RubyConfPH is an annual event by the Ruby Community here in the Philippines where speakers get to drop knowledge bombs about the Ruby language and lots of other technologies surrounding it. It also is a chance to meet fellow developers and share/compare workflows within different teams.

Last April 8 and 9 I was lucky enough to be able to attend RubyConfPH which was held at the SMX Convention Center in Taguig, Philippines.

The line up of speaker was full packed including @tenderlove who talked about how methods are called in ruby and @amatsuda who shared the basics of building gems.

The event also featured @headius who is working at Red Hat for JRuby and he talked about how JRuby make CRuby users stay within the Ruby stack by allowing us to use concurrency and other language features that aren't available as of now in CRuby noting that CRuby has come a long way in terms of speed but it will take a lot more years for CRuby to accomplish features can be used right now in JRuby. Also in this talk I learned that a lot of companies including the NASA is using JRuby.

@claudiob gave an exciting presentation when he talked about awesome new and breaking features within Rails 5(excluding ActionCable) and even providing the links to each specific pull request. These changes includes performance improvement in url_helpers, more granular console sql coloration, and initial implementation of AsyncAdapter for ActiveJob that you can use in development instead of the old InlineAdapter.

@hagenburger talked about speeding up your application without touching ruby. One advice he gave was to use erb instead of other templating engines like Haml or slim to reduce processing time when rendering the view, inlining layout stylesheets, setting css height and width for images, using vanilla javascript instead of jQuery, combining javascript and css to toggle the right display(like logged in / logged out) even for cached pages and a whole lot more of tips to speed up your app!

@weppos discussed how they have been maintaining their 6 year old application. Tips he gave included the use of conventions within the team (eg. following style guides) which they build through years of discussions and refactoring, wrapping gem class into a new class within the application.

@winston, the curator of the Ruby Asia newsletter shared why you should be updating your gems regularly and introduced deppbot, a service they created to automatically do your app's gem updates.

There are other presentations that I failed to mention here but you can check all of the videos here (Day 1) and here (Day 2).