• Vicent Martí

    Once Upon a Time, Ruby

    About Vicent Martí

    Vicent used to make videogames, but he sold out because he likes to wear expensive clothes. Or any clothes at all. He now works full time as a systems engineer at GitHub, focusing on security and performance issues on the backend. He's also the maintainer of libgit2, the Git library that powers GitHub's backend and native clients. He takes long showers because he enjoys smelling nice.

    This talk

    This talk looks like a fairy tale, but it is actually a scary talk about scary Ruby internals. Disregard the fairy tale, actually. There's a lot going on under the hood in MRI, YARV and Rubinius. The C and C++ layer that interacts with the OS is a tangly mess full of tricky bugs and arcane issues; the kind of issues that don't raise exceptions, but kill whole processes and make them bleed rainbows. This is a talk about how we discover, tackle and fix these kind of issues in the design of MRI at our company, to ensure that our infrastructure (one of the largest Ruby deployments in the world) is always up and serving requests.