SF.rb

SF.rb is a meetup group in San Francisco focused on the ruby language. They’re #SFdotRB on twitter.

Space notes

Mavenlink is a nice little space near Montgomery Bart. I notice that they have a nice board games selection. Their pitch was unusually good, and of course they’re hiring. We had more people than chairs. Talks started only fifteen minutes late. There is guest wifi.

Starter notes

There is an open Call for Proposals link for SF.rb

And a CoC (Code of Conduct) “because organizers can also be terrible”

“It turns out that hashtg sfrb is actually ‘science fiction romance books’ so we’re using sfdotrb”

First, the obligatory hosting (mavenlink) presentation - they’re hiring of course. They’re some kind of accounting software / project management hybrid for small consulting firms.

Talk 1

• Self-identified brogrammer who loves bitcoin, hackathons
• He works at Omada Health
• Pair programming: “communicate or die”
• He was once told “You’re the nicest tool I’ve ever met”
• Good style, depressing content.

He says that he used to tell people that people who used to code as a profession rather than a passion that that was doing it wrong and terrible. He says that he no longer says that, but I got the impression that he still believes it.

Interim pitch for RailsCamp

Lacklan Hardy talks about RailsCamp

Talk 2: basic intro to reading cruby

Discussing array sort

Lots of references to the book Ruby Under a Microscope

Excessively basic

ruby uses qsort_r

“Everything is kind of important… but we have lots of servers, we have AWS, it’s fine” gets a laugh from the audience

Talk 3: “Stop Building Services”

Rachel from Github :)

References Karl Popper on Falsifiabilty: is there evidence that could change your mind?

“All of our architecture questions should be based on falsifiable beliefs!”

“We should grow up and make decisions based on evidence”

“Github is a giant terrible monolithic rails app”

“We should pause to appreciate that this is the diagram of doom. When you see this, you should rethink all your life decisions” (two apps with their own databases, both also talking to each others’ databases)

“We created an ecosystem of services that mirrors our poorly-factored code”

Needing to cross-mix microserrvices and libraries is a sign that you drew the lines around the services incorrectly.

Easy Rewrites with Ruby and Science by Jesse Toth (she rewrote the github permissions system)

“The user object was modified in many places.”

“This is a failure. We created something much more dangerous.”

“I was about to draw the diagram with my hands, but hold on…”

“It felt absurd, like I was bludgeoning you with network calls, but we were bludgeoning ourselves with network calls”

“Finding source code is tricky” … I disagree. github global search within internal GHE or within org, or checkout-all?

“Although we avoided having to copy and paste, it came at a terrible price.”

“Don’t create more points of catastrophic failure!”

Build together the parts that will need to change together! (maybe remind yourself of this regularly)