What is a Lightning Talk?
Stealing this from Wikipedia:
Lightning talks are designed to be short presentations between five and ten minutes long, but are usually capped at five minutes.
Lightning talks usually accept sign-ups after the conference has started, so they can't be found in the conference schedule. Even if the recordings have been uploaded, this is what you'll usually see when trying to find out about them:
Eh! Super hard to know what they're actually talking about. Still, I'd recommend you to watch them!
Why should I care about lightning talks?
They're short! If you're spending hours on YouTube already, please just give it 5 more minutes.
Lightning talks compress months and years of knowledge into less than 5 minutes. Super time-efficient way to learn or hear about something new.
You'll definitely like it because you like reading on Hashnode and you clicked on this article! 😆
Since they're so short and packed with content, it's never boring!
Lightning Talks from RailsConf 2021
To get things rolling, let's start by looking at the Lightning Talks from RailsConf 2021.
Should You Create a New Rails App as API-Only? - Steffani Brasil
When should I choose Rails API?
- Does your client (SPA, mobile native app, etc) render all HTML pages?
- Does your client create all user interfaces
- Does Rails API only need to serve JSON responses to your client
If the above questions end with a yes ⇒ Rails API was built for this!
It's also possible to turn it back into a full-fledge Rails project, so don't need to worry about it!
Talk slides and cheatsheet: https://www.stefannibrasil.me/railsconf/
Programming logbooks - Robson Port
What is a logbook?
A personal and professional reference, mainly used by engineers, about everything related to a project
Why is it useful?
- Divide and conquer: breaking big problems down so it's easier to fix
- Reduces context switching: stuff you need already written down
- Creates an audit trail
What to write in it?
- Write down the initial problems
- Describe
- Write down discoveries or how it was resolved
Example
- App used: JoplinApp (Open source note taking app)
- What to write:
- Link to ticket
- Engineering detail
My thoughts
Why not just Jira tickets / or any ticketing system?
Might have other roles other than developers looking at it, so the logs might be a bit too much for them.
Maybe we could use Slack as a logbook?
Pair Programming as a Mentorship - Emily Harber
About Emily
- Early Career Developer at Shopify
- Self-taught
- Started to experience pair-programming at bootcamps
- 3 months after graduating, Emily went into Shopify
How can pair programming help?
- Build confidence
- Practice skills
- Share knowledge real-time
- Everyone knows something you don't know yet
My thoughts
- It's also a good practice for interviewing!
Isolate Packages with Packwerk - Dorian Marie
What is Packwerk?
A Shopify project that enforces boundaries and modularizes Rails applications.
Check the one-minute demo out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwqlyBAxVpQ
If you want a Rails back end and a React / Vue / Svelte front end?
Get started with Inertia.js here: https://youtu.be/03EjkPaCHEI
My thoughts
If you've been a past user of Django, Laravel, or Rails, definitely take a look at the project!
Renewables + Rails - Sarah Sausan
Sarah's Story
- A story on how she fell in love with Ruby & Rails
- Ruby is super fun
- To make something useful, we don't need to know everything about it
- An opportunity to attend RailsConf
- Geologist caring about Geothermal topics
- Wanted to make data available to the public by using Rails
My Team's Recent Gitastrophy - Lauren Billington
- Rebasing vs merge
git pull vs git merge- Story on recovering from breaking production with rebasing and
git pull
My thoughts
We all might have encountered this before, but sharing it in a lightning talk let us all know we've been in the same shoes once.
That's all for now and we've taken a look at 7 wonderful topics related to software development. Isn't that fast? You can find all of the talks from RailsConf in this playlist.
Last but not least, for those who are curious about "Is Ruby Dead", you'll find the answer at https://isrubydead.com/.
Love to know your thoughts about lightning talks as well! Please leave them in the comments!
