RailsConf 2015

I feel so excited that my first post on the blog is about RailsConf 2015, it feels like so an appropriate way to start .

This year I had the opportunity to attend to RailsConf. It was my first time and it was an amazing and refreshing experience. 3 days charged of interesting talks and people. The topics I found to be more recurrent were:

• Microservices: I feel that by now a lot of companies had tried microservices and they had realized that is not all sunshine and rainbows. Divinding your app in microservices is not the solution to bad code. And if you decide to go for it you should be prepared to do monitoring, know a little about devops, handling errors, among other stuff. That’s why I found really informative Microservices, a bittersweet symphony by Sebastian Sogamoso.
• A more diverse and inclusive community: a lot of talks discussed how to collaborate to open source, how to recruit people to collaborate and how to create a good dev culture. I found Sometimes a controller is just a controller by Justin Searls to be a fun but also good reflexion on how we are as community.
• APIs: there were a couple of mentions on good API design and also the inclusion of rails-api to Rails 5. My favorites talks on the topic were AMS, API, RAILS and a Developer, a love Story by João Moura and Designing a Great Ruby API - How We’re Simplifying Rails 5 by Sean Griffin

I also enjoyed Aaron Patterson’s keynote a lot, it was great to see how such a technical talk about improving performance he manage to made it fun. And the other talk that I loved was Nothing is Something by Sandi Metz, she’s an excellent speaker hands down . I compiled my notes on the different talks and unofficial events I went and they can be found here Day 1, Day 2 and Day 3.

I came back from Atlanta with this feeling that to have something cool you have to work for it. You don’t need to go with the hype of every framework, pattern or whatever technology out there to build the best. You should go with what actually works for you. As Yehuda mentioned on the Fireside chat, after the hype phase passes everyone starts to actually be honest about the pros and cons. This also implies that your project should be good enough to pass this phase.

I will end with something Justin Searls said on his talk “Your clever code doesn’t impress me, it makes me feel stupid. Obvious is impressive. I would like to read more obvious code”. I will always have this on mind when reviewing my own work and others work.