Quick Learnings

PRODUCT

• Vacation policies can be hard. We’ve decided not to solve all the problems and leave some flexibility for the users. Automation is important, but people are people and sometimes just manual adjustment is worth more than covering any possible use case.

HARDWARE

• Keyboard marks on my macbook’s screen drive me crazy. It’s not that I see them all the time, but once I saw them, I can not unsee them. Unfortunately there is nothing I can do about it.

Haggis Ruby Conference Notes

I’ve attended Haggis Ruby - let’s be honest, every opportunity to visit Edinburgh is a good reason to go there. Haggis Ruby is an effort to reestablish Ruby conferences in Scotland - and it turned out really great.

Main Talks

Stop overthinking and start creating - Olly Headley

• Side projects are where you’re learning new things. This talk highly resonates with me, as I don’t actually remember times when I haven’t had side project on my own. I think this is how I’m taking breaks from day-to-day work and, at least for me, it’s a way to fight boredom or stuck in a rut
• Try, do, do not worry about the future

Invalid byte sequence in UTF-8 - Rosa

• Fun, low-level talk about String encoding. Basic things we all should know about (or at least be aware of) and most of us is missing some basics in this topics
• Rosa prepared nice list of links to get you up to speed: “Invalid byte sequence in UTF-8” 😭 | rosa.codes

Turn left for Bridgetown - Ayush Newatia

• Ayush is Bridgetown core dev - a static site generator, that is fork (from 2020) of Jekyll
• Supports esbuild (which is nice), erb is templating engine - this feels familiar
• Allows dynamic parts (like contact forms), server is puma and roda. To be perfectly honest I’m not sure how I feel about it. If I’d need dynamic part anyway, I’d make it either as a simple rails application or I’d give Hanami or Kemal a try
• Ayush also wrote a book: The Rails and Hotwire Codex

Ruby + AI - Sergy Sergyenko

• Very thankful for this presentation, as it helped me structure some knowledge about building AI-powered applications
• Got some ideas I’ll use once we’re ready to add AI integration to Humadroid
• rspec-llama is interesting take on utilizing LLMs to test applications

Building resilience - Melinda Seckington

• Any talk making software developers think about their emotions and feelings is priceless
• I honestly think that it’s managers’ job to increase awareness, but then it’s up to developers to seek professional help
• Resilience can be developed!
• As this profession is full of masculine ego, we rarely talk about feelings and mental health. I’m happy to see more talks about this - maybe it will help normalize going to therapy or just admitting we’re not okay sometimes.

Using “modern” Ruby and Ruby on Guard(Rails) - Mike McQuaid

Original (planned) talk about Homebrew is available here: Using “modern” Ruby to build a better, faster Homebrew

• MTTR - Mean time to repair - bugs fixed quickly make customers happy
• Check out: Robot Pedantry, Human Empathy
• Remember to add helpers while working on app:
  • While coding: rubocop, erb_lint, better_html, prosopite (n+1), licensed, actionlint
  • While testing: rspec (with appropriate rubocops), simplecov, playwright, vcr, parallel_tests, CodeCov, Github Actions
  • Error monitoring: sentry, logtail, better stack

Monolith archaeology - Emma Barnes

• This presentation is supposed to be private and known only for attendees. But I think Emma will appreciate following review:
• “An Archeological investigation of a large ancient Rails app” delivers a refreshingly honest and humorous take on why we should stop cringing at our old code and start celebrating it. Through personal anecdotes and sharp wit, this illuminating work challenges the tech industry’s obsession with perfection by revealing the human story behind every “ugly” solution. It’s a masterful reminder that those embarrassing code snippets from years ago aren’t just technical artifacts—they’re milestones of growth, shaped by real-world constraints and the developers we used to be.

Lightning Talks

Fractional CTO Explainer - Ceri Shaw

• Fractional CTO was more or less a service we’ve offered back in Prograils. It’s also something I always wanted to do - act as an advisor for (mostly) non-technical founders, helping them make educated choices and/or verifying offers they’ve got from outsource development firms
• If that’s something that drives your interest, just contact me or Ceri (most likely she have more structured approach than I’d ever have)
• Many aspects of Ceri’s presentation resonated with me

Ruby RPG - Max Hatfull

• Quick introduction to game engine written in ruby: ruby_rpg
• Writing simple asteroid clone in his library is super quick and simple. I’m no longer into gamedev, but it might be something I’ll look into later, with my kids