There are many day
s of the year where nothing memorable happens, and then there are some days which leave a lasting impact on your life. I can vouch for the fact that if you ask people who attended this conference, at least 90% (including me) would say that the 2 days at the Ruby Conf Portugal fall into the latter. Whether it was the talks, the food, the vinho(wine) or the venue itself, everything was wonderful.
You hell know that the conference is going to be fun when the master of ceremonies appear as caesar. Hail Jeremy !! You did a wonderful job of managing the whole energy in the auditorium and your wonderful introduction to Caleb’s talk still lingers in memory. And the sssshhhsh sshhh too 🙂
First a warm hug to all of the speakers. You were awesome. And I know I cannot contain this awesomeness in a line or two but I will still try ..
Katrina Owen – Practise simple problems to get better at the craft which will then help you in the bigger problems at hand.
Alex Coles – Rails way has not changed in the last 10 years when it comes to Front end development. And considering the growth of some of the Javascript frameworks, he suggested a mix of 2 applications where API development and JS client framework would be the way to go about designing a web app in today’s day and age.
Piotr Szotkowski – Do read about enumerable.rb and you will be a better programmer.
Carlos Souza – Some pointers to keep in mind when you are developing Web API’s.
Chris Kelly – Some of the content just went tangential to my head but I remember that a string of 23 character is better than a string of length 24. Don’t ask me why 🙂
Gautam Rege – “Ruby is for developers while go is for programmers”. I ❤ Ruby and I know he loves it too 🙂
Erik Ober – Keeping a track of object space is important and just making those little changes in ruby code and benchmarking them can lead to sizeable improvement in performance. Do have a look at his slides for some tips and tricks. And also if you want to see some beautiful illustration.
That was the end of first day. But then it was not the end. There was the traditional Portugese performance in the lobby and then the Ruby Karaoke session took the fun to another level.
And yes even after all the wine and the fun last night, I did make it to the next day on time and I had breakfast too 🙂
Steve Klabnik – He introduced us to a new language rust and then gave a demo of a c extension which used a rust service. Pretty cool eh. Also I came to know that he is these days involved with the active_model_serializer gem which plans to tackle some of the pain points of the JBuilder experience.
PJ Hagerty – Mozart effect works in programming too .. ie. listening to a particular type of music does result in cognitive boost.
Piotr Solnica – You may be a clean coder(very particular about code smells) or a cowboy coder(you sometimes cut corners just to deliver more features) and both the styles are pretty acceptable as long as you have the confidence to change something or refactor if the need be. I sure need to work on my testing skills to increase my programming confidence.
Luca Guidi– It is important to reinvent the wheel and the Lotus web framework is trying to do that. Do use it if possible and provide feedback. The community can only get better with such new stuff coming up
Danish Khan – This talk did remove some of my misconceptions about sales. Awesome slides.
Caleb Thompson – He gave an awesome presentation of how scenic gem can be used to do full text searching across more than 1 table. Yes elastic search and other 3rd party search tools are there but then I would love it if there was something in rails out of the box for these advanced searches. The problem with the gem right now is that it is only for Postgres database.
Terence Lee – A great closing speech where he spoke about the ways in which you can contribute to Ruby and that is not limited to writing C code and sending in patch requests. You can open tickets for features/bugs at their ticketing website and not on twitter 🙂 Share data about application performance which can be used to improve ruby. More or less participate in the discussion and take Ruby to the next level(3.0)
Obrigado to the organizers, the volunteers and the sponsors for making the RubyConf Portugal a big success. And a thank you to Josh software for making this trip happen. That’s it from Braga. Hopefully I will there again next year.
Josh Software 