Hackathon - Strada - Rails World

Welcome to today’s episode of Remote Ruby, where we dive into another successful year of Rails Hackathon, celebrating the talent and creativity showcased with 37 outstanding submissions from 216 participants across 111 teams, and Chris unveils his Signalman project, a tool that simplifies Rails development. We also venture into discussions about the potential and intricacies of hybrid applications, with Chris advocating for the power of Hotwire Turbo Native and eagerly awaiting the release of Rails 7.1 and Strata.  The upcoming Rail World conference becomes a topic of excitement, from intriguing speaking engagements to unique dining experiences.  Lastly, we explore the latest developer-friendly features from Stripe, including the innovative Workbench beta, which promises to transform the debugging experience. Join us on this thrilling ride through the world of Rails, hackathons, and future tech trends. Hit download now! 

[00:00:13] Rails Hackathon took place, and Chris fills us in on the details and the winners. The Judges’ Favo(u)rite went to ‘Gem.sh’ project by Awesome Docs. The Best Solo project was ‘Rails Duels’ by the Lazy Lambda team, and the Community Favorite award went to the ‘Locale Ninja’ project.  Other notable submissions included ‘Ahoy Captain’, ‘Ruby on Plain,’ ‘First Ruby Quest,’ and ‘AI Quiziverse.’

[00:07:31] Chris worked on a project called Signalman during the Hackathon. It’s like Laravel Telescope for Rails, allowing users to build generators and scaffolds through a friendly UI rather than needing to use the command line.  

[00:09:50] The Rails Hackathon had 216 participants across 111 teams, with 37 teams submitting an entry.  A fun aspect of the event was randomly assigning people to teams, allowing participants to meet new people and make friends. 

[00:12:21] Andrew mentions looking at Gem.sh and how cool it looks, he compares it to the Ruby toolbox, which hasn’t been updated much in recent years. He also praised Active Mermaid, an application that generates UML diagrams for active record tasks. 

[00:14:01] Chris requested suggestions for the theme of the next hackathon. Andrew discusses potential themes, including one based around new features released at Rails World, or web-based themes. He also suggested a hackathon where anything, but Rails could be used to build a web app with Ruby. 

[00:16:15] Jason brings up their speaking engagements at the upcoming Rails World event.  Chris brings up a Tweet that he posted from a Tom Scott video and the guy is talking about trains and says America doesn’t appreciate rails like they used to. 

[00:17:25] There’s a lot of good technical talks lined up at Rails World, and there’s speculation about the release of Rails 7.1 and Strata at Rails World.

[00:21:51] Chris explained the benefits of hybrid applications, specifically how they can shift between web views and native settings depending on the user interaction.

[00:24:12] Andrew points out the importance of a well-built hybrid application, suggesting a poorly built one can negatively impact the user experience. Chris explains the nice part about the Hotwire Turbo Native things and discusses the issues with PWAs. Chris thinks more people should start using Turbo Native to contribute to its development, and Strata could potentially make this process faster and easier.  

[00:27:44] Andrew started learning SwiftUI to build mobile apps, and Chris points out the integration of all the authentication stuff in Turbo Native, making the mobile app development process much quicker. 

[00:30:00] The Rails World agenda is packed with a bunch of awesome talks and there are two tracks. Andrew is going to miss out on this event, and Jason booked a dinner place they’re going to that’s an old fort Island converted into a restaurant.