Sometimes, writing Rails apps is awful. Do you know what’s nearly always more awful? Hand-rolling assembly. Ruby lets us not think about how the processor works, but we’re programmers. We’re uniquely positioned to intellectually appreciate the wonderful, complex, engineering that goes into a processor.

In this talk, you’ll learn a little more about what it means for Ruby to be an “interpreted” language, how a processor executes programs, and what magical tricks processor designers use to make our programs go faster with every generation. If you’ve ever written a Ruby program, and understand that a computer has a processor in it, this talk is probably for you.