Talks

Consultancies like get leads thanks to their strong presence in the community: open source contributions, blog posts, podcasts, conference talks, books, etc. I present my take on the incentives for companies and individuals to contribute to the community. I explain how thoughtbot does it through investment time. Finally, I give tips to individual contributors and leadership at product companies who want to start something similar.

A dive into the internals of the suspenders project. Suspenders uses Rails generators to quickly configure a Rails app in line with practices agreed and refined at thoughtbot.

Icecast is an audio streaming format often used by Internet radios. I show how it can be read to extract metadata about the currently played song.

I present an Elm application which aims to make surgery safer with checklists. Surgeons prepare a list of steps and procedures before the operation. In the operating room they see the checklist on a tablet connected to a foot pedal. With the pedal they can advance through the checklist or note problems. I talk about the data structures used, the good side of shipping an Elm app to production and some pain points.

In this live coding session, I implement assertions using fundamental concepts of the Ruby programming language, then create a test runner. I spend some time on testing the framework using itself. The final result is a small library which is used similarly to Ruby's minitest.

This presentation about multi-tenant applications is very similar to the one given at Geneva.rb.

In the Elm 0.17 days I made a "breakout" clone. In this presentation I demo the game. Then I show the code for the game loop, including the rudimentary collision detection and collision response. In the end I discuss the unit tests and property-based tests.

I explain how we combined 3 applications which had very similar code bases (started as forks from each other), but were deployed separately. In the new architecture, multiple customers are served from the same application. Data separation at the database level is managed with PostgreSQL schemas and the apartment gem. There is also separation on the file system (e.g. uploads) and some intricacies around the configuration of background jobs, email delivery and caching. In the end I also show how one can still customize the design, translations and even features for each tenant.

Ruby provides a way to use code written in other languages (e.g. Rust, C, Java) within Ruby libraries. In this talk I introduce how to get started with integrating such an extension into a Ruby gem.

In this talk I share my experience upgrading a Rails application from Rails 2.3 to 4.2 and from Ruby 1.8.7 to Ruby 2.1. The application had been first created in 2006 and I had joined the project in 2013. By then the codebase had amassed a lot of vendored code, out-of-date dependencies, and custom solutions to things better solved with gems in the meantime. I increased test coverage and modernized the codebase over several months.

This talk was meant as inspiration about what you can achieve in the browser with JavaScript. Many APIs and browser capabilities we take for granted now were just emerging at the time.

A talk about feature flags from the early years of my career. I had seen a lightning talk about feature flags at a conference. I experimented with the approach presented and gave my own talk on the subject at a local Ruby meetup.