Our Experience at EuRuKo and Friendly.rb 2024:

Two Ruby Conferences, One Exciting Journey

At Take Off Labs, we believe in continuous learning and staying ahead of the curve. This year, our team members had the opportunity to attend two exciting Ruby conferences: EuRuKo 2024 in Sarajevo and Friendly.rb 2024 in Bucharest. Both events were full of insightful sessions, new ideas, and community-driven energy. We’d love to share some of the highlights and thoughts from both conferences.

EuRuKo 2024 – A European Ruby Adventure

Our first stop was EuRuKo 2024, which took place in the beautiful city of Sarajevo. EuRuKo is an annual Ruby conference that rotates between different European cities, bringing together developers from all over the world. This year’s event focused on sharing practical knowledge and innovations in the Ruby ecosystem.

One of the standout ideas presented was Ruby WebAssembly, which opens up new possibilities for using Ruby in the browser. The ability to run Ruby in the front-end, alongside other modern web technologies, is an exciting development that could change the way we think about Ruby’s capabilities.

There was also a lot of buzz around the introduction of Namespaces and Annotations in future versions of Ruby. These upcoming features will improve code organization and make Ruby more flexible for large-scale projects, something we’re keen to explore at Take Off Labs.

We were also introduced to tools like WebMock, a handy library for testing HTTP requests, and Phlex, a new gem that allows you to build HTML using Ruby constructs. These tools can streamline how we build and test our applications, making development faster and more efficient.

Beyond the technical sessions, the conference also gave us valuable insight into how large companies like Shopify and Gusto manage their development teams and projects. It was inspiring to hear how these organizations tackle the same challenges we face, and we’re looking forward to applying some of these strategies in our own work.

Friendly.rb 2024 – A Ruby Deep Dive

Next up was Friendly.rb 2024, held in Bucharest. This conference offered a diverse range of topics that extended beyond Ruby on Rails. One notable example was DragonRuby, a tool that allows developers to create games using Ruby, showcasing the broader potential of Ruby outside of web development. We even had the opportunity to experiment with building simple games using this tool!

The conference also touched on industry-wide concerns like the European Accessibility Act (EAA), which will require products and services to be accessible to people with disabilities by 2025. Ensuring that our work is accessible to all users is becoming more important than ever, and this legislation underscores the need for developers to prioritize inclusivity in their projects.

In the world of Rails, we learned about the Solid Errors gem, an exception tracker that lives within your Rails app. Inspired by the Solid trio principles and the 37signals movement toward bare-metal infrastructure, this gem offers a self-hosted alternative to third-party exception trackers, giving developers more control over their application’s error monitoring.

We also explored exciting updates in Rails 7.2, including a built-in Rate Limiter, which will replace the need for the RackAttack gem. These advancements in Rails will help us build faster, more efficient applications moving forward.

Our Takeaways

Both EuRuKo and Friendly.rb 2024 gave us a fresh perspective on the Ruby and Ruby on Rails ecosystem. At EuRuKo, we saw how Ruby is evolving into new spaces like web browsers, while Friendly.rb provided us with practical tools and insights to improve our day-to-day work with Ruby and Rails.

A few lasting thoughts from the conferences:

  • You’ll always know more than you do right now. This was a common theme across both events, reminding us that learning is a continuous process.
  • Keeping systems up to date isn’t just about performance—it’s about security, scalability, and keeping our development teams happy.
  • Finally, it’s clear that Ruby on Rails is far from dead! Both conferences reinforced the strength and vibrancy of the Ruby community.

We’re excited to bring back the knowledge we gained and apply it to our projects at Take Off Labs. These experiences have energized us for the year ahead, and we look forward to continuing our journey with Ruby.