this for Android apps, but now I’ll consider it for small apps.
Chris Oliver showed us how complex some simple concepts like notifications can become and how handy Single Table Inheritance (STI) is here. He also showed us some inspiration from Rails to create some functionalities. Here’s a GoRails video about the Notification gem.
send a slack notification
Last but not least, I was surprised by the tremendous work Marco Roth is doing for the community around Hotwire, Stimulus, Reflex, and more. He gave us a very thoughtful landscape explaining where we are today after Turbo 8 and how exciting the future is. If you’re using Hotwire, I strongly recommend checking this out: Hotwire. I’m particularly I'm using Stimulus LSP.
