RubyKaigi is the annual Ruby conference organized in Japan — Ruby’s country of origin. This year, hundreds of Rubyists gathered in Sendai to spend 3 days expanding their knowledge and discussing future development path of the language.

This work by RubyKaigi 2018 Team is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License

Have you been there as well? If you’ve missed the opportunity, let me tell you why you should consider going to RubyKaigi in 2019.

I guess most people would now start writing about all presentations one by one. But let’s all agree that it’s not the most exciting stuff to read. How about, instead of focusing on single talks, we take a look at a whole conference at once? Do you want to know what made it so special?

Giving the choice

If you’re a regular conference attendant you know the struggle of listening to stuff that isn’t interesting for you. Some presentations are just too easy, others are too hard. And the worst ones are those out of the scope of your expertise 😩

That was not an issue in Sendai, because there were three parallel blocks of talks to choose from. And with three available topics you’re more than likely to find something that’s just right for you. This one thing made the whole conference much more enjoyable 👏

When you choose the best one out of three available talks

For example, if you didn’t have enough experience with machine learning you could have skipped all talks related to it and choose ones related to memory usage or code quality (like I did 🙋).

Keeping things technical

Let me ask you a question. What are the most important things you look for at technical conference? I personally always look for the talks that require and share some deep technical knowledge. If I wanted to listen about ways of achieving the success I’d have chosen some kind of coaching event, not a technical one.

Thankfully, RubyKaigi had this one figured out really well. It was a technical conference and there was not a single non-technical talk there. And among those talks you had a wide variety of topics to choose from. Some of them, like Scaling Teams using Tests for Productivity and Education or Devly, a multi-service development environment, focused on utilizing technology to improve the way you work. On the other hand, you had talks like How to get the dark power from ISeq and Grow and Shrink — Dynamically Extending the Ruby VM Stack, that required a deep understanding of some intricate low-level problems 😳

When you go to Ruby conference and they talk about stack allocation and stuff

But if something was too hard for you, there were always two other talks to choose from. In the end it was possible to find interesting talks that were neither too easy not too hard. It made the experience much better than during typical conference where you get coaching talks mixed with technical ones 😃

Focusing on Ruby

There is one other thing that RubyKaigi did well. It focused on a single piece of technology — the Ruby language.

Even though there were talks about all kinds of topics like machine learning, cryptocurrencies or memory management, you only had to know one language to be able to follow them. And it made everything much easier to understand 🤓 After all, you already knew the language so you could have focused on what was the clue of each presentation.

Another advantage of being Ruby-exclusive conference was that a lot of talks focused on the future development of the language. As expected JIT, type checking and improving performance and memory usage were really hot topics there 🔥🔥🔥

When it’s early 2018 but you’re already talking about features coming to Ruby 3

Being at RubyKaigi gave you an early insight into what will be available in Ruby in the future.

Building a community

But let’s be honest here. Listening to the talks is not the only reason to go to the conference, right? It’s also about the people. Networking, after parties, sharing ideas and opinions… That’s as important as presentations. And it seemed to be important during RubyKaigi as well.

Just starting your day? Why not go to the venue early and grab a free breakfast with other attendants? And that was not the only food-related networking opportunity. There was also a lunch break and some kind of party every day.

Apart from that, there were short breaks between talks. A perfect opportunity to quickly exchange thoughts with other attendants, prepare some notes or ask a follow-up question to the person giving a presentation.

RubyKaigi was a really international conference. There were attendants from all around the World 🌏🚀

And people who were there all knew Ruby, so you had an instant connection with them. And the most important thing is that everybody was friendly and willing to talk with others. It was like a one, big Ruby family. This made the 3 days in Sendai really nice and productive.

Next year, then?

Those were all small details, but they contributed to something bigger. They turned RubyKaigi into an exceptional conference. You had 3 days filled with high-quality presentation and many opportunities to talk with like-minded people.

I will be definitely going back to Japan for RubyKaigi 2019 and I hope that you feel convinced about it as well.

Oh, and if you actually wanted to read about the talks, you can check out my notes from the conference on GitHub — you won’t be disappointed 🙆

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