RailsFactory at RubyConf India 2023

It’s been a few weeks since the RubyConf event, and we wanted to highlight some of the best moments from this year’s event in this blog post.

A group of us from RailsFactory attended in Pune, continuing our tradition of participation. With this year’s conference spanning two days, it provided more opportunities to connect with more people. We met many new faces and reconnected with familiar ones from previous years. Isn’t it heartwarming when someone comes over and tells you they remember meeting you at the same conference 5–6 years ago?

About RubyConf India

RubyConf India is a technical conference dedicated to the Ruby language, its frameworks, and tools. This community-organized event draws Ruby developers from India and around the world, fostering a space for learning, sharing, and networking. Every year, over 300 individuals attend to exchange knowledge and experiences.

RailsFactory’s Contribution

Last year, Amulya from our team did a great job talking about “Exception handling in Ruby”. This year, I took the stage to discuss “Concurrency in Ruby,” shedding light on threads, fibers, and Ractors for those who haven’t explored them yet. We always relish these opportunities to connect with attendees and absorb knowledge from other speakers and experts.

Last year, as a platinum sponsor, we set up an interactive booth with games and gave away memorable gifts like books and Alexa bots. This year, we were a silver sponsor. Although this time only a few of us were able to attend the conference nevertheless, we had a lot of fun.

Day 1

Brimming with excitement and energy, we eagerly embarked on the first day of the conference. After a hearty breakfast, we made our way to the event hall where we promptly registered, receiving our passes and commemorative t-shirts. Strategically, we positioned our standee and selfie booth at the hall’s entrance, allowing attendees to snap pictures as they entered.

A highlight of the morning was meeting our Pune colleagues in person — individuals we’d previously only interacted with online. Their warm presence set the tone, and as expected, the conference commenced with its customary vigor and enthusiasm.

The Talks

Karan from GitHub showcased how to build a Rails application from scratch using AI. We learned a lot of tips and tricks to write code faster. I liked how we are able to do everything within VS code, like selecting code and searching with the context, and also filling in code from chat to files. It was an interesting start to the conference. We also met Karan after the talk and had a really good conversation about his work at GitHub, etc.

I followed Karan with my talk on Concurrency in Ruby. I used Rajinikanth's gif images to explain parallelism to people, and this made them laugh. Many came over to me after the talk and asked a lot of interesting questions about Async, Fiber, and Ractor. This is the good thing about talking at a conference, you can share your knowledge and also learn more from others.

Rish Jain delved into Rails performance monitoring, highlighting key concerns and the frequent errors developers make that affect performance. Maheshwari then spoke on the pitfalls leading to flaky test cases, offering practical strategies to enhance reliability.

Then we had our very own Harman’s talk on Payment workflow with Ruby and Clickhouse, he talked about the challenges in running many workers with Sidekiq, processing tasks in batches, saving states, and dividing work efficiently. Since they were processing payments they had to make sure the workers were Idempotent. Interesting how they went from processing payments for 200 million records in 2 days to paying them off in just 3 hours. That’s impressive.

Post-lunch, we were treated to a fantastic energizing session. Zumba instructors were ushered in to get everyone dancing — a brilliant strategy to reinvigorate attendees after a meal! This undoubtedly kept many alert for the subsequent hours. And, as a thoughtful touch, coffee and tea were later served to sustain our energy.

Other notable talks included meta-programming in Ruby by Arihant Hirawat, and RuboCop usage by Shloka Shah. Rahul Mahale’s insights on Kubernetes scalability, and Chinmay Naik’s advice on avoiding over-engineering were equally enlightening.

Then we had an unconference-style discussion about AI and the fear around it about people losing jobs, etc. A lot of people asked many interesting questions. One of them was, “If AI is like cricket, why is everyone being forced to play cricket? shouldn’t it be optional?”

I think AI is not like cricket it is more like a computer back in the day. When the computer was introduced for businesses, people were not forced to use it but accountants, restaurant owners, grocery stores, etc started buying computers not because they were forced but because they wanted to improve their work with speed and efficiency. Computers made things easy for them and their customers. The same goes for AI. You can use it to improve your work and support your customers better.

Day 2

Day two kicked off with high energy. Highlights included Vipul’s discourse on the evolution of JavaScript tooling in Rails, Aniket’s guide to monitoring Rails apps using open-source tools, and Hiểu Nguyễn’s tips for building a robust MFA framework.

Manu Janardhanan talked about Async gem and Falcon to execute IO-bound tasks directly with clean, simple, performant, and scalable code. Since his talk was in line with mine (concurrency) I was more interested to hear about his experience working with async.

Puneet Khuswani shed light on scaling engineering teams, emphasizing maintaining quality and efficiency. Vishwajeet and Ratnadeep then delved into the intricacies of IOT and Rails respectively, rounding off the informative sessions.

Sponsors and Swags

The sponsor booths were abuzz with activity. Pattern stood out with their distinctive initiative: creating personalized avatars for attendees. Many delightedly shared their quirky avatars on social media.

From RubyPY, I collected a few treats, including “indoori namkeen” (a spicy snack), a card dispenser, and charger heads. Meanwhile, RailsFactory upheld its tradition of gifting insightful books, a gesture that consistently garners appreciation.

Networking

Conferences like RubyConf are invaluable for networking. Over the years, many connections made at such events have blossomed into friendships or collaborations for us personally. We always encourage our folks to actively participate in such tech communities; they’re a treasure trove of like-minded professionals and insights.

Adios

We had an absolute blast this year, just like always. We’re definitely hitting up more of these conferences to hang out and meet even more cool folks. Those two days flew by in the best way. By the time we hit Chennai again, we were feeling pretty stoked.

Looking forward to participating in more conferences and contributing even more to the community that keeps giving.

Adios!