Ruby
Community
Conference

Many Ruby developers like to initialize new objects, so let's take a dive into Ruby object initialization! What makes initializing an object slow? Can we use Ruby to speed it up? In this talk, we will examine the internals of the `Class#new` method, explore the trade-offs between Ruby and C method calls, and experiment with a Ruby implementation of `Class#new`. Additionally, we will discuss strategies for speeding up Ruby method calls, such as inline caches, while also considering the drawbacks of moving from C to Ruby.

We’ve used Resque and Redis to run background jobs in multiple apps for many years at 37signals. However, performance, reliability, and our own apps’ idiosyncrasies led us to use a lot of different gems, some developed by us, some forked or patched to address our struggles. After multiple war stories with background jobs, looking at our increasingly complex setup, we wanted something we could use out-of-the-box without having to port our collection of hacks to every new app and with fewer moving pieces. After exploring existing alternatives, we decided to build our own and aim to make it the default for Rails 8.

In this talk, I’ll present Solid Queue, explain some of the problems we had over the years, how we designed Solid Queue to address them, and all the Fun™ we had doing that.

We'll explore how Ruby can unlock new avenues of creativity in the age of AI and cross-technology innovation. By leveraging Ruby's simplicity and adaptability, we can seamlessly integrate cutting-edge solutions like speech recognition and generation, or image analysis and creation. We can also incorporate advanced techniques like vector search into our projects with minimal effort. Let's rediscover the joy of building beyond traditional boundaries and position the Ruby community at the forefront of technological invention and creativity.

The Ruby Platform Core Team at Zendesk supports hundreds of Ruby services, internal gems, and a few massive monoliths. In this talk, the team will share how they upgraded one of their biggest monoliths to Rails 8.0 just 14 hours after it was released, covering the tools and processes that made it happen. Topics include dual booting in production, testing daily against Rails' main branch, tracking gem dependencies, and using production profiling to keep performance in check.