Helvetic Ruby - Third Edition
I got to enjoy another delightful helvetic ruby conference this year. This year we went to Geneva.
Workshop: Riffin’ on Rails with Kasper
The day before the actual conference, Helvetic Ruby offered two workshops and a community meetup this year. They were offered at no additional cost. Quite the offer at the low cost of 160 CHF (for late bird tickets)!
We saw Kasper, a former rails core member, show how he riffs / works on coding new features. The basic idea is to take one ruby file, and just start writing code. Only write what is important for the design: Surface the associations, the naming, and maybe a couple of methods that are important on how objects interact with each other. Kapser offers lot of material about riffing, check out https://github.com/kaspth/riffing-on-rails!
While I have worked in a similar fashion in the past by sketching features in markdown files, I learned some key parts:
- Try not to write comments/prose. You want to keep things compact and easy to change. It’s not about completeness and having everything figured out, riffing is about iterating quickly. When you write in a markdown file and put down a lot of thoughts, it becomes harder to delete things and explore completely different directions. Riffing it really is more like jamming as a musician, try things out, see what feels right, copy, start again, improvise, go crazy, test the limits. It’s a creative process—writing comments and elaborating will slow you down and make it harder to explore different directions.
- Defer correctness / defer execution. During riffing, you want to embrace Ruby’s expressiveness. The goal isn’t execution or correctness—staying close to executable code is helpful, but exploration matters more.
I’m definitely gonna be riffing a lot in the future!
Conference: Hallway Track
Helvetic Ruby stuck to its approach of generous breaks. The rhythm of the conference was essentially one 30-minute talk followed by a 30-minute break. I love having so much time to chat with other rubyists!
Talk: The Temple of Love
Well actually, the title was “The Test Pyramid and the Temple of Love”, but Ronan, very much started by introducing us to the lyrics of a 1992 hit song by an English gothic rock band. Now how that relates to the test pyramid, you will have to see for yourself once the videos of the talks are up, as I can’t do the talk justice with a summary. Let’s just say this one is a must-watch. We can even forgive his grossly inaccurate claim that people don’t care about bass or bass players.
Talk: More feedback! Quantity becomes quality
Awesome talk about how we learn as humans, as developers, and how we are better off when we try a lot of things, rather than trying to create the one perfect thing. Advancing is about deliberate practice, set a goal, have a simple plan, execute it, adjust, repeat and do that often, faster and more experiments are better than the perfect plan (that doesn’t exist anyway). Everything was nicely illustrated through his personal experience and supported by results from scientific studies. As a former statistics nerd, I appreciated seeing standard deviation values on the slides. Thanks Kyle!
Again please!
There will be a Helvetic Ruby 2026, though the date and location have not been announced yet. I look forward to it, and hope to see you there!
