Tuesday. Day 1. Keynote by DHH on belief systems. Fascinating talk by Lance Ivy on JSON Web Tokens, Justin Weiss on sessions, Dave Tapley with an entertaining exploration of VueJS, ActionCable and image processing. Eileen Uchitelle with a much anticitpated presentation on adding a significant feature (SystemTestCases) to Rails. Alex Kitchens with a great primer on using Git to explore the history of the Rails codebase. Finally Sam Phippen, now with Digital Ocean, in much better health than last year, giving an upbeat tour of fixing some RSpec issues.
Wednesday. Day 2. Justin Searles keynote with a tongue-in-cheek programmer personality test inspired by Myers Biggs. Back to back presentations on Elm, Phoenix, React and Helix highlighting various Rails related technologies. Nate Berkopec with clear and practical guidance on configuring app servers on Heroku or elsewhere. Evening lightening talks, most notably Isaac Sloan building a Crystal Kemal blog in five minutes.
Thursday. Three talks on distributed teams, including Maria Gutierrez, Glenn Vanderburg, formerly of Living Social, and David Copeland of Stich Fix. Simon Enskilden on the decision at Shopify to embrace flash sales and scale from MySQL sharding to multi-datacenter ‘pods’. Tony Drake pitching his active_reporting gem, then Nate Berkopec and Eilieen Uchitelle again with Rafael Franca and Richard Schneeman on a performance panel before the final keynote from Aaron Patterson with his traditional trolling of DHH and, eventually, h2o with Rack 3.0.