Hello Rubyists,
I've been on the road quite a bit lately. I attended RubyKaigi in Fukuoka, Japan and Railsconf in Minneapolis, MN. RubyKaigi was incredible - over 1000 attendees, with a huge number of Ruby committers and core team members. The talks were highly technical and lots of new material was presented for the first time, such as the core team's direction for static types in Ruby 3. Railsconf went really well too, with equally enormous attendance and what I thought was a very good keynote by DHH. After the conference, several of you joined me for a drinkup (thanks for coming!) and a few of you also came to my workshop on Rails Performance, which I thought went very well.
So what actually happens at one of these workshops?
I designed and developed the one-day Rails perf intensive because of something I see a lot in the CGRP slack channel: people getting stuck on the complexity of applying the relatively simple lessons of the CGRP to their complex Rails applications. It's one thing to know how to put a tool into your Gemfile, it's another to know how to get insights from it. I decided that a one-day intensive, small-classroom format where I could look over my participants' shoulders and help them to understand that complexity would be the best way to get them through this hurdle.
Throughout the eight hours, I have all participants applying the lessons to their actual, everyday Rails app, not a prebaked, simplified app. That lets us work together on setup issues ("my RubyProf keeps crashing!") and interpreting the often complicated output of profiling tools like Stackprof.
It also means that, unlike in the CGRP, I get to tailor the content of the 8 hours for the actual participants that show up. At the start of each workshop, I go around the room and ask everyone why they came - what problems led to this room. And then, I get to spend more time on the areas they said they've been struggling, and less on areas where they feel pretty confident.
I'm also surprised by just how much people are enjoying meeting fellow Rails coders and travellers on the Rails performance journey. Most people that show up to workshops realize they're all in the "same spots" in their technical challenges and often learn as much from each other as they do from me.
As for content, I focus almost entirely on measurement. It's the lead chapter of the CGRP for a reason. It's also the reason why I gave a talk about measurement at this year's Railsconf (I'll share the video link on this newsletter when it's posted). Measurement is the foundational performance skill, because any optimization without measurement is premature. If you don't have numbers, you don't actually know where the slow code is and you don't even know if you made it any faster!
Anyway, if you're finding yourself nodding your head and live in the United States, I'm probably coming to a city near you this summer.
Learn more and get your ticket for my summer USA workshop tour here: https://www.speedshop.co/workshops.html Locations include NYC, SF, several cities in the northeast and pacific Northwest, Atlanta, Austin, Chicago and Denver. Hope to see you there.
-Nate
==============================================
You're receiving this email because you opted-in at nateberkopec.com or speedshop.co
Unsubscribe <<Email Address>> from this list:
https://speedshop.us11.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=1aa0f43522f6d9ef96d1c5d6f&id=840412962b&t=b&e=[UNIQID]&c=1307ce84e1
Our mailing address is:
Nate Berkopec
PO Box 541
El Prado, New Mexico 87529
USA
Our telephone:
Forward this email to a friend:
https://us11.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=1aa0f43522f6d9ef96d1c5d6f&id=1307ce84e1&e=[UNIQID]
Update your profile:
https://speedshop.us11.list-manage.com/profile?u=1aa0f43522f6d9ef96d1c5d6f&id=840412962b&e=[UNIQID]&c=1307ce84e1