Today we’d like to share with you some information about Ruby Meditation – a great event that took place this weekend (July 16th) in Kyiv.

Quick intro

RubyMeditation is a conference that was organized by Aejis and Gera-IT as an event where those who interested can share brand new ideas about Ruby world specifically and web development in general, discuss solutions to challenges, meet with old friends and find new ones.

This time it was 10th Anniversary RubyMeditation. It is so nice that this event is running for so long since it started in 2013! Moreover this year it became even more regular – every 1-2 Months. Anna, Andrey, Tatyana and everybody from the Org team – thank you for all this hard work that you do to organize RubyMeditation!

Let me now tell you about the content! It was really impressive and useful.

Have you ever been upset spending couple of days to setup new Rails project? There is a solution.

I mean new rails app, configure rspec, prepare demo and deployment process, etc.

If yes, Andriy Kyrylenko from Gera-IT team presented internal tool that we’ve initially developed for internal needs. RPSK (rails project starter kit) – Automated application bootstrapping and provisioning. This is a tool that in 10-30 mins gives you ability to get:

• bootstraped Rails app(rspec, twitter bootstrap theme, admin namespace, PG, etc)
• Git repository
• capistrano deployment in separate repo
• ansible stripts to provision your real demo server(nginx, unicorn, monit, etc)
• create jobs on your Jenkins instance

So this simple tool allows you to save up to 2 days of boring work!

Do you know what’s the most impressive benefit of Ruby?

Ruby is dynamic language. Everything is an object. It means that Ruby allows you to create new Domain Specific Languages as easy and 1-2-3. This is actually the main reason how RSPEC, ActiveRecord and many other gems in Ruby world appeared to be so readable and easy to use!

Alexey Osipenko delivered us story about his experience in building object-oriented language. In other words – DSL. Slides are here.

Have you ever tried Erlang?

Language, created in old 80th can be scary to try! But it offers so sweet opportunities in terms of scalability, performance and concurrency! Well, there is a great option for you – Elixir! Built on top of Erlang VM and compatible with it, Elixir was created by Jose Valim, former contributor to Ruby on Rails. It offers syntax, which is familar to all Rubists, but together with Phoenix(general-purpose web framwork) it can bring us to the next level of performance without loosing Ruby and Rails comform and productivity.

Eugene Pirogov gave us a very informative introductory presentation about Erlang and Elixir, their history and how they play together, about basic syntax and many other aspects.

“DRY or not to DRY?” – Digital Shakespeare

This and some other good and practical questions were addressed by Alex Topalov in his speech “Applications Architecture” (slides). As you know there are many great words about different methodological improvements in software development like DRY (don’t repeat yourself), Abstraction, ideal way to create code structure, etc. But if you apply them blindly, especially over existing code – you may end up with negative side effects. Also there are many cases when specific approach or pattern not only doesn’t bring positive effects, but it can make things more complicated. So in this speech RubyMeditation attendees could hear some practical cases and participate in discussion about reasons, obstacles and consequences that surround them.

Fast-like-a-boss. Another option in Ruby world.

Pavlo Zahozhenko, made a great introduction to Roda – brazing fast web microframework in Ruby which is even faster then Sinatra and provides same simplicity! Check the slides here.

Single page apps: should you follow the trend?

Maksim Goncharov in his talk touched the pros and cons of building Single Page Applications (SPAs).

Problem: Do you know how many requests modern websites do?

For example, expedia.com: 239!!!  How many domains does it talk to? – 62!!! And the problem is – they do this for a reason, they just can not avoid this as all those files and request are the content, metrics, analytics, etc. The stuff which is important for business.

Stas Volovyk, and his presentation “Dead heavy web” (slides), didn’t offer “silver bullet” for anything. Instead he pointed our attention to this and some other problems of web development today: multiple dependencies of any specific websites, a lot of content, loading information from large number of 3rd party domains. Will the HTTP/2 really help? Any other options? Good question, bro!

So, my dear friends, 10th RubyMeditation was full of really great and useful content. Next one is announced to take place on 17th September, so everybody who wants to learn something helpful and enjoy this funny event are welcome. And if you have something interesting to share – give Orgs a shout and sign-up as a Speaker!

Stay tuned with Gera-IT!