The Opportunity Scholars & Guides program is one of the least known and also one of the best aspects of RubyConf and RailsConf:

Opportunity Scholars (Scholars) are new to the Ruby community and looking to make professional connections. Scholars are typically students, new professionals, and/or members of underrepresented tech communities (women, BIPOC, etc.) interested in starting a career in the technology sector. Scholars are paired with a Guide (mentor) who can help them get the most out of the conference, and offer insight and advice on Ruby programming and working as a developer… Due to the generous donation from our conference sponsors and supporters, we are delighted to offer a limited amount of financial support for Scholars’ transportation and/or accommodation.

This year I had the honor to speak at RubyConf in Nashville. It was my second time attending the conference and first time as a speaker. I talked about skunk, a gem to calculate the SkunkScore of a module or set of modules.

Since its inception, skunk has changed quite a bit based on real usage in our productized service for Rails upgrades. As a matter of fact, the night before my talk I realized there was a BIG error in our formula.

Here is a description of the problem and solution.

Every time we start a new Rails upgrade project, we need to setup a whole new environment in our local machines. Sometimes that leads us down the rabbit hole which ends up breaking our environment for other client projects.

After years upgrading Rails applications, we learned that the best way to isolate our client projects’ environments is using Docker.

That’s why we decided to use Docker and docker-compose for all of our client projects. This year I had the opportunity to share our process in a series of workshops: Upgrade Rails 101: The Roadmap to Smooth Upgrades