Experiences of Brighton Ruby 2023

Bloom & Wild were lucky enough to be able to sponsor the Brighton Ruby conference in June 2023. It was our fourth time sponsoring the conference but the first time we’ve been a major sponsor and so it was the largest conference sponsorship we’ve ever done. And also the first time we’ve appeared at a conference with a table of swag and a lot of engaged engineers who were on hand to chat to the attendees, as well as learn from the various talks throughout the day.

Sponsoring conferences is important to us for three reasons:

1. It helps us to raise our employer brand in communities of likeminded and experienced people. Often engineers don’t realise how big we are nor the interesting work that we do and so being able to get out there and shout about it is really important (if you’re curious about what we do then have a read of this post 😀)
2. Conferences give so much back to the communities that they serve. The opportunities to learn, network and sometimes just absorb information at a good conference is huge. Conferences wouldn’t exist without sponsors and so being able to give something back to the Ruby community through Brighton Ruby sponsorship was really important to us (and that’s one reason why, if you’re at a conference, then popping by the sponsors booths and grabbing swag is important 😃)
3. Our engineers get to learn so much from the conference. While having a sponsor booth at Brighton Ruby was a big step for us, and so having engineers on our booth chatting to attendees was important, when the talks are happening then the best place to be is in the auditorium listening to them.

Huge kudos to Billy, our Senior Talent Acquisition Manager, who pulled together a great selection of swag, a great ‘Win a Year of Flowers’ competition and banners and bouquets to make our sponsor booth look great 👏

We all had a great time at the conference, met some great people and learnt a lot too. Here’s some quotes from our engineers about what they really loved about the conference. If you were there then we’d love to hear about what you enjoyed about it.

Having someone from the Rails core team talking about the challenges they face when building and maintaining things was eye opening, and shows that even they face similar problems to B&W

Ruby is is still trending (maybe not as much as it was a few years ago, but still kicking). I had the opportunity to talk to a lot of Junior Engineers who are just starting and are in love with the language and lots of awesome chats with experienced Ruby Engineers talking about projects they’ve worked on and how they’ve deal with Ruby/Rails changing over the years

Railties is pronounced rail-ties (as in the thing you wear around your neck) rather then rail-teas (the thing I drink far too much of) 😂

How little I understand about the deeper aspects of rails/ruby despite using it for the last 13–14 years 😂 I am going to be focussing my learning days on diving deeper into the 12 core libraries and de-mystifying how it works under the hood so when somebody asks “what is the difference between “eager_load, preload and includes”The documentation talk was really interesting, giving us really good guidelines on how to start creating more docs to support our apps (mainly the monolith) and it seems to have gotten us motivated to talk more about it and evangelise it.

Build things for fun 😃 Loved the last talk, and was supremely impressed by how calm of a debugger he was while an auditorium full of eager pacman ghosts were waiting.

Conferences are really important to us, both as part of how we learn and grow as engineers and how we help more great engineers to find us. If you’re interested in learning more about what we do, and how you could grow your career with us then take a look at our careers pages for open roles.