justin․searls․co

RubyKaigi 2025 is heading to Matsuyama

Incidentally, Becky and I just visited Matsuyama for the first time a bit over a week ago, so I was surprised (and delighted!) when RubyKaigi's head organizer Akira Matsuda announced that next year's event will be held in Matsuyama from April 16-18, 2025.

If you've never been, Matsuyama resides in Ehime prefecture, which is on the island of Shikoku, just southwest of Japan's main island. It has one of the most cherished castles in the country atop a mountain at the center of the city and which is accessible by a continuously running cable car. It's also home to Dōgo onsen, which is considered to be the oldest hot springs bath in the country (and one of several inspirations for Studio Ghibli's Spirited Away). Additionally, it's famous for its massive and varied mikan (Japanese clementine oranges) crop—Becky and I got to sample a smattering of varieties from a store that had dozens of local citrus juices on tap, via cute little faucets.

Getting to Matsuyama isn't so bad either. From Osaka, it's about 3.5 hours by train, and a special rapid "Shiokaze" train service runs to Matsuyama from Okayama, making it an easy transfer from the Sanyo Shinkansen.

If you've ever wanted to visit a hot springs resort, or get a glimpse of daily life in a more remote Japanese city than the most well-known tourist destinations, I hope I'll see you next year!

[Translator's note: yama means mountain]

I'm going to take a stab at recording a podcast from Japan now that RubyKaigi has finished. If you have any curiosities about what's coming up in Ruby 3.4 or questions about the conference, email them! podcast@searls.co

Just booked a flight from Okinawa to Fukuoka on Peach airlines. $53, all-in, including aisle an aisle seat.

Could get used to this. #円安

PSA: if you're using Rails+Hotwire, Turbo's so-fast-it-feels-like-magic ability to update sections of the DOM downgrades Capybara's all method from "likely to regret this" to "definite footgun" when used in system tests.

IME, Turbo Streams updates the DOM so fast that elements found with Capybara's all are extremely likely to be stale by the time you iterate and interact with them. After several days of fighting intermittent CI failures, I had to banish all in favor of find in all my tests.

Preparing for the first night of RubyKaigi in my traditional way: debugging a
flaky Capybara/Selenium test which has nothing to do with Ruby and everything to
do with JavaScript. 👍

Oops! All Dryers

Had a surprisingly hard time finding a coin laundry in Okinawa this morning. First one I went to only had dryers, which was a first. 💨

Kawakyu Tonkatsu

We had a brief stop in Kagoshima, so we took full advantage to get ourselves some Kurobuta (黒豚) pork. The pork is like "black angus" in that despite having "black" in the name, it is still the just-barely-cooked-enough-to-be-safe pink color we know and love.

一泊二日のフェリーに初めて乗りました。昨夜、荒波に遭遇し、さらに飲みすぎてしまったので、今日は二船酔いの状態です。

I was genuinely confused when so many people were excited for the Rabbit R1 device, because they said that it worked by hostile screen-scraping of Android apps in the cloud to order Uber, Door Dash, etc.

Had anyone who preordered this thing ever tried automating even a basic web site with Selenium?