After a 10 year break I made it to an in-person Ruby conference again: Euruko 2022 in Helsinki. For travelling, I chose the Finnlines ferry from Travemünde to Helsinki. That’s travelling without a hurry, since each trip takes 30 hours. At the time of this writing, I’m sitting in the ship’s café looking out over the Baltic Sea into the sunshine, just south of Oland and slowly approaching and then passing Bornholm. There are worse places to write a post. 😁
Photo taken onboard the Finnmaid, while approaching the port of Vuosaari, Finland
Thankfully there’s a gym, a sauna (if a Finish line after all) and lots of nice places to take a seat watch the waves pass by. I even met the fist few other attendees on the ferry already!
Even before reaching Helsinki, Leo Kiisi one of the organisers, sent an invitation to join the sauna – including access to the open water. We met in the evening and had a great time as several attendees and a speaker joined. It was a fantastic way the end the first travel day, relaxing, refreshing and overall remarkable.
The opening Keynote was recorded and presented by Matz, and he busted several myths and claims that were made about Ruby. What surprised me most, is his take on type systems: He explained that (at least some) type systems are Turing compete. which means that the type system alone is already complex enough to encode any algorithm or program. 🤯 — Whether that’s desirable or not is another question. 😉
Wiktoria Dalach told us about how security aspects can be handled, by categorising the infinite space of possible issues into only thee categories:
- Confidentiality: How to keep secrets secret
- Integrity: How to be sure that we get what we expect
- Availability: Ability to access our information always
What we’d need do do ourselves: Select the aspects from these categories that are most important to us — and them work on them.
Adarsh Pandit told us about ‘The Technical and Organizational Infrastructure of the Ruby Community’ – and drew parallels to the transportation infrastructure differences he found between California (where he lives) and Finland. I understood that the difference is mainly that in the US transportation seems to optimise the number of cars the system can handle, while in Finland it’s more the number of people and how they can get from A to B. We also learned how individuals (and companies) can support the Ruby community:
- Contributing to the language implementation(s) and its libraries: The code is still being optimised, bugs a fixed etc. All think work needs to be done by someone. Thank someone could be you.
- Support Ruby Central/Ruby Together with money: In the end services such as Rubygems (and its website & repositories), Bundler etc. require hardware to run on and that costs money. These projects are also improved and that involves investing time and/or money as well.
BTW, you can support RubyTogether at https://rubytogether.org.
An amusing point Adarsh made: He said that Finland seems to have the happiest people and at the same time the angriest music. (Note: Finland has the highest number of mates rock bands per capita worldwide).
Vesa Vänskä explained how to move ‘From massive pull requests to trunk-based development with Ruby’ – and reminded us of Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt’s observation:
I say an hour lost at a bottleneck is an hour out of the entire system. I say an hour saved at a non-bottleneck is worthless. Bottlenecks govern both throughput and inventory.
Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt
Be sure to check out the talks on the conference site; I believe, at least some talks were recorded and will be available in the next few days. As always, I thoroughly enjoyed the conference days, meeting many new people, the great food at the lovely location.
I’m already looking forward to the next Ruby conference I’ll attend. It may be the next EURUKO and the community voted for Vilnius, Lithuania.
