Who’s Speaking?

I always strive to bring a mixture of established folks and new voices, with a mixture of technical and less code-based talks. Ideally all these talks have something for beginners and the more experienced programmers in the audience.

Nadia Odunayo has been so often the smiling face on the door of this event, but did you know she’s the founder and (more impressively!) one woman development team behind The StoryGraph, a reading community of over a million book lovers. Her story is one of grit, insight and technical insights into what it takes to execute on the “one person framework”.

It can be hard, even with experience, to know why you’re making (or not making) decisions on code and infrastructure. And how can you communicate or understand your own decision making framework, when it feels like your gut “just knew” what to do? Nicky Thompson was done the research into providing us all with ways to make better, smarter decisions.

SQLite is having a moment in the Rails community so I thought, who better to cover its myriad production uses than the primary author of the LiteStack series of gems, Mohamed Hassan.

Many of us know that “ruby is slow” or that it doesn’t have a good concurrency story. Or does it? Daniel Varvatov will walk us through Ractors.

As a web developer I wish I was better at understanding SQL approximately twice a day. Who better than Karen Jex from CrunchyData to help us understand, troubleshoot and debug our databases.

Chris Oliver is an educator, product developer, open source maintainer, entrepreneur and the first Rails Luminary. He’s recently rebuilt the noticed gem from the ground up and learned a few things about building libraries.

We have a delightful smattering of Lightning Talks, covering failure, minitest, philosophy, side projects and resuscitation.

Matt, Frederic, Murad, Richard & Chris will be sharing the stage.

Arguably the biggest development in Rails 7.1 wasn’t in Ruby at all. Or TypeScript. Turbo 8 has made a massive splash and people are achieving slick and fast user interfaces with wildly less JavaScript. Marco Roth is a core team member on the project and will lay out the future of the Rails front-end story.

Wrapping up the day, in the community’s sparkliest jacket, will be Drew Bragg in the role of Chris Tarrant in the early 2000’s. He’s American, so he’ll miss that reference, but there’s a chance for folks to win some books, fun audience interaction and byzantine and confusing Ruby.

Gold