Speakers


Carl Lerche

Software Engineer, Engine Yard

Carl Lerche

Carl started building web applications at 13 with PHP. He started learning so that he could one up his friends who were only building static HTML. Since then, he's dabbled with quite a few technologies before settling with ruby four years ago. Carl is a software engineer at Engine Yard, a member of the merb team (currently working on Rails 3), and a contributor to many OSS projects. He plans to build a web server in haskell, ocaml, or ____ in his spare time for no tangible reason.

Carl likes chocolate, coffee, scuba diving, and long walks on the beach.



Presentations

Writing Fast Ruby: Learn from Merb and Rails 3

It has been said that Ruby is a slow language, but that is not true. Numerous Ruby projects have shown that it is possible to write fast, scalable software using Ruby. Merb, for instance, is faster than any major PHP web framework.

In this talk, Carl will show how to take the many available tools available, such as ruby-prof, RBench, and kcachegrind, and turn any old ruby into a speed machine. The tips and processes will be demonstrated with real world examples of optimizations that have been done to the Merb and Rails 3 projects.

Topics that will be covered include:

  • Finding performance drains in existing Ruby code.
  • Popular ruby idioms that are actually quite slow.
  • Using benchmarks to help determine the fastest approach to a problem.
  • Understand the MRI garbage collector and how it applies to Ruby speed.
  • Leveraging the power of the JVM through JRuby.

This talk is geared towards the intermediate developer and you should have a good grasp of the ruby programming language.