wroc_love.rb 2016

This year I decided to attend more IT related events so I went to wroc_love.rb conference first. While the conference is aimed at Ruby programmers the topics ranged from Ruby through general object oriented programming, DevOps and even coffee. I also finally decided to give a lightning talk (it didn’t go that well but I don’t think it was a total disaster). I enjoyed two talks in particular one about NixOS and the other one about Liskov substitution principle.

The NixOS Project and deploying systems declaratively

Sander van der Burg gave a very interesting talk about NixOS, how it works, how it deals with complexity involed when deploying applications to production servers, rollbacks, compatibility, reproducibility. I have been contemplating using NixOS quite a few times but could never bring myself to try something more practical. Sander’s talk shed some insight on how NixOS can be used in practice. A very interesting talk for people involved in DevOps.

Lessons of Liskov

Peter Bhat Harkins explained Liskov Substitution Principle succintly and presented examples of why nil is a bad idea, why do we have callbacks everywhere in Rails, how to avoid getting exceptions in strange places and how to write software that doesn’t feel brittle. In my opinion it was the best talk on the conference - it concentrated on Ruby but the principles presented can be applied elsewhere and make you a better programmer overall. I really recommend watching it when the videos are available.