RailsConf 2017 in tweets, and my “Why Do Planes Crash?” lightning talk

On March 18, 2018 by Mike With 0 Comments - Conferences, Ruby on Rails

RailsConf 2018 starts in exactly one month, and I’m looking forward to it! This means I should probably get around to saying something about RailsConf 2017. The video above is cued to start at the beginning of a lightning talk I gave. The title was “Why Do Planes Crash? Lessons for Junior and Senior Developers.” Analyses of plane crashes show planes actually crash more often when the senior pilot is in the flying seat, often because junior pilots are reticent to speak up when they see problems, while senior pilots don’t hesitate to do so when the junior pilot is flying. There are some great lessons developers can apply from this for how to do mentoring and pair programming.

The lightning talks were at the end of the 2nd day, and I made a last minute decision that morning to sign up and put a talk together. I’ve given a number of conference talks before, but never to a crowd this big, and never with so little time to prepare. Then when it was time to give the talk, there was a technical issue that prevented me from seeing my notes, so I had to wing it. Under the circumstances I think it still turned out ok. Here are my slides (they’re also embedded below) and some tweets about the talk:

I work for ActBlue and we provided Opportunity Scholarships for people who normally wouldn’t be able to attend, for financial or other reasons.

4 of us from ActBlue attended, and my co-worker Braulio gave an impressive full-length talk explaining how our technical infrastructure supports close to 8,000 active organizations, and handles peak traffic like the 2016 New Hampshire primary night, when our traffic peaked at 300,000 requests per minute and 42 credit card transactions per second.

Here are some other highlights from the conference…

Video of Marco Roger’s talk mentioned above.

A group of us took in a Diamondback’s game the night the conference ended, and then the next morning a couple of us headed to the Desert Botanical Garden before flying home.

Lastly, here are the slides from my lightning talk:

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