Day two of RubyConf Mini was action packed. Nadia Odunayo hit a home run with her morning keynote. As the founder and sole developer of Storygraph she shared a Ruby mystery with the crowd. A fitting genre to be delivered with a British accent.

Day Two Was More Technical

While the first day featured some technical content the second day cut deep. Kevin Newton shared how Ruby syntax trees work. Julia Evans taught us how to make a DNS query in Ruby from scratch. Both of these went deeper into the way technologies work than I typically operate at. However both speakers kept their content approachable for a general audience.

Why It Matters

Advances in a programming language, innovation, comes from folks that curious and bold enough to learn about things that most others try to avoid. By making the more technically arcane topics accessible, it piqued my interest and maybe set a bit of a challenge to the community to dig deeper into that sort of work. Not everyone will need or want to learn about DNS or syntax trees, but if a few people do they can create better developer experiences and improve libraries used by many. It makes Ruby more appealing as a language and is a force multiplier for the folks using it.

Also of Note

• Vladimir Dementyev has some great tools for working with test suites including test-prof. Looking forward to the release of his TracePoint tool for evaluating test mocks.
• RubyCritic is a great way to build a map of what needs to be updated in a legacy Rails application.