talks & speakers

Verona
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Weird Ruby

Over its long history (31 years and counting) Ruby has accumulated dozens of little known, obscure and somewhat weird features. Some of them are annoying, some of them are fun and a few are actually quite useful. In this session we'll go over some of my favorite weird Ruby features and we'll discuss how to make the best use of them (provided they are any useful, that is). It will be weird and fun, I promise!

Bozhidar Batsov

Senior Director of Engineering @ Toptal

I’m Bozhidar and I love computers in general and programming in particular. My fanatic devotion to Emacs is known world-wide. I spend a lot of my (free) time on GitHub, contributing to various open-source Ruby, Clojure and Emacs Lisp projects. My most notable open-source projects are RuboCop (a linter/formatter for Ruby) and CIDER (a Clojure interactive development environment for Emacs).

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News Crawler via Langchain.RB and Gemini APIs

How can we get an LLM to be updated to today’s news? Gen AI is great at answering questions...from the past. After the LLM was trained, all you can do is RAG. How about crawling the web for latest news with Gemini for multimodal extraction and offering summarization by your favorite topic? It all gets more exciting thanks to Andrei’s langchainrb gem.

Riccardo Carlesso

Developer Advocate @ Google Cloud

Riccardo loves caipirinhas and 🍷 Amarone, playing 🎹 piano and 🏊🏻🚴🏿🏃‍♀️ triathlons; he's been passionate about Mathematics since he was 4. He's still in love with Ruby and Rails. Former network administrator, sysadmin, and Ruby on Rails developer, Riccardo has been in operations for 20+ years and still likes to spend time coding (better if Ruby). He loves engaging with customers and help them run their operations reliably and successfully in the cloud.

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Using Ruby on AWS's Lambda

A Hitchhiker's Guide to Ruby on AWS's Lambda. Starting from a real world example, I will show how to develop and deploy ruby code on AWS's Lambda. I will show why we chose ruby for the project and why we decided to move part of the monolith code to microservices keeping ruby as main language. I will also show how to test and deploy the code using rspec, cucumber and serverless for a complete CI/CD cycle.

Emiliano Della Casa

Software Architect Independent Consultant

Born in Modena in 1980, I have been developing with Ruby for 20 years and never stopped loving it. I am currently working as an independent consultant

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Discover Modern Ruby features

Exploring Ruby's evolution as a language: Dive into new features like pattern matching, hash literal value omission, object shapes, and a wide range of new abilities. Learn their real-world applications & impact on code readability in my talk. Let's unlock Ruby's full potential!

Lucian Ghinda

Senior Ruby Developer by day, Curator of Short Ruby Newsletter during weekends

I am a Senior Ruby Developer, but I like to describe myself as a 'polymorphic' Ruby developer, as in the past 15 years working with Ruby, I have worn many different hats. I worked as a Senior Ruby Developer, Senior Product Engineer, Product Owner and Engineering Manager, but my not-so-secret passion is the mix of programming, teaching and mentoring. Out of this passion, I ran meetups and bootcamps, co-founded a learning academy, and mentored developers.

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Monads: Exploring Railway Oriented Programming in Ruby

Can we apply the fundamental concept of monads in building maintainable and robust applications in Ruby? In this talk, we'll explore what railway-oriented programming is and how it enhances error handling, simplifies complex workflows, and improves code readability via the use of monads. Throughout the session, we'll write code together and actively test it, uncovering the unique failure and success contexts of monads.

Abiodun Olowode

Senior Engineering Manager @ Factorial

Abiodun Olowode is a Senior Engineering Manager at Factorial in Barcelona, who made the switch to software engineering from Avionics engineering. Prior to transitioning into engineering management, she worked as a Senior Software Developer on several core teams and a Developer Experience Team. She is very enthusiastic about sharing her knowledge and breaking down complex technical concepts, via writing and speaking. She's always up for a new challenge, especially when it involves making the world a better place one line of code at a time.

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From Data to Recommendations: Building an Intelligent System with Ruby on Rails

Did you know that 75% of users are more likely to engage with a platform offering personalized recommendations? Well, with 1.2 million websites worldwide built on Ruby on Rails, let’s harness the power of this popular framework to implement intelligent recommendations effortlessly! This talk will explore the exciting realm of recommendation systems and how to build an intelligent system using Ruby on Rails. We will start by unraveling the fundamentals of recommendation systems, including collaborative filtering. With this foundation, we will integrate machine learning techniques into the Ruby on Rails framework. Throughout the talk, we will discuss various strategies for capturing and utilizing user preferences, improving recommendation accuracy, and continuously refining the system based on user feedback. By the end of this talk, you will have gained valuable insights into building an intelligent system that can transform raw data into valuable recommendations within a Ruby on Rails application!

Rashmi Nagpal

Machine Learning Engineer @ Patchstack

Rashmi, a Machine Learning Engineer by profession and a passionate researcher is dedicated to crafting beautiful AI/ML products. With nearly 5 years of industrial experience, she has brought ideas to life at pre-seed startups and contributed to impactful redesigns and features at established industry giants. Beyond coding, Rashmi finds inspiration in capturing the wonders of the cosmos through her telescope and engaging in board games with friends. Additionally, as a Research Affiliate at MIT, Rashmi continues to push the boundaries of technology, leveraging her expertise to bridge the gap between academia and industry in AI.

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2000 engineers, 2 millions lines of code: the history of a Rails monolith

Rails is the best framework for building your startup. But what happens when the startup becomes a leading business? How do companies that have Rails at the heart of its stack manage growth? How do you maintain a growing application for 15 years in a constantly changing environment? In this Cristian Planas, Senior Staff Engineer at Zendesk, will share with you his 10 years of experience in a company that has succeeded by keeping Rails in its core. He will guide you through the life of a Rails-centered organization, that scaled from zero to hundreds of millions of users.

Cristian Planas

Group Tech Lead & Senior Staff Engineer @ Zendesk

I am a software engineer currently based in New York City. I have been working primarily with Rails since the release of Rails 3, more than 10 years ago. Performance optimization has been an obsession for me since I founded my first start-up as a solo engineer in 2012. Currently, I am a group tech lead and senior staff engineer at Zendesk, where I focus on performance optimization.

Anatoly Mikhaylov

Senior Staff Performance Engineer @ Zendesk

I live in Dublin, Ireland. I'm Performance and Reliability engineer with over 15 years of experience. I'm part of Capacity and Performance team at Zendesk where I'm responsible for capacity management, infrastructure rightsizing, building sophisticated observability, running performance workshops and ensuring large complex system is up and running reliably and cost efficiently. My team plays key role in incidents response to performance and capacity related outages. I also contribute to Zendesk Engineering and Nginx blogs, publish with USENIX Login magazine and present Zendesk at several tech conferences and online webinars.

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Panel - Navigating a career: tech, people, and LLMs

Join our distinguished panelists as they explore the future of careers in the tech industry amidst rapid technological advancements and economic uncertainty. This discussion will cover key topics such as transitioning into leadership roles, upskilling, navigating career pivots, and insights for early-career developers. Learn strategies for staying relevant in a fast-evolving field and gain practical advice on building a strong professional network. Don’t miss this engaging conversation that promises to provide valuable perspectives and actionable insights for tech professionals at all stages of their careers.

Monica Giambitto

Engineering Leader - MASTER OF CEREMONIES

Software engineer at heart turned manager. Italian in Munich. Co-host of the Expanding Beyond podcast. Proud MC for the Ruby community.

Bozhidar Batsov

Senior Director of Engineering @ Toptal

I’m Bozhidar and I love computers in general and programming in particular. My fanatic devotion to Emacs is known world-wide. I spend a lot of my (free) time on GitHub, contributing to various open-source Ruby, Clojure and Emacs Lisp projects. My most notable open-source projects are RuboCop (a linter/formatter for Ruby) and CIDER (a Clojure interactive development environment for Emacs).

Rashmi Nagpal

Machine Learning Engineer @ Patchstack

Rashmi, a Machine Learning Engineer by profession and a passionate researcher is dedicated to crafting beautiful AI/ML products. With nearly 5 years of industrial experience, she has brought ideas to life at pre-seed startups and contributed to impactful redesigns and features at established industry giants. Beyond coding, Rashmi finds inspiration in capturing the wonders of the cosmos through her telescope and engaging in board games with friends. Additionally, as a Research Affiliate at MIT, Rashmi continues to push the boundaries of technology, leveraging her expertise to bridge the gap between academia and industry in AI.

Lucian Ghinda

Senior Ruby Developer by day, Curator of Short Ruby Newsletter during weekends

I am a Senior Ruby Developer, but I like to describe myself as a 'polymorphic' Ruby developer, as in the past 15 years working with Ruby, I have worn many different hats. I worked as a Senior Ruby Developer, Senior Product Engineer, Product Owner and Engineering Manager, but my not-so-secret passion is the mix of programming, teaching and mentoring. Out of this passion, I ran meetups and bootcamps, co-founded a learning academy, and mentored developers.