The challenge
Been involved in crafting software for some time already, and love discussing about the topic of software development from all kind of directions from the details of bits to team composition and way of working.
Talking with groups of people I know about these topics don’t feel intimidating at all and feel comfortable in that kind of setup, probably a big reason for that is the safe space that we have been able to reach during the years of working together.
At some point I had decided to take the leap towards the unknown and stand in front of total strangers to talk about something I find interesting. Finally saw the chance for that when i stumbled upon a local Ruby meetup and just recently had been focusing on the history of software dependencies from the point of view of the service I’m working with.
The talk
The event was hosted by the fine Helsinki Ruby in a cosy pub in the center of Helsinki.
With the title “Dependencies an asset and a curse”, the talk itself was going to tell the story of how a service had grown into what it is today from a software dependency point of view. Decisions and neglect of dependencies in the past coming back to haunt the team in the future. Main push being a Rails update from version 2.3 to Rails 7 and realizing dependencies are important and needs care.
Not going to go into details about the content, link to the slides and my random notes to myself is linked in the end of this post. Also there is a YouTube recording of me rambling, no idea how that turned out. I cringe if I would need to listen to myself talk.
How did it go?
All in all I’m happy that i had the courage to step up and prepare something. But the execution could have been better. The main learning is that I need to practice way more than I did to have a smoother execution. Also in the end the feeling was the people was more interested in how do you pull off a Rails 2.3 upgrade in 2023 than how important it is to keep dependencies in good shape so you never need to do a big push.