How to work on your boss
It can be hard to convince your boss that it’s worth you going to a conference, especially if it’s the other side of the country let alone a different continent. Here are three great reasons;
- If you’re hiring or looking for a job it’s awesome. We are (get in touch via twitter @rhs) and both the job board — which is free — and talking to people have resulted in > 5 great engineers that we want to work with. Bonus? We’ve hung out with them more than we ever could via most other recruiting methods.
- Learning? Developers from all ends of experience were here; streaming gigs of geo data? Want to implement a new data type in cruby? Wondering how to do something in your favorite gem? — there was someone to help.
- Talking to users. We build a developer tool (Rainforest QA) — if you’re building things that interest developers then this is a great chance to show lots of them (from all over the place!). Put your name down for a lighting talk. Do adhoc demos. Talk to people and companies you respect and show them what you do.
The cost
It cost under $1,000 USD all in, flights, tickets and accommodation. Here is the breakdown;
- $300 — American Airlines via Hipmunk, San Francisco -> Miami
- $350 — Rubyconf tickets
- $300 — Airbnb 3 blocks from the hotel, which is much better than $259/night at the recommended hotel
- ~$50 — Food was cheap as lunch was provided each day
Total; $1,000 + alcohol. Obviously you can save more by sharing an Airbnb; mine had two double beds. I estimate it would be ~$1,600 for two!
Conference highlights
Originally when I looked at the schedule my first thought was ‘damn, annoying’. Rubyconf has three tracks, for most slots I wanted to hear at least two. Thankfully they’re recorded, though not online yet.
If you didn’t make it this year, here are the talks I went to which I loved (in no particular order);
- Extending Gems — Patterns and Anti-Patterns of Making Your Gem Pluggable — this was interesting as we make gems for Rainforest.
- Thinking about Machine Learning with Ruby — I’ve seen Bryan talk before (on the internets) and he’s an awesome speaker. He live coded and it worked. Demos worked. He’s smart. He’s funny. I’m jealous.
- Effective Debugging — I learnt about Byebug and how to use it. End of story.
- The tricky truth about parallel execution and modern hardware — Dirkjan explained parallel execution in depth and the problems caused by reordering and smarter CPUs. We learn about memory barriers and why ruby developers should care. You should watch this.
- How to control physical devices with mruby — I’d never heard of mruby before, but learnt a lot about it. Embeddable and fast, there were some good demos of what it can do on commodity controllers.
- Unleash the Secrets of the Standard Library with SimpleDelegator, Forwardable, and more — Ruby’s standard library is pretty big. Jim covered some of the more interesting ones commonly missed. It’s pushed me to look deeper into what ships for free!
- Mangling Ruby with TracePoint — Mark doesn’t like pants to wear when he talks; luckily the rest of the talk was more complete. He demo’d TracePoint to us and showed how simple it is to get in-depth stats on execution yourself. Did you know a Rails hello world does > 120k calls for a single request?
The People of Ruby(conf)
Yukihiro Matsumoto, better known as Matz the creator of Ruby, is a genuinely nice person. It seems to be infectious. I learnt that a Rubyist coined “MINSWAN”, which stands for Matz is nice, so we are nice. I love this.
It couldn’t be truer; I met wide range of people, from people looking to learn Ruby, through to core committers on cRuby. Each one was friendly.
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