Technology is moving quickly - things like bots, serverless, VR/AR, IoT and more are quickly changing both how we develop and what we develop for. And we thought things got complex when we were just targeting desktop and mobile devices! In this free, online event we’ll cover two of those trends that are shaping how we develop and what we develop for.

As we discussed in October, the trend towards serverless architectures is changing the way developers build their apps. It solves a number of problems but also brings new complexities. Brian LeRoux will discuss how one tool is aiming to address the complexities it can bring.

Complex, conversational bots are also changing the ways in which businesses interact with their customers. Many common tasks once handled via the phone or chat with a live person can now be handled by an automated bot. Andy Barnov will teach you how you can build a conversational bot using Ruby.

Going Severless on Easy Mode

With functions as a service, cloud providers have signaled the smallest billable unit of computation is a single function execution. It’s a beautifully simple idea, rejecting the metaphor of a server, and freeing developers to design smaller and simpler services. We can iterate on our code with a high degree of isolation, without fear of affecting other parts of the system; deploy systems in seconds with zero downtime; and always be available regardless of load.

However, building serverless-y apps is very new and as such fought with early days complexity:

• Configuration tooling was designed for the last generation of computing metaphors (and often lags behind the releases of new functionality)
• AWS is massive and overwhelming with many similar, but not the same, products
• The web console is confusing, with divergent interfaces between interlocking services
• Deep proprietary knowledge is required to configure and maintain common infrastructure primitives

In this talk Brian will walk you through a new approach to architecting applications with plain text using arc.codes to create apps in minutes and subsequently deploy in seconds with zero downtime and unprecedented availability.

Develop a Messenger Bot in Pure Ruby

Learn how to quickly get started with Rubotnik boilerplate to build a bot with rich features. Rubotnik is framework- and database agnostic and promotes a «bot-end» approach to build conversational interfaces with an easy-to-follow DSL. And it’s easily deployable to Heroku!