The second day and its sessions were a lot shorter than the day before (mostly because the afternoon was mainly workshops), but also the quality of the sessions was a bit disappointing compared to the day before, I must say.

RubyLLM 2.0: Beyond Agents

I arrived a couple of minutes late to this session (because I could - did I mention that I went to this conference on my own budget 😆) but I feel I had not missed much. The session was run by Carmine Paolino who is the author of this Gem - RubyLLM and the whole session was mainly a journey through its development with an overview of some of the new features (e.g. video, model fallbacks, ...).

One thing that I took away from this is that the author put a lot of focus on the Gem's forever API, meaning the API that's stable and not supposed to change over time. Well, in other languages we simply call that an "API", but what do I know 😆.

Parsing: it’s more than a regex

This session was about writing a parser in Ruby. It contained some parser theory (e.g. lexers, tokenization, recursive descent, ...) and showed some practical applications of that theory by building a very simple JSON parser.

I won't say that I did not like the topic, but it was really basic and I'm wondering: do (Ruby) people really not know that?

At least the presenter covered (although very briefly) performance topics like using StringScanner or considering techniques like string deduplication.

City Pitches

After that the cities for the next Euruko conference were pitched. I really like that tradition and haven't seen something like that at any other conference so far.

Those were the city candidates presented by conference attendees:

• Barcelona
• Modena
• Bruges
• Newcastle
• Toronto (😅 a bit tongue in cheek for obvious reasons, but I think they would have made it happen had it won)

Voting happens by putting plastic Ruby gems into glass bowls representing the cities.

I voted for Modena 🇮🇹 which happened to be the winner and I'm really looking forward to visiting this city (and Euruko) next year - together with my wife probably who loves Italy just as much as I do.

Closing Keynote - Parallel programming with Ractors

Having only learned about Ractor (the Ruby actor model) the day before, I found the topic itself - working on Ractor performance (e.g. Ractor-local GC, thread scheduling, ...) - super interesting. But I must say that the execution of this talk was horrible. No idea where people take the chutzpah from thinking they'd make good presenters when they can hardly speak a proper English sentence. Or why conference organizers think this is a good idea for that matter. I know that the Ruby community is all about being nice to each other, but this was embarrassing and definitely not worthy of a closing keynote.

It's a wrap!

And that's it for the sessions of day 2 already. There would have been a couple of workshops to choose from for the afternoon, but (again: since I was here on my own decision and budget) I decided to skip those and explore the city instead.

Conference Impressions

The conference only had a small exhibition area; the exhibitors I spoke to were:

• AppSignal - being a smaller player in the observability space, I had heard of them but did not know a lot. So we chatted for a while about observability and its challenges (yes, I outed myself as a Dynatrace employee)
• CloudAMQP - having already spoken to them at last year's Euruko I was aware of this company. I managed to score some free books from them (RabbitMQ, LavinMQ) however 😉.

The venue itself was not huge (I think a bit smaller than last year) but the venue/hotel was quite nice.

Here's an image of the empty session room when I arrived.

And here's what I looked like after it had filled up.

The first day had buffet food which I must admit I did not really care for 🤢 but the afternoon snacks and the second day lunch were nice.