It has been said before, and it will be said again: this conference definitely deserves its name. It was a few days filled with friendly, amazing people who shared their knowledge, experience and passion to build apps and solving problems.
First day
Adrian Marin gave a warm welcome on first day, followed by video message from Matz. The first talk was a deep dive into encoding with Rosa Gutierrez and her presentation: Invalid Byte Sequence in UTF-8. We were reminded that computers only understand bytes, and it is worth understanding the fundamentals of the things we are dealing with—”bugs-driven learning”. The next topic was presented by Greg Molnar, who took us through the OWASP Top 10 for Rails developers. He presented the 10 areas we should review in our apps to ensure their security.
The third talk was about a performance issue, where we learned about a case where understanding indexes and how they work made a significant impact. Nabeelah Yousuph, with her presentation The 8-Second Nightmare: How One Change Reduced Latency by 99.9%, took us through a production issue, explaining step-by-step how it worked and what could be done to make it faster. This is another example of how understanding the fundamentals and looking under the hood is a great opportunity to learn. Before the lunch break, we received a massive dose of inspiration and tips from Tom Rossi, who, through his SaaS Lessons Learned presentation, guided us on what is important when building our products. We shouldn’t solve future problems, we should run experiments, and define our success with the understanding that happiness is more important than profit.
The second part of the first day began with a presentation by Julian Cheal titled Make a Massively Multiplayer Ruby Game with DragonRuby, where we saw how easily great games can be created using DragonRuby. The presentation ended with a friendly game between Adrian Marin and Yaroslav Shmarov. Next, we had the opportunity to learn more from Celso Fernandes with his talk Ruby in the Billions. We learned how to use Kafka with Elasticsearch and the recommended use of racecar and delivery_boy, provided by Zendesk
After all these amazing talks, we had the chance to listen to discussion panel on the topic Ruby at Scale, featuring Celso Fernandes, Cristian Planas, Hana Harencarova, and Alexandru Calinoiu, moderated by Lucian Ghinda. Then we were invited to join one of three city tours to explore more of Bucharest. Afterward, we headed to the after-party, where we enjoyed delicious Romanian food, connected with other attendees, and shared our experiences from the day.
Second day
We started the second day with SQLite on Rails: Everything You Need to Know by Stephen Margheim, where we learned everything about using SQLite in Rails apps. During the talk, Stephen made enlitenment (which is a Rails template script that helps you get started with using SQLite in Rails apps) public and available for free. After that, we learned about Building for Web and Mobile in 2024: Production Story and a Brighter Future with Rails 8 from Hana Harencarova. She showed us how her team built mobile and web application using PWA and hybrid app approaches. An interesting aspect was sending notifications through the browser.
Then we learned about different ways to quickly calculate the Fibonacci sequence and how, with the right methods, Ruby can be very fast. Fibonacci Funhouse by Kyle d'Oliveira will definitely help us crush one of the most popular recruitment tasks. Next Yaroslav Shmarov, with 10 Commandments and 7 Deadly Sins in 2025, pointed us in the right direction on how to write more robust frontend apps using Rails. He advised us not to disable Turbo Drive by default and 'not to write giant Stimulus controllers, but to create smaller ones that you can compose’.
After lunch break a dancing surprise was waiting for us where we could admire a traditional Romanian dance and even take part in it! Then James Carr shared what A Day in the Life of 2,000 Developers looks like. We heard how Stripe handles security and ensures smooth development. He talked about managing code reviews, merging, CI testing and deploying for such a large codebase.
Benjamin Wood talked about Embracing Uncertainty: Thriving in Complexity and Legacy Code. He explained how every developer experiences uncertainty about their code, how this affects our cognitive functions, and how we can quickly become fatigued from making many micro-decisions. He also discussed the positive outcomes of this stress and how we should change our mindset towards uncertainty and get excited about learning something new.
The last talk was about creating. Olly Headey encouraged us to Stop overthinking and go create things. We were reminded that we are creative, and we should build side projects and finish them! It's good for us, boosts our confidence, makes us happier, and the Rails ecosystem is our superpower. It makes us better developers. 'Creativity improves performance at everything!’
We also had the opportunity to gain more knowledge and inspiration from the lightning talks. In the first one, Victor Motogna spoke about mandatory Web Accessibility by 2025 and showed us how to start incorporating it into our projects. In the second talk, Alexander Repnikov (our folk from Visuality) introduced the Ruby Europe initiative, encouraging fellow Ruby developers to join. As a result, many new people joined the Ruby Europe Discord.
On the third day, participants enjoyed a Friendly Trip to Cantacuzino Castle, a perfect chance to relax and connect after days of learning and collaboration. The conference itself was filled with valuable insights and practical advice. We were encouraged to create products or side apps, keep things simple, and use challenges like bugs to understand the fundamentals. Many thanks to Adrian and the team—well done! We can’t wait for the third edition!
