Shopify is Heading to Pittsburgh for RailsConf 2018!

2 min read

We’re excited to announce that we’ll be attending RailsConf 2018 in Pittsburgh from April 17 - 19! RailsConf is hosted annually by Ruby Central, Inc., and features the world’s largest gathering of Rails developers and Rubyists!

This year, we’re sending three Shopify engineers to speak about their experiences and best practices for developing on Rails for one of the world’s largest commerce sites. Check out their conference topics below!

• Debugging Rails Itself (When It All Goes Wrong) - Sean Griffin

Tracking down bugs can be hard. Tracking down bugs in a codebase touched by five thousand contributors is even harder. Making heads or tails of an inheritance-happy codebase like Rails can be a nightmare. How do you find where the bug in save is when save is overridden by 15 different modules?

In this talk, we’ll look at the process that goes into fixing a bug in Rails itself. You’ll learn about every step from the initial report, to when the fix is eventually committed. We’ll share tips on navigating Rails’ internals, and how to find the source of problems - even if you’re a complete newcomer to Rails.

Tuesday, April 17 (11:40am - 12:20pm)

• Operating Rails in Kubernetes (Deploying and Running Rails) - Kir Shatrov

Moving from operations powered by scripts like Capistrano, to containers orchestrated by Kubernetes, requires a shift in practices. In this talk, we’ll go beyond the operational basics of Kubernetes, and cover more advanced aspects, such as gradual deployments, capacity planning, job workers and their safety, and solving problems for unique cloud environments like Kubernetes.

This presentation is about the lessons we learned while migrating hundreds of Rails apps within the Shopify organization to Kubernetes.

Tuesday, April 17 (2:30pm - 3:10pm)

• Upgrading Rails at Scale - Edouard Chin

Upgrading Rails at Shopify has always been a tedious and slow process. A full upgrade cycle took as much time as releasing a new version of Rails - this wasn’t working for us. We realized that having a full-time team dedicated to working on Rails wasn’t the solution; instead, it was to build a proper toolkit and process for each upgrade. In this talk, you’ll learn about the different techniques and strategies that enabled Shopify to perform its fastest, smoothest Rails upgrade ever.

Interested in working at Shopify? Talk to Mackenzie, Alexa, or Jane about our engineering opportunities at our booth, or reach out to them on LinkedIn! You can also head over to our careers page.