Sep 16, 2012 by Blake Lucchesi
GoGaRuCo 2012: What a Great Experience
I had a blast! This was my first time at a large scale Ruby event and I think what impressed me the most was how welcoming everyone was. The Ruby community typically gets labelled as being a bunch of elitists. All I can say is not at this event. All of the speakers had such an encouraging and positive tone while delivering their presentations.
Update: You can now watch all of the sessions from GoGaRuCo on the Confreaks.com website.
A Shortlist of Takeaways from My Favorite Sessions
From Heather Rivers' talk “Linguistic Potluck: Crowdsourcing Localization in Rails”
Many internationalization gems are available. rails-i18n, tr8n (tron)
Storing string translations in YAML format can quickly become overwhelming. Instead she recommends storing the translations in a simple database table. Just make sure to add a layer of caching so you don’t fry your box while querying for translations.
Always try to store the highest level of translation available to you. e.g. Stay away from just plugging a translated word into a sentence because in many languages when a single word changes it can affect the usage of the words around it causing incorrect use of the language.
From Yehuda Katz’s talk “Cruft and Technical Debt: A Long View”
The primary cause of technical debt is not bad code. It’s that the assumptions originally defining the requirements for the code have likely changed.
His example was the extra code required in jQuery to support IE6. Once IE6 support is gone, it will be important to remove all the extra “cruft” still left in the codebase.
He suggested creating a “CRUFT.txt” file somewhere in your project so that you can write down the major assumptions you are making and note where they affect your codebase. When you understand the underlying assumptions made when that code was written, you can more easily determine whether those assumptions are still relevant.
His main goal was to encourage development teams to continue to question why something is written the way it is because many projects have areas where the motto is “just don’t touch that code!!!”. Once you feel like you can’t change a piece of your code it is officially cruft.
From Jack Danger Canty’s talk “Mega Rails”
Use PostgreSQL. No, seriously.
One of the first things you segment out from your app code is Mailers. It’s a nice chunk of code that can be put into it’s own app and run as a service. Doing so might even make it easier for the marketing team to edit and deploy changes to the emails being sent by your various systems.
I’m Feeling Rejuvenated!!!
First, let’s take a step back. The decision to shut down ChapterBoard and open source the code was a really tough one. Four years of on-again off-again development alongside two intense years of marketing and user acquisition left us with a lot of lessons learned, but more importantly an increasingly close relationship with our fans and users. Over the past few months, Alex and I would continue to sit down and discuss new ideas and we found ourselves continually second guessing the usefulness and viability of the idea.
In the two weeks leading up to the conference I started to look a little more optimistically about moving on to work on something new. That feeling was increased ten-fold once I actually got the conference and saw all of the excitement from fellow programmers and entrepreneurs. I found that a lot of the discussions I was having between sessions were not just “so, what version of Ruby do you use?”, but much more about the passion someone felt for what they were working on and working towards. Passion, my friends, is contagious.
The awesome looking t-shirts for this years event.