Recordings

Every Rails app starts with id: integer. It works, until it doesn’t. In this talk, we’ll trace the evolution of database identifiers from humble sequential integers to the emerging UUIDv7 standard. Along the way, we’ll unpack why UUIDv4, despite being widely used, can quietly destroy your write performance.

Drawing from Buildkite’s journey, you’ll hear how we went from a dual-key system (integers + UUIDs) to UUIDv7 as the primary key for all new tables. You’ll also hear war stories along the way, including how we bought ourselves more time with 32-bit integers by using negative IDs.

Whether you’ve never thought twice about database identifiers, or you’re mid-way through sharding a Postgres database, this talk has something for you.

Ready to move beyond Senior but not into management? Thong sets out a practical framework for aspiring Staff engineers, and current ones. Learn how to demonstrate Staff-level impact in your role, and how to increase your impact as Staff+.

Password authentication has been the cause of countless incidents for the software industry. Hugh illustrates the problems with passwords, shows how passkeys work as a solution, and demonstrates implementing passkeys in Rails.

Nik will take you through what they’ve learned building an AI Agent startup (so far) - how to take advantage of the new magic tech in your product, and how to build a factory that produces code. Physics has got a bit weird recently, so let’s talk about adapting to the new laws.

The Data Engineering ecosystem has exploded recently in the rise of AI. Ruby seems to be left behind in this space but what can we do about it? How can we Ruby devs take advantage of this Data age?

Jordan shares his own woes when it comes to accessing personal financial data. The talk will explore the current landscape of solutions, several iterations of DIY solutions and some optimism for the open banking future.

Applied techniques for applying Martin Fowler’s preparatory refactoring through stacked pull requests. Commentary on improving your design by thinking about tests differently, and some hot takes on VCR.

Talking about a large release, and how they made it safe with their testing approach, observability setup, use of flagging, and deployment/rollback strategies.

This talk is a crash course in the OWASP Top Ten for developers (and why you should care), including a heap of real world examples and exploitation techniques for common software security vulnerabilities.

Why I think rails API + react SPA is still a great architecture choice, a bit about full stack development / communication, and some specific tooling we’ve used around OpenAPI, @openapi-codegen/typescript, and react-query to bridge that gap successfully. And maybe a bit about the value of automated testing and type safety for dev velocity.

How does DNS work and what do I need to know as a web developer? Let’s talk about the building blocks of address resolution, common tasks for developers and some commands to navigate with.

Ever struggled to manage the codebase of a complex Rails application, or wondering how you could keep a codebase clean and modular as it grows? I want to cover intentionally modularizing your Rails applications without needing to depart from the majestic monolith. We’ll go over what it’s like using packwerk+packs to build out new contexts/namespaces for a Rails app without needing to split out separate services as an application gets more complex.

We know that low coupling and high cohesion are at the core of writing code that is easy to maintain. Experienced developers do this intuitively, but how do we put these concepts into words? Connascence is a software quality metric that gives us a set of rules that allow us to identify and (roughly) measure the coupling that occurs within our codebases. Audience participation is greatly encouraged, so you are more than welcome to read a bit about it before coming along!

Why you might want to change build systems, what issues we’ve hit along the way, and whether it was worth it.

We will discuss the definition of allyship and explain key concepts to start you on your journey to become a better ally. We will also touch on the importance of allyship in tech, and in particular in web development.

A short rapid-fire introduction to Flutter and some of it’s comparisons to working with React and similar web technologies.

On the pros and cons of type checking, particularly in the ruby language, where it’s at right now and if we should care.

Jordan walks us through his intentions and implementation of a personal project to display family photos with a very specific set of goals.

A look into why you would use Event Driven Architecture, some commonly used patterns, tools, and cool libraries.

Kelly, the Wellington Rails Girls co-organiser, will briefly talk about some of the highlights and challenges from the most recent Rails Girls event where 50 women had an introduction to this wonderful world of programming.

Rails is referred to as a “framework” but what does that actually mean? Rob will cover this and the ways in which code is included/shared in Ruby.

Rachel has 10 years’ experience in C# and is now taking on the challenge of cross training in Ruby at Powershop.

Most of the time we throw up our hands in the air when we see error messages in software, having very little ability to diagnose or fix them. However we as developers do have the power to do something. Megan will talk about commonly used tools and techniques in Ruby on Rails that allow us to hunt out and squash the bugs in our code.

What you need to know about setting up a project for internationalisation. How Wellington-based open source project Loomio has translated their site into 21 languages in under a year, and why it is so important for open source projects to have internationalisation.