We spent three wonderful days in Poland at Wroc_love.rb, a Ruby-oriented conference. Here’s a quick recap about our experience.
Highlighted Talks
I’m not going to summarize all the talks, but instead I’ll focus on the interesting ones that captured our attention the most.
The Saga Pattern by Robert Pankowecki
The guys at Arkency built their own ticketing system. It might look like a simple “to-do” app from the outside, but these kinds of systems have to handle a lot of edge cases when they grow big and accumulate substantial amount of customers.
The Arkency team used message-driven architecture based on two models: Commands and Events. As far as I know, this makes the architecture more robust and flexible. Their presentation is published on the Arkency blog.
Ecosystem for Things by Wojciech Ziniewicz
I had the most fun during this presentation. Wojciech uses cutting-edge tools to build cool projects for their client Google. He had an easygoing talk, with his presentation effectively combining funky images with serious technical slides.
Remotely updating and running software on millions of hardware devices is difficult. Wojciech talked about the ROS (Robot Operating System) project, which makes it easy for different parts of hardware to communicate with each other and make remote upgrades painless.
The NixOS Project and Deploying Systems Declaratively by Sander van der Burg
If you’re wondering whether your production box supports the feature X, the NixOS guy has the answer: “NixOS supports this feature, of course.” NixOS allows you to upgrade your Linux distribution atomically, and if something goes wrong, you can revert the system to its previous version. Sander also explained the concept of declarative deployment (which you might know from Chef) and how it differs from imperative deployment. For a brief introduction, see Sander’s blog post.
Last Words
I really wish we had the chance to attend Lessons of Liskov by Peter Bhat Harkins from Chicago, since it was said to be the best talk of the weekend. Unfortunately, there was no public transportation from Wroclaw to Brno on Sunday evening, so we missed it. We will be waiting for the video to be released on his Twitter Account.
UPDATE: all Wroc_love videos have been released
