Crafting Rails Plugins

Ever wanted to build a plugin for Rails to add new features? Rails plugins allow you to hook into the lifecycle of a Rails application to add routes, configuration, migrations, models, controllers, views and more. In this talk, we'll learn how to do this by looking at some examples Rails gems to see how they work.

The goal of this talk is to provide a realistic look at building Railties or Engines to extend Rails apps.

The target audience is anyone who wants to either create a Rails plugin or contribute to one. Lots of gems are looking for new maintainers and hopefully this can encourage people to help maintain more projects.

Mapping Concepts Into Code

Implementing a feature like "notifications" in an app sounds simple, right? As you dig in to problems like this, you'll realize the complexity that lies below the surface.

In this talk, we'll walk through designing a feature like Notifications and how naming, DSLs, metaprogramming, and a bunch of other small decisions can make code feel delightful to use. Plus, we'll take a look at some of the decisions along the way that didn't turn out so well, analyze why they didn't work, and how we can improve them.

Catch Me If You Can: Learning to Process Webhooks in Your Rails App

In this workshop, you’ll learn how to catch and process webhooks like a pro. You’ll build a Rails app that’s both robust and low-latency so you keep up in real-time like a champ. Come ready to level up your skills and leave with the expertise you need to become a true webhook wizard!

We will begin by exploring the fundamentals of webhooks: how they work, why they are useful, and how they differ from other approaches. We will then dive into the hard-won lessons learned for consuming and processing webhooks, including routing, handling payloads, and responding to events.

Along the way, we will explore best practices like error handling, authentication, retries, idempotency, and scaling. You’ll walk away with a solid understanding for how to build a resilient and robust system to handle webhook notifications from a wide range of external services and APIs. Attendees will leave the workshop with a working webhook processor running on Rails!