Samuel Williams
Samuel Williams is the creator of Falcon and Async, and a longtime contributor to Ruby’s concurrency and performance ecosystem. He works on production systems at scale and maintains several libraries that push Ruby forward into the world of non-blocking I/O and real-time web applications.
Session
Ruby is beloved for its developer experience, but it's not always known for raw performance or scalability. With Falcon and Async, we're changing that.
In this talk, I’ll walk you through building modern, concurrent Ruby web applications using Falcon — a high-performance async web server — and Async, the foundation for non-blocking I/O in Ruby. We’ll cover the full lifecycle of a production-ready app:
- Building: Writing non-blocking, fiber-based web apps using Async and Protocol::HTTP.
- Deploying: Running Falcon in production environments, from containers to the cloud.
- Monitoring: Observability strategies for async systems — logging, metrics, and tracing.
Whether you’re serving APIs, streaming data, or scaling real-time features, this talk will equip you with practical tools and patterns to confidently run async Ruby apps in production.