RailsConf 2022: The Shopify Talks Worth Watching

RailsConf returned to an in-person format this past May in Portland, after two years of pandemic-enforced virtual events. Several members of Shopify's Ruby on Rails team were on hand, delivering more than a dozen talks on topics spanning virtual machines, performance engineering, and open-source investment. Now that organizer Ruby Central has published the session videos, all ten of Shopify's presentations are available to stream.

Day One: Keynotes on Rails, JITs, and Fun

Eileen Uchitelle, a Senior Staff Production Engineer and core contributor, opened the second day with a keynote surveying the state of Rails. Her talk traced the framework's history and argued that more companies should fund open-source contributions, which she framed as key to productivity and to building scalable applications.

Aaron Patterson (Tenderlove), Senior Staff Engineer, delivered the first day's closing keynote wearing green-screen gloves, joking that the visuals could be fixed in post when the talk is streamed later. He walked through a range of Rails hobbyist and professional projects—including his own JIT compiler, tenderjit—to make the case for enjoying the problem-solving process. His core message: "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should."

Under the Hood: The Ruby VM and Caching

Maple Ong, Senior Developer, took a break from Rails-centric material to explain how the Ruby Virtual Machine (YARV) actually interprets bytecode. The talk covered why treating Ruby as an interpreted language isn't quite accurate, and how YARV's design contributes to performance in long-running programs.

Staff Developer Chris Salzberg addressed an internal incident involving Marshal, Ruby's mechanism for serializing objects into binary form. In his talk, he describes the problem with Marshal—that it can "encode the universe" and cause issues when used for caching—and how he migrated the core monolith's cache to the MessagePack binary format as a safer alternative.

Performance, Security, and Historical Lessons

Staff Developer Stephen Prater covered diagnosing performance problems in Rails, focusing on algorithmic complexity and how to use OpenTelemetry tooling to identify and resolve issues. The session apparently features cats.

Senior Production Engineer Nick Schwaderer, who describes himself as a "freelance detective in the annals of Ruby history," revived his Ruby Archaeology series on stage. He set up a 2009-era development environment on a modern machine, then examined three popular gems from that period—including Merb—to see what lessons the debates of a decade ago offer for today.

Staff Developer Ashley Ellis Pierce and Senior Developer Betty Li, both from the Ruby Conventions team, examined recent supply chain security breaches to show how "typosquatting" and "combosquatting" can turn legitimate gems malicious. Their session leans on pop-culture references and drawings, but the underlying point is serious: most attacks exploit human error, not technical genius.

Teams, GraphQL, and ReDoS

Staff Developer John DeWyze discussed how trust develops—and breaks—on engineering teams. He explored how systems, pair programming, RuboCop, and compilers all influence team dynamics, and offered practices for actively building trust.

Senior Developer Gui Vieria's tutorial is aimed at anyone building a GraphQL API. Using a fictional space flight company as the example, he compared GraphQL to REST and demonstrated real-time delivery via WebSockets, Webhooks, WebAssembly, and Bulk Operations.

Finally, Staff Developer Kevin Menard covered regex denial-of-service (ReDoS) attacks, which affected regex engines in multiple languages in 2021. Menard, who had been working on regex performance for TruffleRuby, walks through how regular expression engines work and how algorithmic complexity leads to ReDoS exploits—and how to mitigate them.

The full list of sessions is available via the RailsConf 2022 playlist on YouTube.