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Schedule: Day 2 - Friday (Sep 27, 2024)
Closing Keynote
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#ruby-on-rails
#performance
#entrepreneurship
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Closing Keynote

Aaron Patterson • September 27, 2024 • Toronto, Canada • Keynote

In the closing keynote of Rails World 2024, Aaron Patterson, a prominent member of the Rails Core team, delivered an engaging and humorous presentation focusing on improving the Rails Router. He introduced a hypothetical feature called LamboRoutes, playfully noting it might not be real, which contributed to the lighthearted tone of his talk.

Patterson started by sharing his excitement about being part of the conference and referenced other presentations, particularly humorously critiquing a prior talk about Paws without Easter eggs. The keynote incorporated a mix of technical insights and anecdotes from Patterson's experiences as both a Rails developer and an entrepreneur who has navigated several product failures.

Key points from Patterson's keynote include:
- Appreciation for the Community: He expressed gratitude towards Shopify for supporting Rails and for employing him, highlighting the importance of community in developing open-source software.
- Unique Presentation Style: Patterson maintained a humorous tone throughout the presentation, using jokes and anecdotes that made technical content more relatable.
- Failures in Entrepreneurship: He shared stories about three failed product ideas, including a USB Bell that rings when terminal commands fail, a Bluetooth stick shift for Vim, and a combination lock for computers. Each anecdote illustrated key entrepreneurial challenges, such as poor marketing and lack of sales.
- Rails Development Experience: Patterson emphasized his passion for Ruby on Rails, stating it as the best framework for building web applications. He noted his motivation for helping entrepreneurs bring their products to market through Rails.
- Reflection on Rails: He reminisced about the history of Rails, noting the original release date and discussing the ongoing evolution of the framework.

In conclusion, Patterson's keynote combined technical insights with personal stories, humor, and community appreciation, driving home the importance of learning from failures while contributing positively to the technology community. His call to focus on enhancing the Rails Router resonates with developers aiming to improve application performance and user experience.

Closing Keynote
Aaron Patterson • September 27, 2024 • Toronto, Canada • Keynote

Rails Core member Aaron Patterson (@TenderlovesCoolStuff) delivered the Closing Keynote at this year's #RailsWorld about speeding up the Rails Router. With his unique blend of humor and presentation style (a little bit technical, a lot of tomfoolery) he also introduced a new feature that may or may not* be in Rails 8: LamboRoutes.

* This is not a real feature in Rails 8.

#RubyonRails #Rails #Rails8 #router #railsrouter #websterweb

Thank you Shopify for sponsoring the editing and post-production of these videos. Check out insights from the Engineering team at: https://shopify.engineering/

Stay tuned: all 2024 Rails World videos will be subtitled in Japanese and Brazilian Portuguese soon thanks to our sponsor Happy Scribe, a transcription service built on Rails. https://www.happyscribe.com/

Rails World 2024

00:00:18.199 Uh, hello everybody!
00:00:23.880 Okay, I'm really very happy to be here. I really want to get one of those framework laptops because I feel if you're doing framework development, it should be on a framework laptop.
00:00:37.600 Hello everyone, welcome to my talk. Happy Friday, everyone! Ah, we made it! Yes, it's always Friday somewhere, but today it is actually Friday.
00:00:50.360 Did any of you stand in line for lunch today? Yeah? All right! That was definitely a solid queue!
00:01:05.400 I hope today I'll be able to give a solid keynote with some solid jokes, and I really hope that this is not a solid waste of your time.
00:01:13.680 Yes, this is a poop joke; I'll do anything for laughs on stage.
00:01:27.079 I really enjoyed David's keynote on the first day, though one part of it kind of bothered me. He was talking about how he's against Paws, or no Paws.
00:01:32.759 I can't agree with that because I enjoy making Easter eggs, and I don't know what he has against Easter eggs!
00:01:39.920 So to get rid of this, I can't deal with it. If I love dying Easter eggs and you tell me no PAW, I say hard pass! I'm so sorry.
00:01:54.840 Also, in his presentation this year, he was talking about Linux on the desktop.
00:02:09.800 I love Linux on the desktop; that was a huge theme this year. So this year is definitely going to be the year of Linux on the desktop.
00:02:32.560 I was very happy to see this, but I really have to say that Rails World 2024 is the year that hell froze over.
00:02:45.440 So, who in here, raise your hand if you're using TextMate? We got three—okay, wow! Impressive! That question was for you, Jean. Jean is the last person on the core team that's using TextMate.
00:03:03.280 Alright, David keeps going on about how Rails is the one-person framework, but I think that he could have a much more concise way of marketing this.
00:03:17.280 So what I want to do today is I want to do my impression of David doing an impression of Steve Ballmer.
00:03:34.480 Developer!
00:03:45.760 I gotta say thank you to Justin for that joke. I don't know if you caught his talk or not, but this is the last talk that he's going to be giving, so if you can catch up with him after the conference, that would be really great.
00:03:57.680 But he gave me that joke, so I had to use it. My name is Aaron Patterson; I'm also known online as Tender Love.
00:04:10.120 I'm very excited to be here today. I'm from Seattle, and I'm really excited to be here in Toronto. It gives me a great opportunity to visit our neighbors to the south in Canada, which is technically true.
00:04:20.959 I'm a senior staff engineer at a very tiny startup called Shopify. I want to say thanks to them for employing me, as well as how supportive they are of the Ruby and Rails community.
00:04:33.880 I wouldn't be here on stage today if it weren't for them, so I really want to say thank you.
00:04:46.360 I also want to say thank you to the Rails World staff and the organizers, especially Amanda, for putting up with my very poor communication skills.
00:04:58.240 I want you all to know about my live stream. I'm doing a live stream called 'Tender Love's Cool Stuff'. I have a YouTube channel, so please, please subscribe to it.
00:05:12.759 I'm on my road to 100,000 subscribers and yeah, I'm on the way!
00:05:25.080 Actually, I made a mistake on this calculation. I realized I had to update the slides but I kept this one in.
00:05:38.759 The true number is I actually have 97,000. It's because I accidentally multiplied by 10 because I'm a 10x developer!
00:05:53.080 So I learned yesterday that I really only need a thousand dedicated fans. So maybe I should switch to a website where only my fans can come say hi to me.
00:06:10.440 Anyway, here's the link so you can go to my YouTube page.
00:06:22.120 I don't really have a title for the talk this year, but I'm going to be speaking about some technical stuff and then I'll wrap it up at the end of the presentation.
00:06:31.360 I think this is usually my presentation style, and I think it's worked out okay so far, so I'm going to stick with it.
00:06:43.840 However, this year I'm afraid that the section might be getting a little bit larger than the technical stuff, so we'll see how this goes.
00:06:56.520 I love Ruby on Rails! I've been a Rails developer since 2008.
00:07:08.800 I think building with Rails is the best tool for building web applications available today, bar none. It's better than any other framework out there.
00:07:22.639 Rails is very good at enabling entrepreneurs to get off the ground and get their product to market quickly.
00:07:35.000 The problem is that I'm not particularly good at marketing products, nor am I good at making them.
00:07:51.000 I know David was talking a lot about going from Hello World to IPO, and I think I've got Hello World down pretty well. But I don't think that even Kamal is going to get me to IPO.
00:08:02.160 Let me give you a few examples of what I mean. I'm going to show you a few products that I've developed over the years and then talk about why they're failures.
00:08:10.880 The first one I want to talk about is a product I developed called The Analog Terminal Bell.
00:08:24.720 This is a USB Bell. You plug it into your computer, and anytime the bell in your terminal rings, the bell rings.
00:08:30.720 Instead of getting that weak virtual Bell, you get a strong physical bell telling you that you messed up your git command.
00:08:44.240 You can go to analogterminalbell.com for more information there. There's a demo video if you click that link.
00:08:58.360 I didn't want to put it up on screen because it is very loud. This is a 100% bootstrap product; I took zero VC funding.
00:09:10.320 The R&D cost me about $100—that was just the cost for parts including a custom PCB.
00:09:22.000 Notably this price does not include the 3D printer that I had to buy and assemble, nor does it include my time.
00:09:31.000 Unfortunately, zero units sold, so I have to consider this product a failure.
00:09:46.519 My next product is special. It's called Initial V. This is a real product, by the way.
00:09:58.160 Here's a picture of it. This is a Bluetooth stick shift for Vim.
00:10:07.040 I'm definitely doing Hello World, but you can see all right, this is a video. You can watch the video; I'll explain what's going on here.
00:10:14.280 This shift lets you move around in Vim. If you double press up, that will go into insert mode, and you can type.
00:10:27.680 Pressing Park will press Escape, and pressing Park again will save the file. You can also put it into visual mode.
00:10:37.080 You can control Vim with this stick. I don't know if I highlighted this very much in the video, but when you change modes in Vim, it communicates back to the stick shift handle.
00:10:50.720 It changes the light on the stick shift handle so you can see what mode you're in.
00:11:02.920 This is a chart of all the things that it will do. It's not that important. It is wireless and Bluetooth.
00:11:16.960 However, it requires a 12V power supply, meaning you need to plug it into the wall.
00:11:27.600 So, it's Bluetooth but requires being plugged in at the same time.
00:11:56.840 It cost about $400, just the cost of parts including PCBs. This does not include building a Reflow oven.
00:12:10.520 My Reflow oven is built out of a toaster oven. What this basically does is you get your PCB, put all your parts on it, stick it in the oven, and it solders everything.
00:12:22.720 I used components that were so small that I couldn’t do it by hand. It doesn’t include my time.
00:12:35.000 Unfortunately, zero units sold, so I must consider it a failure.
00:12:47.240 If you think about this product a little, I mean we’re combining cars and Vim.
00:12:58.960 I have like a very unique idea for one particular customer. I'm charging a million dollars for it; I just need to sell one.
00:13:09.720 Alright, the next project, my last one, is called Comini.
00:13:19.800 It's because it's incredibly convenient, and it's also a combination lock for a computer.
00:13:30.480 I know all of you have encountered this: you're going in to use your computer, but you're wearing boxing gloves for some reason.
00:13:43.740 So you can't type; wouldn't it be nice if you had a combination lock that you could just turn to unlock your computer?
00:13:54.360 I started building one. This is my dev kit today. It's not totally done.
00:14:06.800 But basically, what it does is you enter the combination correctly.
00:14:15.360 Then it enters your password for you. You do have to hardcode your password into the thing; that's fine. Working through the bugs.
00:14:31.360 This is R&D right here. Anyway, it’s very convenient.
00:14:45.320 Unfortunately, zero pre-orders, so I'm really worried that this one is going to be a failure.
00:15:01.080 So why did all of these projects fail? Thank you! Why did all these products fail?
00:15:12.740 Well, poor marketing is one reason. Not actually being wireless; I think one of the biggest contributing factors is that I'm not actually selling them.
00:15:26.880 That might be one issue. Also, none of them were built on Rails.
00:15:36.960 I want to communicate that I'm not a particularly good entrepreneur; I'm more of an aspirational entrepreneur.
00:15:50.080 Not very good at it yet, though I think I'm making progress, and I think through practice I'll get better.
00:15:57.760 Unlike entrepreneurship, I'm actually pretty good at being an engineer; that's a thing I can do.
00:16:10.640 This is one of the reasons that makes me so happy to work on Rails itself.
00:16:19.800 I can use my skills to help folks who don't have the same skills I do.
00:16:24.960 I can help entrepreneurs improve and get their businesses up and running, and I'm really grateful that I can do this on a day-to-day basis.
00:16:37.680 Truth is, though, working on Rails isn't always that fun. There are some aspects I don't particularly like.
00:16:49.520 Specifically, I don't like doing security releases.
00:16:55.040 But speaking of Rails releases, does anyone know when the first release of Rails was?
00:17:02.880 Anyone? No? 845? No, it's actually according to Wikipedia.
00:17:11.760 If we go take a look at Wikipedia, the very first release date was December 2005.
00:17:21.520 However, if you go to the very top of it, it says it was actually released in 2004, 20 years ago.
00:17:33.600 So, where did they get this date? If you go over into the description... let’s scroll down.
00:17:45.760 There's a quote here that says according to Wikipedia, 'Hansen first released Rails as open source in July 2004.'
Aaron Patterson
@tenderlove
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