The most recent Rzeszów Ruby User Group meeting confirmed our belief that it’s worth it to discuss topics other than Ruby even among a Ruby crowd. The organizers saw a 50% increase in attendance compared to previous editions. Participants talked about the advantages and disadvantages of TypeScript, and learned what the role of a DevOps Engineer is and isn’t. Overall, it was a very fruitful meeting.
The first presentation of the meeting was given by Róża Szylar, who spoke about TypeScript from a Ruby developer’s perspective. TypeScript is an open-source programming language created by Microsoft and a syntactical superset of JavaScript. Roża described its main characteristics, such as optional static typing, the possibility to use regular JavaScript constructions and elements of the object-oriented paradigm, such as classes and interfaces.
She also listed the pros and cons of using TypeScript. The language’s disadvantages include a level of complexity which can be overwhelming at first, and an extra compilation stage which results in a delay before freshly introduced changes become visible. However, TypeScript has many advantages that make using it worthwhile, such as high predictability, ease of debugging and a good syntactical structure. Róża summed up her presentation by saying that TypeScript works very well for large projects and teams, but in smaller ones, the gains won’t be equal to the time investment necessary to use the language.
The second presentation of the evening was delivered by Michał Borkowski. His topic was DevOps - more specifically, Michał wanted to explain what it means to be a DevOps Engineer, what an environment with a real DevOps culture is like, and how to make the first steps towards building such a culture. For Michał, DevOps isn’t a job, a single person with the term in their job title or even a team using DevOps principles. There’s also no specific toolset that can claim the name for itself. Instead, DevOps needs to be understood as a culture of shared responsibility, transparency and automation.
DevOps promotes the shortening of the feedback loop between teams in a company, for example between software developers and the operations team. It emphasizes the importance of constant knowledge sharing with team members, as well as continuous improvement and automation of processes. The goal is to deliver new iterations more quickly, while maintaining system security and stability through effective monitoring. Michał finished his talk with a practical presentation of several basic command line prompts, such as previewing logs, which can help developers in completing simple tasks on the production environment.
Remember to join us at the next RRUG meeting - as iRonin is RRUG’s sponsor, we’ll be posting about upcoming meetings on our social media. You can follow us there to make sure you’re always up-to-date with our Ruby events.
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