speakers

The fiber scheduler presents new opportunities for building scalable and concurrent Ruby programs. However, Rails has traditionally been a request-per-process or request-per-thread framework. We will give a brief introduction to the fiber scheduler, and look at how we are evolving Rails and Ruby in general to take advantage of request-per-fiber using Falcon.

With mruby/c, it's now possible to run Ruby code on Sega Mega Drive!

I will show you how to get started, what makes Sega Mega Drive a great platform for mruby/c, and some of the challenges I faced.

This presentation will be delivered on a Mega Drive unit.

Is thinking different such a bad thing? ...Let's look at the evolutionary theory behind neurodiversity. Would the human race even exist today if Neurodiversity wasn't engineered into the population? the answer is - Probably not! Why is that?

How and why do modern teams benefit by actively including neurodiversity? More and more workplaces, such as the Australian Defence Force, are actively seeking out and including neurodiversity? They're offering supportive working environments to unlock their super powers!

Are you unknowingly suppressing the super powers of your neurodiverse colleagues by forcing them to conform to neurotypical expectations? Are you aware of their daily struggles due to workplaces and processes being built for neurotypicals? eg. do you offer pairing opportunities to help with task paralysis? or quiet working spaces? or attention to office lighting? or recorded Zoom meetings, etc? The chances are, if they are female - they might not be aware of their own needs! Did you know that the average age for ADHD diagnosis for anyone born male is single digits, and goes up to 45 for anyone born female?!

Let's encourage more open conversations, and educate ourselves and our peers. Neurodiversity is not a disability - it's a super power from being wired differently. The benefits can be incredible when we become inclusive!

The Ruby community has a reputation across the wider tech industry for being a bit special - opinionated, yes, but also warm and welcoming. Our conferences, our events, even our code is so often a bit more thoughtful and a bit more fun, and the legacy of this has spread beyond Ruby to other language communities such as Elixir and Rust. We have every reason to be proud… yet, we should be wary of resting of our laurels.

And when we look at the broader world - with pandemics, wars, and the devastation of the climate emergency - well, it's easy to become despondent, or to shut that out and focus on the code. But instead, we should tap into that special community vibe that has nurtured us, and take a step forward in having a broader impact. So what could that look like?

To understand what we can (and perhaps should) do, we must understand what has been done already: this session will cast a critical eye on our industry, pointing out missteps and missed perspectives, as well as looking at what has been done elsewhere to make lasting, positive changes. With that foundation set, we will then talk through several recommendations on what meaningful action for software developers can be, as well as possible guidelines to help each other critique, share and refactor our actions to have even greater impact.

Put yourself into the eyes of someone with autism… wait that's not how that goes, metaphors are hard. As someone who grew up in an autistic house, I knew we were different, but not why and what to do about it. After stumbling through life, here's what I'd like to share about autism. Wait, shoes!

An in depth look into autism and how people with autism function in the workplace.

This talk goes through:

Personal history and experiences

• I've been diagnosed for 15 years and majored psychology at university to learn more

How autism is diagnosed including criteria and levels of autism

• Including the history of autism
• Debunking some common myths and stereotypes

Strengths and weaknesses

• Real life min/maxing

Workplace consideration and accommodations

• Asking people what they need and believing them helps everyone

I'm hoping by sharing my experiences you'll be able to gain some insight on how to help others, or yourself if you identify with what I've been saying a little too much.

As much as Rails is all in on Convention over Configuration, there comes a point where there is just so much code, such intricate relationships between classes and such complex business requirements that conventions don't seem to fit anymore. It seems like the only solution is to abandon the Majestic Monolith and use micro services.

However, there is an answer to this. An answer that's been there for a very long time, right under our noses. One that allows Ruby on Rails developers to keep growing a beautiful, sustainable and scalable Monoliths and ride with them to the sunset.

The answer is Rails Engines.

Like… Devise or Spree?

Not quite. In this talk you'll learn a whole new perspctive on Rails Engines; a much lighter and leaner way to use them that allow teams to break up their app into meaningful modules without losing the beauty of Rails' conventions. Sprinkle in the Packwerk Gem by Shopify for the perfect combo to scale your domain and your team.

70% of people worldwide have felt like an imposter at some point in their career. 46% respondents to a women-in-tech survey agreed that help overcoming imposter syndrome would make them happier and more successful. Do you worry sometimes that you're not as smart as the other people in your organisation? Or that you won't be able to keep up and they'll find out that you don't really belong there? Do you stress out about living up to the expectations of the people you manage?

People working in tech, including those in leadership positions, often struggle to overcome prejudice and lack of privilege but still end up feeling like they don't belong, like they are a fraud, even when they're achieving success and making an impact. Imposter syndrome can affect people at any stage in their career - whether they're an intern or in a senior leadership or executive role.

In this talk I'll go over personal experiences with imposter syndrome and practical strategies I've developed that anyone can apply to banish imposter thoughts and prevent them from getting in the way of your success, career progression, mental health, and happiness at work. An easy to remember acronym (REACT) with 5 realistic steps you can take away and practice can help you create a more accurate representation of your performance. You can take these steps away for yourself, or if you are a people leader, use them to help coach your people through the confusing world of imposter syndrome.

If you're a programmer who has ever found themselves inadvertently (perhaps unwillingly!) straddling the line between design and code, this is the talk for you.

Even with zero design training or background, there are numerous small, simple and practical ways you can vastly improve the look and usability of a website.

In this talk, we'll explore 10 of them together, using research and proven solutions to see how the impact as a whole for both clients and users is greater than the sum of its parts.

Have you ever wondered how Puma (or other webservers) work? Let's explore the internals of how a pre-forking webserver like Puma buffers and processes requests, what Rack is and how Puma uses it to interact with Rails, and how Puma's multi-threaded and parallel design works in practice.

In an age of algorithmic manipulation, surveillance capitalism, privacy erosion, rising fascism, and impending climate disaster, it's easy to fall prey to despair, to grimly accept our slide into an inevitable dystopian future. But there is another way. The philosophy of techno-optimism challenges us to imagine alternate futures in which technology helps promote broad social good. This talk applies a literary lens, by way of an early 20th century "future history" by H. G. Wells, to explore our evolving relationship with world-changing technologies, and help us imagine — and build toward — a future we can all not just survive in, but truly thrive in.

The Ruby 3.2 release includes a new technique for for representing objects' properties that can increase cache hits in instance variable lookups, decrease runtime checks, and improve JIT performance. This technique is called "Object Shapes." In this talk, we'll learn how object shapes work, why we implemented them for Ruby 3.2, and interesting implementation details.

If you're curious to learn more about Ruby internals, or how instance variables work, this talk is for you!

Recently I've been working in Rails applications where protecting sensitive data is a priority. But keeping data secure sometimes comes at the cost of utility. The types of queries you can execute can be limited.

In this talk, I'll share what I've been learning about application level encryption, and an encryption scheme called Order Revealing Encryption (ORE).

ORE enables querying capabilities while still keeping data encrypted when in use. I'll be demonstrating ORE's capabilities using a toy ORE library that I have built in Ruby.

Years in the making, Hanami 2.0 is out! This release brings new levels of polish and power to a framework you can use for Ruby apps of all shapes and sizes.

Come along to discover what goes into building a new Hanami app, the principles that underpin the framework, and how they just might change the way you work with Ruby altogether.

Negotiating salaries is hard. It's harder if you always want people to like you. If you fall behind your peers and don't reach your full earning potential.

This talk demystifies negotiation and empowers the attendees to earn as much as their peers while staying true to their personality.

Having performant queries means nothing if your customers can't load them. Slow internet is a reality for many Aussies, especially in rural areas. This is even more challenging when building interactive data-visualisation tools. Learn how we adopted modern web tech to deliver, even when NBN doesn't.

Testing in Production is a common CI/CD practice nowadays. However, feature flags and canary deployments can only get you so far. This talk will walk you through the Branch By Abstraction pattern and the tools to give you confidence when shipping your code to production because we should be able to move fast and break nothing.

Mentoring - For me or not for me, that is the question!

"Tell me and I forget, teach me and I remember, involve me and I learn." – Xunzi (Xun Kuang)

From the day you start as a Developer, to the point you achieve your highest career goal your journey is about transformation and that like anything else relies on HELP. Being a good mentor/community contributor will change the lives of others in ways you never even think of.

Let me share a thing or two I learnt about being a mentor and helping the community over the years.

How to build secure products? After 9 years of coding, I moved to the security team where I discovered a better, more manageable approach to security.

From my talk, you will learn how to design with security in mind so that security isn't a blocker but an enabler for innovation.

Why is Ruby more fun than JS or Python? Why might a JS dev disagree? Different people have different ways of processing the world - does that mean there's a language that best fits your brain? Let's explore this idea, touching on learning theories and implications for getting people into coding.

Having learnt and taught Ruby, Python, JavaScript, and a bit of C to hundreds of career changers - and teaching alongside dozens of experienced developers over the years - I have seen over and over the passion that someone can feel for one particular programming language over another. I've also felt it myself - when I'm coding in Ruby, I can feel it fitting in my brain, and I can feel it actually making me happier in a way that no other language quite does.

Drawing on my background in education and experience teaching and managing coding bootcamps, this talk will explore the relationship between how we as individuals see and process the world around us, and the languages and paradigms we work in as developers.

Implications for how we understand and work with our colleagues will be discussed - both those new to the industry and seasoned professionals, as well as how this can help us to understand ourselves as developers and lifelong learners.