Past Events

The crystal language is a statically-typed, compiled, and ruby-like language with terrific performance.

While still young, it could be the next ruby with enough love and interest, capitalizing on the fact that its learning curve is quasi null for any decent rubyist.

This talks will outline the current state of the language, its advantages, drawbacks and perspective.

Slow requests to third party payment gateways or sudden spikes in image uploads make background jobs crucial to scaling applications. However, they require us to think differently about failure scenarios: we give up consistency guarantees, and we can’t be certain if or when a job will succeed. In this talk, you’ll learn how to get the started with background jobs, master the challenges they're posing, and how they are used at Shopify to scale one of the largest running Rails applications.

Marina will present an overview of this paper by Yang et al., focusing on how these principles apply to Rails applications and go over different examples, followed by a discussion.

https://hyperloop-rails.github.io/220-HowNotStructure.pdf

If you wish to dive into Machine Learning but have been intimidated by its complexity, this talk will show you how simple the core principles of modern Machine Learning are. We'll rebuild a Neural Network that can predict a few letters from images, in 50 lines of code.

So you've got that big pile of (hopefully) useful code. There are plenty of reasons to extracts some parts to gems, but do you know how to do it? In this talk, I will show you step by step how I extracted a gem from a production application and how I published it.

State machines are overused, so they say. They are used to solved trivial problems that perhaps a state variable alone would solve, they say...

In this talk I will present how this hammer is the right tool for the task at hand.

Maintaining an API is no easy task. At GitHub, we often faced problems evolving our GraphQL schema. What fields are being used? Who is using them? Can we remove this field safely?

We recently tackled this problem. This is the story of how we regained confidence in building and evolving great APIs.

Julia is actively working on improving Ruby's toolset with rbspy. It's an open-source project and here is it's description on Github:

Have you ever wanted to know what functions your Ruby program is calling? rbspy can tell you!

rbspy lets you profile running Ruby processes. It's the only Ruby profiler that can profile arbitrary Ruby processes that are already running.

Ruby 2.5 was released on Christmas day and it came with a bunch of new features! We'll take a look at how they can by implemented in pure Ruby and explore practical use cases. Finally, we'll take a peek at a couple of exciting features planned for Ruby 2.6.

Language matters more than you think. And the more you think, the more you need language. This talk explores the connections between language and problem solving, how the metaphors that we use can expand or constrain our thinking, and how it all relates to our identities as software developers and as human beings. Along the way we’ll learn about linguistics, category theory, Russian colors, gigantic bridges in France, and how to pronounce the word “lacuna”. And you’ll definitely have some things to think about. Hopefully, in new ways.

Mind map: https://metamaps.cc/maps/3315 The organizational structure of today’s society is exceedingly centralized and hierarchical. In this presentation, we will explore that web of control and how the decentralized open source movement is poised to overtake it. We will be discussing several innovative projects including Holochain and one that I have founded built in Ruby on Rails called JoatU.

Solving the “monolith” and breaking it into smaller pieces that can have their own, independent work streams, in a web of independent-but-connected components is the brass ring everyone is reaching for. Events, Event Streams, and Event Sourcing are the corner stone of successful services projects. Taking an event-oriented approach to a microservices or service-oriented architecture makes the difference between ending up with the holy grail of architecture and productivity that you’ve been envisioning, or more of the same old problems, but now with all the distributed systems problems, too. And with an event-sourced approach, you get complete audit logging for free!

Did you ever have to maintain a 15-year-old application? Dead code and tables everywhere, static methods, database queries in between HTML tags and some pages still in a language that is no longer supported.

This presentation will lead you through a progressive rewrite from very old legacy to the latest shiny versions. Learn how to automate legacy testing, how to seamlessly jump between the old and new parts, and how to overcome other challenges that arise from dealing with legacy.

“Patience, young grasshopper.” Mentoring young grasshoppers is a way of giving back and sharing the wisdom you’ve accumulated over the years. And mentoring with a peer can help you solidify what you have just learned, or to have a concept explained to you better than someone 15 years your senior might have. We feel validated by receiving and giving mentorship.

There are a few pitfalls though. How we think we learn isn’t necessarily what the learning brain has to say about it. As a mentee, we don’t always know how to ask the right questions, or as a mentor how to answer the questions right. We want to be helpful but maybe we also like to hear ourselves talk.

In this presentation we will go into the research that can help us understand how we learn, how we can help build self-confidence in others and ourselves, and how to determine an individual approach for all types of people we mentor, including those who think very differently than us. We’ll also go into our experience with mentorship at Les Pitonneux, with both receiving and giving mentorship.

Translating stored content in a Ruby project can be a tricky task. How do you read, update and query your translations? Do you need to change your presentation logic to accommodate translations? And in what format will you actually store the translations?

Mobility is a gem I've built to help make working with translations easier. Unlike other translation gems, Mobility is "pluggable", in the sense that it supports many different storage strategies through a common interface. It also supports multiple ORM (ActiveRecord and Sequel currently). This makes it, I believe, the most flexible translation solution for your Ruby project.

I'll explain Mobility and a bit of background about how it internally manages multiple storage backends using some interesting Ruby metaprogramming.

A talk about the benefits and tradeoffs of rails' single table inheritance and some learnings from maintaining existing code bases that use it.

User stories are a part of an agile approach to writing software. But how do you go from writing a few sentences to providing detailed instructions for developers? In this talk, I go beyond user stories by detailing how the Acquisio Promote team's GitHub issues are built.

So you've got that big pile of (hopefully) useful code. There are plenty of reasons to extracts some parts to gems, but do you know how to do it? In this talk, I will show you step by step how I extracted a gem from a production application and how I published it.

Functional programming may seem complex at first sight, however, some concepts are simpler than the ones that we are used to in Object Oriented languages. During this presentation, I will show you some FP concepts that makes code more modular, succinct and clear. The whole presentation will be done using Ruby.

If you wish to dive into Machine Learning but have been intimidated by its complexity, this talk will show you how simple the core principles of modern Machine Learning are. We'll rebuild a Neural Network that can predict a few letters from images, in 50 lines of code.

Gaming the system is an inherently human trait for some of us. Come find out how some famous algorithms get mistreated by people for fun, for profit, or for the sheer joy of messing with math.

Do you have an application you need to replace, but can't afford to shutdown for weeks? Your best option is to use the Strangler Pattern to replace parts of your application URL-space without breaking everything. I will show you two techniques to strangle an application.

How you can use a mobile application to track the location of a phone and use Ruby on Rails to manage the data? In this presentation, Martin will use Sharethebus use case to explain how they are tracking buses throughout North America. Using API calls and asynchronous processing, you'll follow the path of each data point from the phone to the customer interface.

Le Wagon, a coding bootcamp ruby on Rails in Montreal Marie-Gabrielle and François will come to present Le Wagon, a 9-week coding bootcamp that teaches technical skills to entrepreneurs. Le Wagon has trained over 750 students within 14 cities around the world. It comes now to Montréal ! Le Wagon Montreal is now hiring FullStack ruby on Rails developers willing to share their passion and teach the curriculum. Find out more there → https://goo.gl/xPBQot. www.lewagon.com

The thought processes behind building this side-project

Why not React? React is a framework. For the number of screens and for the complexity of the application, I deemed the 180 kiB were too much. The whole JavaScript, with no compression or uglification, stands in at 67 kiB, or 1/3. The JS does exactly what it needs, no more, no less. But, React has excellent ideas which I shamelessly stole

Ever wondered about the fastest way to insert data, and why? Seevibes scaled it's insert pipeline from 200 to 80,000 rows per second. François will share his knowledge with you.

I wanted to spy on what functions my Ruby programs are running! So I wrote an experimental program to do it. We'll talk about Ruby internals, spying on Ruby with gdb, why I needed to learn DWARF, and how to build the future of Ruby debugging tools (spoiler: I'm not sure)

> How can a small team with diverse backgrounds and skills deliver non trivial software solutions?

In this talk, we will follow the life of a developer from onboarding to technical and collaborative proficiency in order to create maximum value and impact.

We will go through the tools and best practices that you can apply to your team and organization.

We will also explore what management can do to provide a minimal but structured way of ensuring that the right work gets done.

Data is at the heart of everything we build with Rails.

Even with the power of Ruby on Rails, developing reports for company takes time and can become a major distraction for engineering teams.

Eric presents a workflow using Heroku Dataclips, Google Sheets, as well as a ruby gem that you can use to build your own data pipelines, with the end goal of empower other teams to harness the company’s data quickly become self sufficient users.

With the rise of front-end frameworks like React and Angular, the need for an API is necessary, if not mandatory. The Grape framework is the perfect solution to easily build RESTful APIs. In this talk we'll walk through the basics of Grape and how to use the framework inside your existing Rails application.

They say "to become a Ruby Jedi, you have to master the art of metaprogramming". In this talk, we'll go through the steps to create a gem using metaprogramming techniques. So, Let's look into that, shall we...

Internet security is a huge, important, and often discussed topic. However, as a junior developer, it can be very daunting to know where to even start learning about it. This talk will give a brief introduction to some parts of the architecture of the internet that make it so insecure, covering concepts like DNS, man-in-the-middle attacks, and ending with a brief tutorial on how to use Let’s Encrypt to set up SSL for your web applications.

Le data fetching est encore un problème difficile à régler, surtout lorsque nos applications deviennent de plus en plus grosses et complexes.

Est-ce que vos APIs REST “over-fetch” ou “under-fetch” vos données ? Est-ce que vos endpoints ad hoc deviennent un vrai cauchemar à maintenir plus vos vues changent ?

Apprenez comment utiliser GraphQL dans vos applications Rails et comment cela peut aider à la communication client serveur ainsi que nous aider en tant que dévelopeur, en utilisant un language qui nous permet d’exprimer nos besoin en données d’une façon déclarative et hiérarchique.

La programmation “front-end” n’est pas votre tasse de thé? Vous en avez marre de débugger des fonctions de callback et des exceptions de runtime ?

Elm pourrait être la solution ces problèmes. Durant cette présentation je vais vous démontrer quels sont les éléments qui font de Elm un language si spécial, allant de ces fonctionnalités de language fonctionnel en passant par un éventail d’outils de développent sans égal.