---
title: "RedDotRubyConf 2014"
description:
  "This post talks about our experiences attending RedDotRubyConf 2014 in
  Singapore."
canonical_url: "https://www.bigbinary.com/blog/reddotrubyconf"
markdown_url: "https://www.bigbinary.com/blog/reddotrubyconf.md"
---

# RedDotRubyConf 2014

This post talks about our experiences attending RedDotRubyConf 2014 in
Singapore.

- Author: Prathamesh Sonpatki
- Published: July 1, 2014
- Categories: Rails

![RedDotRubyConf2014logo](https://www.bigbinary.com/blog/images/images_used_in_blog/2014/reddotrubyconf/reddotrubyconf2014_logo.png)

I and [Vipul](http://twitter.com/vipulnsward) recently gave a talk at
[RedDotRubyConf](http://reddotrubyconf.com) on **_ActiveRecord can't do it? Arel
can!_**. It was our first trip to Singapore and we enjoyed the conference as
well as Singapore a lot.

RDRC2014 was awesome.

## Day 1

We reached the venue in time for [Koichi's](https://twitter.com/_ko1) keynote on
**_[Ruby.Inspect](http://www.atdot.net/~ko1/activities/2014_reddotrubyconf_pub.pdf)_**.
He talked about various things related to development of Ruby including Ruby
team at Heroku, recent releases of Ruby and new syntax introduced in Ruby 2.1.
He also talked about performance improvements including Generational GC -
**_RGenGC_** and upcoming features in Ruby 2.2.

After that in second part of the talk, he talked about inspection tools
available in Ruby. It was a deep technical part for me and something to learn
about. The message he gave from the talk was to become **_low level engineer_**.

Second talk of the conf was from [T.J. Schuck](https://twitter.com/tjschuck)
about solving one of the hardest problems.
**_[Storing and retrieving passwords in a secure way](https://speakerdeck.com/tjschuck/80-000-plaintext-passwords-an-open-source-love-story-in-three-acts)_**.
He talked about how increasing improvements in hardware pose a challenge as even
if you use proper algorithm it can be cracked with high computing machines. It
was interesting to know about internals of storing passwords. I had never cared
too much about it :)

After the coffee break, [Brandon Keepers](https://twitter.com/bkeepers) from
Github gave talk on
**_[Tending Your Open Source Garden](https://speakerdeck.com/bkeepers/tending-your-open-source-garden)_**.
Github is still on Rails 2.3 and Brandon is working on bringing it up to new
version. His talk was a great advice for those who want to contribute to open
source and community. I think this talk resonated well with the audience as most
of the crowd was new and interested in open source contributions.

[Gautam Rege](https://twitter.com/gautamrege) from Josh Software gave talk on
**_[Dark Side of Ruby](http://www.slideshare.net/gautamrege/reddot-ruby-conf-2014-dark-side-of-ruby)_**.
We had attended this talk at GCRC so we left the hall after some time and did
our one last practice. But i heard the feedback was very well for this talk.

After the lunch, [Keith Pitt](https://twitter.com/keithpitt) talked about
**_Guide to Continuous Deployment with Rails_**. He talked about keeping
everything related to deployment from CI to migrations in sync. One of the
interesting thing that i came to know from this talk was how to enable zero
downtime deployments on Heroku using preboot feature.

[Benjamin Tan](https://twitter.com/bentanweihao) gave talk on
**_[Ruby + Elixir: Polyglotting FTW!](https://speakerdeck.com/benjamintan/ruby-plus-elixir-polyglottin-ftw)_**
after that. He talked about Elixir. This talk was about looking beyond Ruby and
adding another tool to our skills. Benjamin also gave some demos including the
last one in which he used sidekiq with Elixir. The actual work was done by
Elixir workers. I will definitely give a shot to Elixir in the coming days.

After that we gave our talk on **_[Arel](http://github.com/rails/arel)_**. I was
a bit nervous as it was my first talk. But it went well. We finished a bit early
than expected. But there was tea break after our talk :). We got some good
feedback from the attendees and especially beginners who had not used Arel
before. Our slides are
[here](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1O4jYDnq8d0lSu3D2c_khKPkQ2GKCm1Fw0y1nQacmwVc/pub#slide=id.p)

After the tea break, lightning talks started. First talk was by
[Hiroshi Shibata](https://twitter.com/hsbt) about how anyone can
**_[contribute to Ruby](https://speakerdeck.com/hsbt/how-to-improve-experiences-of-ruby)_**
to make it better. He talked about how to submit issues, feature requests using
Redmine. After that [William Notowidagdo](https://twitter.com/pluswn) gave talk
on **_Building REST API using Grape_**. With Rails and Rails API gem it has
become easy to generate an API. But we have grape also as a lightweight tool.
[Sayani Basu](https://twitter.com/sayanee_) talked about how to make a
**_[podcast with Jekyll and other tools](https://speakerdeck.com/sayanee/podcasting-with-jekyll)_**
in 5 minutes.

We are planning to start a podcast here in India about Ruby community so it was
good to know about it.

After these awesome lightning talks, the last session of Day 1 started. There
were talks on Fluentd and Domain driven design. Both were good to know as
something outside of daily routine.
[Konstantin Haase's](https://twitter.com/konstantinhaase)
[last talk](https://speakerdeck.com/rkh/reddotrubyconf-2014-magenta-is-a-lie-and-other-tales-of-abstraction)
of the day was \***\*Meta\*\*** talk. He talked on abstraction and how it
happens in our mind. Our mind affects what we see, like we see magenta color.
Similarly abstraction happens in mind. I had to concentrate a lot in this talk
to understand it. But it was worth it.

And that ended the first day of the conf. It was exciting and we were looking
forward to second day.

## Day 2

Day 2 started with [Brian Helmkamp's](https://twitter.com/brinary) talk on
**_Docker_**. We missed the initial part of the talk. He talked about basics of
Docker, how to deploying in container environment. He also discussed about
deploying a Rails app using docker and how it makes very easy to deploy
different parts of the system using docker very easily.

[Zachary Scott](https://twitter.com/_zzak) gave next talk introducing
**_[Ruby Core team](https://speakerdeck.com/zzak/reddotrubyconf-2014-ruby-core-for-tenderfeet)_**
and how it works, how it collaborates, developer meetings, how anyone can
contribute to MRI. We also had a Friday hug in this talk :) This talk combined
with Hiroshi's lightning talk on the first day was great insight into CRuby
development.

After the break, [Pioter Solnica](https://twitter.com/_solnic_) gave an
excellent talk on
**_[Convenience vs Simplicity](https://speakerdeck.com/solnic/convenience-vs-simplicity)_**.
He talked about convenience offered by ActiveRecord may not be simple to
understand. The things such as input conversion, validation are convenient to
use as a developer but not necessarily simple to understand. He also discussed
presenters, immutable data structures,
[Adamantium](http://github.com/dkubb/adamantium) for creating immutable objects
in Ruby. In the second part of the talk, he talked about relations and how they
can be used in composing queries. He explained this idea using
[Ruby Object Mapper](https://github.com/rom-rb). It uses
[Axiom](https://github.com/rom-rb/axiom) as underlying relational algebra
instead of Arel. Its an interesting project to checkout.

After that our very own [Anil Wadghule](https://twitter.com/anildigital) talked
on
**_[Solid Design Principles in Ruby](https://speakerdeck.com/anildigital/solid-design-principles-in-ruby)_**.
His emphasis was on following designs than patterns. He also showed code
examples and refactored them after applying principles. His talk was good
insight into understanding what are these Solid principles and how they can be
applied in real life.

We skipped the session after lunch and roamed around talking with people. We had
an interesting discussion about hiring Ruby on Rails developers, interview
processes etc.

Then lightning talks started. [Sheng-Loong-Su](https://twitter.com/code_ssl)
talked first on using
**_[Algorithms for Trading](https://speakerdeck.com/sushengloong/algorithmic-trading-for-fun-and-profit-red-dot-ruby-conf-2014)_**.
He talked about collecting data using feeder, preparing trading signals using
strategy and making decision based on trading signals. One of the best talks of
day 2 was by [Grzegorz Witek](https://twitter.com/arnvald) on how he is
traveling the world without getting burned out and still happily programming. He
talked about his experiences in different countries being a
**_[Nomadic Programmer](https://speakerdeck.com/arnvald/nomadic-programmer)_**.
It was one of the best inspirational talks according to me. The last lightning
talk was about **_Using Vagrant for setting up Dev environment_** by
[Shuwei](https://twitter.com/fsw0723) and [Arathi]().

[Nicholas Simmons](https://twitter.com/fullstackcoder) talked on experience of
building a
**_[Single page web app and back again](https://speakerdeck.com/fullstackcoder/reddotrubyconf2014)_**
to normal app. He gave real life metrics from Shopify and showed problems faced
with single page apps, batman.js and how moving back to a normal app helped
them.

Then chocolate man from Belgium,
[Christophe Philemotte](https://twitter.com/_toch), gave talk on
**_[Safety Nets: Learn to code with confidence](https://speakerdeck.com/toch/rdrc-2014-safety-nets-learn-to-code-with-confidence)_**.
His talk was about how we can prevent code in long term using testing, static
analysis using tools such as flog, flay, rubocop for removing duplication,
reducing complexity, fixing warnings. He also talked about importance of code
review. His code is present
[here](https://github.com/8thcolor/rdrc2014-safetynets). He also gave us
excellent chocolates from Belgium.

And the last keynote by [Aaron Patterson](https://twitter.com/tenderlove). As
always, it was full of everything - tech stuff, jokes, puns.

He talked on how he is making performance improvements in Active Record, link
generations. He showed some graphs with performance of various database adapters
tested on Rails versions ranging from 2.3 to 4 to master. He urged everyone to
report performance issues to the core team so that they are addressed quickly.
This is the [app](https://github.com/tenderlove/ko1-test-app) used for doing
performance testing by him.

And that ended talks at RDRC. We had an awesome after party where we discussed
with lots of people about Ruby, Rails as well as other stuff. We would like to
thank [Winston](https://twitter.com/winstonyw) for inviting us to
RedDotRubyConf.

I am already looking at RDRC 2015.

## Links

- [Human page](https://www.bigbinary.com/blog/reddotrubyconf)