About Hi, I'm Eileen! I'm an engineer on the Surfaces team at PlanetScale , and I'm on the core teams for Rails, Ruby, and RubyGems. Most of my work is upstream in those projects, in the parts of the stack that get tested when applications get big: performance, scalability, security. I speak at conferences, and I care a lot about how to make open source more welcoming to new contributors.
The Rails Infrastructure team built an open-source toolkit for benchmarking Bundler performance reliably across machines. Along the way I learned that AI is great for scaffolding, but you can’t oursource the engineering rigor required to catch when numbers don’t add up. Read more on the Shopify’s Rails at Scale Blog
The New Year often brings a rethinking of one’s habits, future, and identity. For me this year my future identity is more important than it ever was. Most of you don’t know that 2024 into 2025 was a deeply painful year for me. I wrote my 2024 Rails World keynote while my now ex-husband was moving out of the home we’d shared for 11 years. I put on a brave face and went to the conference. And even…
Monkey patching is considered one of the more powerful features of the Ruby programming language. However, by the end of this post I’m hoping to convince you that they should be used sparingly, if at all, because they are brittle, dangerous, and often unnecessary. I’ll also share tips on how to use them as safely as possible in the rare cases where you do need to monkey patch. Read more on the…
At GitHub, we recently added a new feature to Rails that will be available in 7.0: support for handling associations across database clusters. Read about it on the blog .
Read about GitHub’s Ruby 2.7 upgrade at https://github.blog/2020-08-25-upgrading-github-to-ruby-2-7/ .
Read about GitHub’s Rails 6.0 upgrade at https://github.blog/2019-09-09-running-github-on-rails-6-0/ .
Read about GitHub’s Rails upgrade at https://github.blog/2018-09-28-upgrading-github-from-rails-3-2-to-5-2/ .
Update: The PR’s discussed in this blog post have been merged. You can try out Early Hints by using Rails and Puma master. You’ll need to also use Arel master until Rails 5.2 is released. Recently I’ve been working with Aaron Patterson on implementing the HTTP2 Early Hints. The spec for Early Hints is still in draft but explains the requirements for implementation. In order to start preparing…
There’s a ton of blog posts out there with advice on how to write talks. They all discuss the “right way”, but in reality I don’t think anyone follows a process prescribed by someone else. I’m a very visual person and in a way I write talks backwards. “The right way” would be to write copy and then build the slides around it. I shouldn’t even be opening Keynote until I have solid, well-articulated…
As we work towards the release of Rails 5 there are a lot of changes will affect your application when you choose to upgrade. To help you keep up with the rapid development and changes I'm starting a series of blog posts to help you be ready to upgrade when that time comes. When Rails 5 is released it will require that you upgrade to Sprockets 4. Sprockets 4 has some big changes in how it knows…