Ruby Conference 2017 Kenya

Cess Wairimu
Jul 27, 2017 · 6 min read

My mentor sent an event brite link to a whatsapp group we have for guys who attended a particular bootcamp….which i will talk about in another blog. His quotes were “you should all attend and network with the rest of the rubyists”. When I opened the link I realized it was a Ruby Conference….do you know the feeling of belonging because ruby is what I understand most of all the object oriented languages. I wouldn’t miss it for the world. I have been to some IT meetups but most of them you are introduced to some new stuff. You know a lot of jargon that makes you feel like you know nothing and ends up being even more confused…For example, One speaker is obsessed with Android and so everything to do with another language is a nuisance to him and this other one loves PHP, that chick at the corner python is her first love. So as a young developer you can be confused who to listen to. But here is a conference purely based on my favorite programming language, Ruby. I wouldn’t miss it for the world i knew it would be good.

I am eager to know who is organizing this so for the first time i hear of Nairuby. Of course the next i did like anything a tech guy would do is search them in the internet i read through their website and realize that: Nairuby is a user group based in Nairobi,Kenya which brings programmers of this beautiful language together for meetups and events about the same. Next i stalked them on twitter and saw what they have been up to for a while and of course they were mobilizing people for the conference. At the back of my mind I am like “ I have to meet this community”.

So i attend the conference i will not bore u with the hassles i went through to even get to the venue but am there, am a bit late but am there. As i enter a humorous guy is presenting. For some reason, he hates JavaScript (i also hate it anyway i think its syntax is so complex and why we still need colons?) Anyway i love his presentation besides the fact that i love rails but he is talking about other stuff we can do with ruby and is really annoyed that more than 90% of the people who use ruby use it for web development. I appreciate that myself the most of the code i have written in ruby are for web development and i agree its not the only way to use this powerful language. So he talks about other stuff like rubymotion which is used for developing android apps, jruby for writing scripts in ruby and JavaScript combined, he talked a lot of clojure which seems really exciting to him and i love its context and promise myself i should check it out after the conference. Other things he talked about were Opal, Elm, and the compatibility of this technologies with the various ruby versions. I loved the talk it was eye opening and amazing. Well at the end of the presentation he signs his name at the of the last slide and guess what its Batsov the only and one Batsov of rubocop OMG what an honor to even share a room with the owner of this amazing open source gem(ruby library). Leave alone sit through his presentation.

The next speaker was Victor Shepelev, A Ukraine Rubist who also happens to be a poet. He is a mentor at Google Summer of Code an open source project involvement for students for three months where you get to be paid for your contribution these projects.(I have a friend in this program this summer I will make her write an article about her experience when she is done and share the link here). Victor explains how wikipedia parsing is done and talks about gem wikicloth: ruby implementation of the MediaWiki markup language. The details of this process is quite complex though I understood the process is hard for me to explain using the right terms. He also talked about gem infobox and gem reality. I don’t remember anything about infobox but you check it out. Reality is your quick access point to almost any entity existing in real world and described in Wikipedia. Its goal is to make the world inspectable and computable.

Then came Ben Hughes, a lead engineer at Airbnb who talked about Scaling rails with Ruby-Prof. Ruby-prof is a fast code profiler for MRI Ruby. It features speed, modes, reports and threads. He talks about its compatibility with various ruby versions. He talked about how he himself has used it to scale his projects, the challenges and solutions of the same and under what circumstances should one opt to use prof.

Speaker Rishi Jain left the audience amazed to say the least. He was the youngest among all the speakers and works as a web developer. But he was giving us a guide to music. No, not what you are thinking about. He showed us how to use Sonic Pi to produce music. The most interesting part of it is that Sonic Pi gives an interface where you write code that when compiled produces sound hence music. I mean using this you can create beats where people can dance to or jam simultaneously. You can even deejay using it: as you write code beats are produced. I was really amazed I never knew any code could do this!

The last speaker for the first day was William Wanyama, an open source developer who has worked in Sidney and now an accomplished developer who is also a Green member at iHub. He talked about how you can level up as a developer through involvement in open source projects. Often using communities where you get to contribute in projects and get assistance and learn in the process. Such communities include Agile Ventures(which I am a member and will talk about my experience in one of my blogs), TheOdinProject, Hackoberfest and Exercism.io. He also talked about some really good references for ruby which include: apis on rails, why’s poignant guide to ruby and practical object-oriented design in ruby.

The second day kicked off with James Corey a full stack developer who works at Bendyworks, I was late again so I didn’t get to hear his full speech. He talked about cooperation in the competitive tech consulting marketplace.

Mike McQuaidis a senior software engineer working on open source at GitHub and the lead maintainer of the Homebrew MacOS package manager. Yeah, he works at Github. He talked about good github practices. Which include writing a github script(bootstrap) for setup instead of documentation, using automation over manual comands, scripting over copy paste from documentation, chatOps over ssh and manual writing, automation testing over manual testing, monitoring over clicking around. He also emphasized on how github conversation are essential for projects clarity and some comments can be used as documentation themselves.

Paul Ogonda, a spatial planner working at Research Solutions Africa as a location analyst came next. He talked in depth about GIS application with Ruby/Rails. How you can integrate maps and polygons in Ruby application. From his speech I gathered PostGIS is the best in this area.

Bernand Banta a computer scientist and entrepreneur who is the founder of Banta Technologies was next. He discussed about techpreneurship. How you can make money in technology and the tips to put in mind during the process and basically the dos and don’ts in techpreneurship.

The second day’s wrap up came from Michael Kimathi, who is highly experienced in working with innovative ecosystems and building solutions with BlackBerry Developer Community, Nairuby, Masomomoja, GDG, Unbound, BantaMik , Atlassian among others. I was inspired by his story about how he came to start building communities. He talked about you need for a community to grow and people to feel comfortable. Its challenging, bearing in mind you don’t expect the members to make contributions and sometimes you are forced to put in your resources(which you won’t get returns from since its not an investment). Communities are good because they act as a place where you can get assistance and network with other developers. So yeah, finally I got to hear how Nairuby came to be and I met one of the founders.

This conference was an amazing experience to say the least. This is just a summary of what went down, basically all the activities cannot fit in this blog. Special thanks to Nairuby and the other organizations that were involved for organizing this. I am eagerly waiting for the 2018 one. I definitely will attend it.

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