Bom dia!

Mailjet’s DevRel team went to the first ever RubyConf Portugal event which took place in Braga on October 13 and 14. Spoiler alert: it was really awesome.

Do you know Braga? (no shame if you don’t – I didn’t)

Braga is the 3rd biggest city in Portugal after Lisbon and Porto. It’s about 30 minutes away from Porto (the closest airport) by car.

About the event

This was a 2 days conference on the theme of Ruby in Bom Jesus de Braga , a pilgrimage sanctuary on top of the mountains, with a beautiful park.

There were about 250 attendees from all over Europe, mostly developers.

The atmosphere was really friendly (I guess all these local beers and Porto shots helped) and the event was really well organized. Congrats to the staff!

For Mailjet, it was the first event in Portugal and a great opportunity to meet people there because we have heard great things about their developer community and have been excited to check it out.

As usual, the Mailjet Crew air dropped some pretty awesome swag to the event: mint boxes, eye masks, stickers… all got participants excited. More importantly, it created a lot of conversations around email best practices, deliverability, and our tech!

We sponsored the lunch of the first day, which was really awesome: great food (& the desserts, OMG), Portuguese wine and a wonderful place. We got a lot of thanks from participants but the caterers deserved the credit!

The food at #rubyconfpt is f***ing amazing! Thanks for the lunch, @mailjet! — Rin (@rinpaku) 13 Octobre 2014

About the conference

The conference was both inspiring and instructive with 14 speakers on various topics (from APIs to Sales through FrontEnd and Search), one hour per talk, questions included. Depending on the presentations, it felt a bit long for some, but quite cool to learn a lot for others.



In parallel, the rise of JavaScript applications is In his talk “ Frontend Choices ”, Alex Coles made us realize that in terms of front-end development, Rails has not changed since almost 10 years (created in 2005).In parallel, the rise of JavaScript applications is obvious , so to keep using Rails, he suggests the following architecture to build your web app: an API from day one (with Ruby frameworks like Rails, Sinatra, Lotus.rb) and a front-end JavaScript framework (AngularJS, Backbone, Knockout, Ember) while using JavaScript tooling (Karma, Grunt, Gulp).

I definitely agree with this architecture: it has obvious advantages when it comes to be available on multiple platforms and make easier to open the API to anyone.

About the front-end choice, I prefer using a front-end JavaScript framework to structure my code (I’ve really enjoyed working with AngularJS ), but I understand that some developers prefer to keep full control by coding in pure Javascript.

I had a good time listening to Carlos Souza about building web APIs with Rails. It’s in my comfort zone, but it’s a topic I like and on which I want to improve my skills. Plus, I’m not a Rails developer, and it was interesting for me to see some other ways to perform APIs than those I’m used to work on (PHP or Node.js for example). However, in my opinion, what makes really a big difference between two web applications is not in the back-end (you can make great RESTful APIs in all these languages) but in the front-end JavaScript frameworks.

Interested in using Mailjet with Ruby? Find our wrapper, available here on Github

Also find more photos from the event here

Coming back next time?

Definitely !

Obrigado, Braga !