It was my first conference of the year, and what a treat to start very tropical!
plum
The Tropical Rails is a conference held in São Paulo, Brazil. At the moment of writing this, it’s the only Rails-focused conference in Latin America, featuring two days packed with talks and networking.
São Paulo is a huge city, and consequently, its Ruby community is huge as well. It was great to reconnect with old friends and make new ones. This is something I truly love about the Ruby community—I keep collecting friends from all around the globe.
Let’s dive into some of the talks that caught my attention:
The conference started with a keynote from Irina Nazarova, who presented a curated collection of new libraries and startups currently using Rails to build future unicorn apps. If you’re looking for a job, this might be a great collection of companies to explore.
Moving forward, Marco Roth shared the vision and mission of RubyEvents.org, an oracle of videos for everything Ruby-related. He encouraged us to help the community by uploading materials. There are also various other ways to contribute, which you can find here. Talking with @ceneon (Twitter), he mentioned the emblematic RubyConference Argentina talks are in the process of being uploaded.
marco
One of this year’s hot topics was Hotwire. Here are some highlights from the talks on this topic:
Edigleysson Silva demonstrated how close you can get to a mobile app experience using Rails’ built-in PWA features, native APIs, and offline functionality. This is great to try before building a full native app. However, if you need a native app, Daniel Medina showed how to transform a Rails app into a fully native one with Hotwire Native.
Jackson Pires shared his experience migrating a full React app to Hotwire. His team chose Phlex and RubyUI as replacements for React and ShadCN.
Stepping away from Hotwire but still talking about SPAs and JavaScrip, Svyatoslav Kryukov from Evil Martians introduced us to building SPAs with minimal configuration using Inertia.js.
The legendary Xavier Noria closed the first day with a keynote titled “The Ruby in Zeitwerk.” This might be the last in a series of Zeitwerk talks by him (Zeitwerk GitHub). Previous talks covered various aspects of the library. An extra impressive note: he keeps the library issue-free, and at the time of writing this article, the issue tracker remains at zero—Respect!
Xavier
On the second day, Chris Oliver added more fuel to the Hotwire fire, demonstrating when to use streams versus frames (or both). He also announced a new course about it.
stram-vs-frame
Changing topics, we landed on a talk about the experience of using JRuby in production for over 15 years. Cristian Planas shared the challenges and advantages of adopting JRuby.
Continuing with talks based on experience and real use-cases, Celso Fernandes explained how easily Rails allows adding new Active Record adapters. If you’re planning to fully integrate a new database with Rails, this talk is a must-watch.
Near the end of the conference, Matheus Richard stepped off the Rails track, guiding us through a mini-example of creating a Ruby interpreter and a JIT compiler in Ruby. He also suggested potential contributions to the community with small improvements. Here's a link.
matheus
For the grand finale, Rosa Gutiérrez presented a curious incident involving a Rails app and Puma. It was a fascinating talk that provided insights into the Rails Executor.
Here are some helpful links shared during the talks:
