Notes from RubyConf2020 Day 2

Published Wednesday, November 18, 2020

Keynote: Kerri Miller

“If you can move it, it isn’t broken”

New item for the bucket list: “The 1000 mile stomachache” roadtrip

Learnings from a cross-country motorcycle trip:

  • Ambition
  • Failure
  • Resilience
  • Storytelling

When something bad happens, “at least you get a story out of it”

  • True for motorcycle accidents and code
  • Be resilient
  • Opportunity to learn and help others
  • The story you tell yourself about failures is important

Ambitious systems:

  • Multidisciplinary
  • Large and complicated
    • Too large for one team to fully understand
  • Success breeds essentiality
  • Undefinable end state
    • How do you know when you’re done?
    • What does success look like?
    • Ignore complexity for speed
    • All systems without a well-defined end state will bend towards complexity and chaos

Dwarf Fortress example:

  • Dev ships new “tavern” feature
  • Then bug report comes in: “There’s cat vomit all over my tavern” (??)
  • Design bugs can be subtle, easy to miss and make mistakes

Good quotes:

  • “Software is the resolution of the argument between the proactive and the pragmatic”
  • “The most dangerous thought you can have as a creative person is to think you know what you’re doing” (Bret Victor)
  • “Code is inherently incorrect. It’s always in a state of undiscovered failure”

Why are we so resistent to change?

  • We want to be right
  • Risk being vulnerable
  • Damage our professional reputation
  • Damage our self-image (“Do I know what I’m doing?”)

Ractor Demonstration (Koichi Sasada)

Ractor is an experimental feature in Ruby 3.0

Ractor is designed to provide a parallel execution feature of Ruby without thread-safety concerns.

Performance:

  • Object creation on ractors is slower, needs improvement before GA.

Limited object sharing:

  • Most objects are not shared among multiple Ractors
  • Avoid synchronization bugs
  • However there are immutable objects and “special shared objects”

Communication types:

  • In general, message passing on incoming- and outgoing- ports
  • Supports push / Actor style communication
  • Supports pull / rendezvous style communication
  • Send objects via message passing by copy or move

Demos:

  • Ractor-based “load balancer”
  • Ractor-based worker pool
  • Pipeline

Summary:

  • Ractor provides parallel execution without thread-safety headaches
  • Part of Ruby 3.0
  • Ractor API and implementation is not mature
    • Ruby 3.0 is the preview release
    • Feedback welcome

The Bug That Forced Me to Understand Memory Compaction (Emily Giurleo)

Note: I dropped in late because I already caught an early version of this talk at nyc.rb

Great talk, highly recommend checking out the slides.

This bug hunt story is specific to Ruby gem with C extension.

Takeaways:

  • Knowledge sharing is crucial
  • You never know when the knowledge you put in the world will help someone out of a huge jam like this one, so just put it out there!

Summary:

  • Ruby 2.7 includes manual memory compaction
  • When maintaining an existing gem with C extension, maually mark long-lived objects and refs
  • Newer C extensions can use new convenience methods for pinning and marking objects

Storytelling and Talent Show

Theme: “A time when technology wasn’t the answer”

“Unexpected side effects of medical advances”

  • How 23andMe found his half sister!
  • Got pregnant, so they did 23andMe
  • Months later, 23andMe emailed him “Hey you have a half sibling” (!!)
  • Turns out his dad was a sperm donor back in medical school, but donation bank didn’t track anything. So this was a happy surprise!
  • Everyone was understanding and now they’re one bigger happy family

“The Time I Robbed a Bank”

  • Takes money out of an ATM, notices account has a lot more money than expected
  • Checks again, now account has even more money in it (thousands more!!)
  • So they take out a bunch just to see what happens
  • Spends all of it on fun night out with friends, buying rounds for the whole bar, etc
  • Over the next few months, kept checking, and the money was always in there (didn’t spend much more though)
  • Then one day sees account drops to -$25,000 😱
  • CitiBank is unresponsive, wants him to pay the money back
  • Finally get someone on the phone, no surprise, it was an accident
  • CitiBank resolved everything and sent him a check for 1 cent, which is now framed in his living room

“Names are Hard”

  • Back in 2015, wants to set up a feminist tech conference
  • Recruited some friends, got lots set up, but still didn’t have a name
  • Stumped. Couldn’t pick a name, ended up picking the one they disliked the least: “&:conf”
  • Problems started immediately
    • Google doesn’t recognize ampersands, so unsearchable, zero SEO
    • Lots of other sites mishandled the special characters
    • No one knew how to pronounce it out loud
  • Renamed to “AndConf”
  • Then they decided to start a SF Ruby Meetup
  • Named it “SF.rb”, which shouldn’t have caused any problems
  • EXCEPT they wanted to include the dot in everything, so used “#SFdotRB”, etc. It didn’t go over well
  • Renamed to “Fog City Ruby”
  • Lesson learned: keep technology out of naming things

“The Hunt for Lean Manufacturing Kanban”

  • Yeast rancher!
  • Wanted to use kanban board for tracking physical inventory
  • Read some LEAN manufacturing books, but hard to find implementation details
  • Found a video detailing how a hospital successfully implemented a kanban tracking system, decided to use this as their model
  • Couple years later, needed to iterate on kanban system
  • Found a bakery example that looked useful, switched to that
  • Now EVERYTHING at the facility is kanbaned: coffee, toilet paper, etc
  • And life is good! Yay kanban!

“The Magic of Coins”

  • Needed to choose college major
  • Loved computer science, thinking minor in Education
  • But school forced everyone to do broad liberal arts courses first year
  • Twist! Fell in love with chemistry
  • Now very conflicted, avoided decision til the last minute
  • Chemistry professor flipped a coin to decide back in the day, so they recommend to do the same
  • Flips coin, it’s computer science 4 times in a row
  • Keeps using this technique to the day! Used to choose between industry vs graduate school, let friends borrow it, too
  • Chance > technology

Plus original song and poetry performances!

The Minaswan::Interview (Jesse Spevak)

Tech interviewing is broken for candidates:

  • Gives example of his interview process at Ibotta
    • Cursory HR phone screen
      • No salary transparency
      • HR has more knowledge than the candidate
      • Perpetuates pay disparity
    • Takehome project
      • Unrelated to actual work
      • Many hours of unpaid labor
      • Excludes candidates who don’t have or can’t afford the time (for any myriad of completely valid reasons, including childcare)
    • On-site whiteboarding challenges
      • Often just a trick
      • Often relies on familiarity with niche subject matter (CS topics, chess, etc)
      • Homogenous interviewers (all white dudes)
    • Overall: process is not nice

Tech interviewing is broken for interviewers:

  • Purpose is to collect data and make a guess
  • If the process works, then you should be able to make a confident recommendation
  • Reality: Low data quality + low confidence outcome
  • Overall: experience is not nice

But we’re Rubyists. We live by “Matz is nice and so we are nice” (MINISWAN). Why not with our interviews?

The MINISWAN interview:

  • Shorter
    • Phone screen
    • Manager screen
    • No take home project
  • Presume success
    • Use phrases like “when you join our team…”
    • Challenges are representative of actual work
  • Put interviewee at ease
    • Give them signs that you’ve respected them and their time (tell them you’ve read their resume, etc)
    • Allow them to use Google and ask questions to panel
    • Be intentional about giving positive feedback
  • Exploratory challenges
    • Designed to allow candidate to demonstrate their thought process and opinions
    • Doesn’t presuppose expertise or niche knowledge

Automation Engineering with Serverless Compute (Kevin Lesht)

A masterwork in food puns

What are we solving for?

  • Take a photo
  • Auto-add it to Tumblr blog ONLY if it’s an omlette

Requirements:

  • On photo taken, kick off process to parse image and post if omlette
  • Make sure only authorized users can parse + post

“Brick walls are there for a reason. They let us prove how bady we want things” - Randy Pausch

Exploration:

  • Google Photos has a REST API available
  • Let’s also use a serverless Lambda function
  • Google API endpoint requires authentication. How do we OAuth without a browser?
    • First request to get token
    • Second request to Lambda function
  • How to parse? Pre-trained image recognition model vs custom model?
    • In this case, we’re going custom
    • Construct a solid dataset with lots of variability and robust labeling
    • Then train it
  • How to patch? Where are we sending these images?
    • Lambda function uploads to S3 bucket

Basic flow we have so far:

  • Auth with Google
  • Fetch photo from phone
  • Parse for omlette
  • If omlette, post to S3 bucket
  • Rebuild site HTML

New plan: reconfigure for batches for photos

  • Run Lambda function at regular intervals
  • Only pull in photos since last update timestamp
    • Use DynamoDB to store last updated timestamp
    • Read whenever we kick off job
    • Update at end of job
  • Collect photo keys from S3
  • Break keys into batches for pagination
  • Step over each item, update HTML accordingly

Next iteration: can we process photos concurrently?

  • At this point, we’re chasing the brick wall :)
  • Use event streaming!
  • On new photo event, fire off Lambda
  • Does this bork HTML rebuilds?
  • No! Add another Lambda for the rebuilds

Snack break with Amy Kritzer

https://whatjewwannaeat.com/cardamom-tahini-brownie-in-a-mug/

Ingredients:

  • ¼ Cup all-purpose flour (can substitute with gluten-free flour)
  • ¼ Cup granulated sugar
  • 3 tablespoons cocoa powder
  • ⅛ teaspoons Cardamom (can substitute with cinnamon)
  • Pinch of salt
  • 3 tablespoons milk (can substitute with water)
  • 2 tablespoons melted butter (can substitute with any neutral oil (ex. coconut oil))
  • 3 teaspoons tahini (can substitute with peanut butter, nut butter, etc.)
  • 12 oz microwavable mug
  • Optional garnish: ice cream, nuts, powdered sugar, whipped cream, sprinkles

Instructions:

  1. Mix all ingredients together in mug
  2. (Optional) Add a swirl of tahini/substitute on top
  3. Pop in microwave for 30 second intervals
    • Your brownie will be firm to the touch on top when it’s done
    • Should take 60-90 seconds total
  4. Let cool, then add garnish of your choice and dig in!

I substituted cinammon and peanut butter and it turned out GREAT. 10/10 would snack again.