In the beginning of last week, during the days 13 and 14, I and some guys from Whitesmith went to Braga for the first RubyConf Portugal. I’m not a huge fan of Ruby but since i work with it from time to time, i took the chance to learn a little bit more about it and improve my understanding of the language.
The event was pretty cool and if you go through the agenda in the site you can see that the speakers that gave the talks are well known individuals in this community. The good stuff about this conference started with the choice of the city of Braga to host the event, since this kind of stuff in Portugal always happens in Lisbon or Oporto.
The venue was in an amazing spot, called “Bom Jesus”, that has a nice view over the city as you can see in the photo below:
I liked some of the talks, essentially the ones that are related with my work, the rest didn’t said much to me but this is normal and it happens in every event. The funny part was that in this event we spent more time hearing about other languages (Javascript, Go, Rust, C) than ruby even though they were related with the ruby ecosystem.
The host of the event was Jeremy Walker, and he did a great job from the start where he showed up dressed as a roman guy (seems it was the theme of the event) until the end of the last talk.
Regarding the contents of the conference, in the first day i really enjoyed the talks “Building better web APIS with rails” and “Writing fast ruby“, this last one was already available online (video, slides).
In the second day the two presentations that i liked the most were: “TBA” (according to the speaker that was exactly the name of the talk) and “Search Your Feelings: Multi-Table Full Text Search in Postgres“, both without too much ruby. One addressed Rust and the other Postgres, two topics I’m really interested in improving my skills at the moment.
Aside from the talks the rest of the event (food, party, etc) was great. The only complain that I have is about the conditions of the room where the talks were given, since those who were unfortunate (or late) to stay in the back of the room had some issues to properly see the slides (as you can see in the last photo, I was in the middle of the room).
Finally I must congratulate the guys at Group Buddies for the organization of this conference. I hope this kind of events become more common here in Portugal and happen outside Lisbon, so more regions of the country can benefit from them.
Edit: For those unable to be there, the organization just released some photos and videos taken during the event. You can find them here and here.
