I was lucky enough that my employer Dynatrace sent me to the Euruko (European Ruby Conference) conference in Viana do Castelo (Portugal) this year.

Similar to this year's JFokus conference visit, also this conference had couple of "firsts" for me:

• My first time in Portugal.
• The first time attending a Euruko conference.
• And actually my first time at Ruby conference.

Day 1 (of 2) started with the typical opening ceremonies like introduction of the conferences organizer team, sponsors, venue, code of conduct and so on. The we were surprised with the entrance of a traditional Portuguese drum act that literally opened the conference with a big bang!

Keynote

The conference keynote was held by no one other than Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto, the inventor of Ruby, himself. I learned that Matz makes it a habit to keynote as many Ruby conferences as possible, especially the most famous ones, like Euruko.

The keynote itself was a quite light-hearted talk about "things that Matz liked". He spoke about programming languages (Basic, Pascal, ...) and, of course, Ruby and why and how he invented it. He spoke about object-oriented programming, free software, unix and emacs and how the joy of programming is more important to him than pure performance. He left with a few thoughts regarding AI and how he uses it as a valuable too for "code investigation".

Of course, I could not resist and I had to get a selfie with "Matz".

Introducing ReActionView: A new ActionView-Compatible ERB Engine

In this session Marco Roth (the creator of rubyevents.org) introduced the HERB (HTML + ERB) ecosystem of developer tools for e.g. formatting and linting.

With ReActionView he also demoed a new view layer for Rails and how to easily replace existing erubi code with it. This engine drastically improves dev support and code validation and - as Marco likes to say - "makes Rails frontend dev great again" 😄.

Postgres Partitioning Best Practices

This talk by Karen Jex was exactly what the title said but frankly in quite boring way. The whole talk felt like someone reading the partitioning chapter from a Postgres book to you.

Rewrite with confidence: validating business rules through isolated testing

The talk by Szymon Fiedler promised a showcase of how to migrate a legacy codebase with confidence. This could have been interesting but the talk was not executed. Everything was presented on a very generic and high-level without meaningful insights how this migration actually happened.

The hidden value of niche open-source projects

This was a nice and inspiring talk by Rémy Hannequin about his passion of astronomy and how this turned into his side-project of the astronoby gem.

The whole talk was not Ruby-specific at all and more on a meta-level regarding side-projects and the benefits and rewards of working on such.

How a Ruby profiler works: Stackprof under a microscope 🌟

Ivo Anjo who is the main author of DataDog Ruby profiler explained the general mechanics of such a tool using the example of Stackprof and open source Ruby profiler.

The whole session was a brief, but really well-planned overview of Stackprof's source code (which is only about 2000 lines of code).

Ivo picked out the 4 general concerns of this code and explained those in a way that made me feel like I mostly understand now how Stackprof works.

• When to sample: allocation or interval based?
• How to sample: getting the Ruby backtrace.
• Format the sample
• Store the sample

This was by far by favorite session of this conference!

Conquering Massive Traffic Spikes in Ruby Applications with Pitchfork

This session by Sangyong Sim could have been interesting but the execution was not great. Due to the speakers heavy accent it was really hard to follow and I could not really take any actual best practices out of this.

Building interactive Ruby gem tutorials with Wasm – yes, right in the browser!

This talk by Albert Pazderin was well executed but it was a typical WASM - "I had no idea my browser can do this" talk.

I have seen practically the same demos and talks for multiple languages and runtimes now and, while it has a nice demo effect, it's really nothing new anymore.

Roasting Code for Fun & Profit with Structured AI Workflows

I really enjoyed the last session of this first day by Obie Fernandez who presented and demoed roast, a tool created at Shopify which uses AI to review and improve code.