ChicagoRuby @ Beyond Finance

Speakers: 🎤 Tess Griffin (in person) - Learning Empathy From Pokémon Blue Have you ever looked at a bug and wondered why it actually happens? It's easy to chalk it up to sloppy coding, but that's almost never the case. In this talk, we'll be dissecting an exploit from Pokémon Blue known as the "Missingno" glitch. We'll explore the details of each seemingly random bug behind this exploit and apply the lessons to our Ruby code 30 years later. If you've never played or even heard of Pokémon, that's ok! As long as you're interested in a deep dive into a fascinating set of bugs, this talk is for you.

About Tess: Tess has been a Ruby on Rails developer for 10 years. She lives in Albuquerque, NM with her wife Sage, child Ruby, and many animals.

🎤 Chris Fung (remote) - Stop Fighting Ruby I18n: Message Format Is All You Need Ruby I18n tries to do the simplest thing that works in the most common situations. But do you know all of the pitfalls and trip-ups hiding within? What if there was an alternative that was just as simple and didn't require remembering gotchas?

This talk is aimed at experienced Rails developers who have worked on multi-lingual applications. This talk will introduce i18n-message_format as an alternative to the built-in I18n module that ships with every Rails app.

About Chris: Chris is a Staff Software Engineer at Gusto. He has been working with Ruby and Rails for over 10 years. He loves unraveling difficult problems, crafting elegant software, and creating positive impact on the world.

Location: Beyond Finance - 222 N LaSalle St, Suite 1500, Chicago, IL 60601. We will be in the big conference room floor of the building NOT the offices on 1600.

Location Details:

• Walk-ins allowed (but not recommended as we would like to get a realistic number of attendees for catering)
• If you do come as a Walk-In, you MUST arrive before 6pm as we cannot ensure your entry after that.
• Register/RSVP with your First + Last name
• For folks who would rather not have their Meetup Display name be first + last name OR for folks who do NOT have a meetup account. Please RSVP via this form (https://forms.gle/oKbX26tQXDNBhBdH6 )
• Valid Photo ID required upon checkin.
• Note: Our host location also requires us to send a list of attendees ahead of time to get them registered with building security, so please update your Meetup name to your first + last name. (If not comfortable with doing so, feel free to DM (me) Michelle or email michelle@zooniverse.org and title the email 'July 2026 ChicagoRuby Meetup' with your First + Last name or your First + email so that we can get you registered with building security for the event.)

For remote attendance: Join us via the following Zoom URL.

We want to hear from you! Interested in speaking but unsure what to talk about? Interested in hearing a specific topic? We have compiled a list of potential topic ideas that members of the community are interested in learning more about. See: this google spreadsheet for potential talk topic ideas. For moderation purposes, this spreadsheet is only available for comments and admins will add ideas from comments onto the list. Reach out to Michelle (michelle@zooniverse.org) if you have any questions.