Ruby Wine is coming! The first conference in Moldova focused on Ruby language, framework, and tools. The event is the result of a beautiful collaboration of two experienced organizations: FAF and Ruby Meditation. However, the idea of Ruby Wine has already been around for couple of years. Back in 2015 some of our FAF alumni decided that they wanted to throw a “BIG” Ruby celebration and it’s happening now, on 13th of April 2019.
Vladimir Pintea, one of our FAF alumni, tells how the idea was born and what were the main challenges to make it happen.
Back in July 2015 a group of young Ruby developers (Ivan Zarea, Ivan Danci, Sava Virtosu, Sergiu Terman, Andrei Galkin, Gleb Tocarenco and myself) were celebrating a great end of the week. During a regular Friday night talk — we raised a question about how can we grow our developer community and bring new interesting people to the team and to the Ruby development.
Back in 2015 meetups were very popular and first co-working spaces started popping up and we thought we need to make something “BIG”, something that will bring interest both to Moldova and will help us grow the local Ruby Community. Some years before we were visiting our friends in Ukraine, they were organizing Ruby Meetup and there we visited our first Ruby Conference in Kiev, called Ruby Shift and other meetups outside Moldova.
Being young and quite ambitious we decided: “We need to start a local Ruby Meetup and grow for a year, to throw a “BIG” Ruby celebration as an International Conference of Ruby with Wine”. This way Ruby Wine appeared. But as in any beautiful tale there are obstacles we had to overcome.
We did our first Ruby Meetup were a couple of people showed up, then we did editions #2 and #3, then first Rails Girls but we still did not know how to throw a “BIG” celebration for Ruby. Some people left the company and started their own business; other moved to bigger teams and companies outside Moldova, bringing value and experience back at any occasion, when we were getting together at meetups and Rails Girls events.
Last year, in 2018, we were attending yet another Ruby Meditation #23 in Odessa with a bigger team of young developers. One of the goals we pursued was recruiting talents, speakers and partnering with their team — to finally throw a “BIG” International celebration of Ruby and Wine, here in Moldova at Tekwill with help from FAF ONG on building bigger and greater community of Ruby for the young generations to come.
Thank you all that helped to transform an idea from 2015 in reality in 2019 with a glass of Wine ;).
