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## Abstract

Ruby is widely known as a dynamic programming language that encourages practices like duck typing and metaprogramming. While this can give programmers a lot of flexibility, it can also make programs hard to reason about and debug.

Enter Sorbet: a gradual type checker for Ruby. Using Sorbet, we can harness the flexibility and creativity of a dynamic language while benefiting from the safety of typing.

In this talk, we'll learn what Sorbet is and how it works. Together, we'll go on a journey through the Sorbet pipeline, exploring the steps Sorbet takes to add types to our Ruby code.

## Details

### Intended Audience
This talk is intended for any Ruby developer who is curious about Sorbet. While this talk will have a technical focus, concepts will be explained from the ground up, making it approachable for junior developers while still providing valuable content for those who are more experienced.

### Outcomes
By the end of this talk, the audience should be able to answer the following questions:
- What is Sorbet?
- Why would someone want to type check Ruby code?
- At a high level, how does Sorbet work and how is it implemented?

### Outlines

1. Introduction [5 minutes]
  - Introduce speaker
  - Introduce the concept of type checking: what problems does it solve?
  - Introduce Sorbet, which is a gradual type checker for Ruby
    - Note: define the term "gradual type checker"
  - Explain how Sorbet is added to a codebase and what problems it can solve
2. Sorbet implementation and architecture [20 minutes]
  - This section will be structured around taking a code snippet and showing how Sorbet processes it in order to gain information about types
  - This is where we'll take a "journey" through the Sorbet pipeline:
    - Parse: converts Ruby code into "nodes" -- we're now working with code that represents code!
    - Desugar: converts those nodes to simpler representations of themselves
    - Rewrite: converts nodes into simpler "expressions"
      - Has multiple sub-steps; explain what each of these sub-steps does
    - CFG: Converts expressions into a control-flow graph
    - Infer: From the CFG, infers information about types
3. Sorbet at Shopify [3 minutes]
  - At Shopify, we have four years of historical data about our Sorbet usage
  - This section will dive into how we use Sorbet "at scale" and how it has changed our development workflows
  - This is not a pitch -- there are some positives here and some drawbacks
4. Conclusion [2 minutes]
  - Recap the important takeaways
  - Ask the audience to consider whether Sorbet might be a good tool for their projects

## Pitch

Over the past year, I have worked at Shopify on the Ruby Developer Experience Team, where I help other teams improve their development workflows using tools like Sorbet. While Sorbet has existed for a while, it is still not widely used, and many people are curious about what it is and how it works. I want to take the opportunity to educate the broader community about Sorbet while also growing my own technical knowledge and expertise.

I am an experienced speaker with a track record of breaking down difficult topics into understandable concepts, so I think I would be an ideal candidate for giving a technical talk that is still accessible to a wider audience of Ruby developers.

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