Once a year, in the central Europe, there is a special weekend where all ruby developers can meet together. This could be the shortest description of the Wroc_love.rb conference. It is not an ordinary event. This is the one of the oldest and the biggest ruby conference in our industry in this part of the old continent. This year Selleo, who is one of the most staunch supporters of this event, had a big representation there (10 people).

Before …

We arrived in the Wrocław, Poland on Friday morning. We had some extra time before the event (it was starting in the afternoon), so we picked one of the tourist destination to look at. In our case, it was the Hydropolis — pretty cool interactive exhibition about … water. For more details, you can take a look at the video below to check how it looked from our perspective. I would recommend it mostly for families with kids, due to its educational purpose and interactive form.

The event started at 17:00. At the very beginning we received surprising gifts — socks with rubies pattern and fancy nerd underwear. Interesting and very original idea — thumbs up for the conference organisers. Later on, we focused on the pith of the conference — presentations, talks and after parties.

The most memorable talks

The quality of the talks and variety of the speakers tells me one thing — organisers did their homework well and the conference is so good that it attracts great speakers as well. So, I’ve decided to mention 3 talks that were the most memorable for me, but it doesn’t mean that rest wasn’t interesting — I just want to keep this post as short as possible.

Mariusz Gil presented Machine learning for the rescue — it was a great high-level introduction what the machine learning is all about. I would highly recommend the presentation to everyone who is planning to start using machine learning in his projects. Mariusz described the basic ideas in words that everyone should be able to understand, even if the term seems scary at a first glance.

One of the most exciting part of the conference for most of the people was discussion panel How to survive in the Javascript world as a ruby programmer and stay sane. Our company colleague, Michał Czyż was defending Ember, against React, Angular & Vue. It tells me that developers’ JavaScript toolset preference is not an easy choice in our industry.

The most controversial panel was Ruby vs Elixir. I didn’t expect that anything can unite and at the same time divide people as this panel did. However, it was very entertaining for most of the audience. The most important part for me was the fact, that it was very constructive talk, rather than just hating each other, so big respect for the speakers.

…and afters

The open secret of every conference is that after parties are not the places where people drink tea. It was a harsh time for our heads, but thanks to great company, we were very happy to be there and share our thoughts. I think this part is a must have for everyone, who would like to get acquainted with the preferred practices used in other companies, get to know people and even sometimes argue constructively with others to face his beliefs. For me it was very refreshing and informative experience.