Developers from AddressFinder and Abletech went to Kiwi Ruby, a conference for Rubyists and Ruby-curious. The first day offered talks by Ruby enthusiasts and the second a full day of ‘deep dive workshops’ on a huge variety of topics like dry-rb . Participants could go to either, or both, days.
Our developers have been to Ruby conferences overseas for years. Having this on home turf made it a good chance to catch up with fellow New Zealand Ruby developers and support the local Ruby community.
By all reports the conference team did an excellent job of organising their first Kiwi Ruby conference at Te Papa, Wellington. Logistics ran smoothly and the conference appeared professional. There was a good range of speakers on a diverse range of topics to interest beginners right through to people who’ve been using Ruby for a long time.
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Some topics discussed at Kiwi Ruby have been doing the rounds for a long time but it was good to hear fresh perspectives on issues like how to manage time and how to mentor people new to the community.
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A highlight for one of our devs was UTF-8 encoding. “It’s super smart in that it is backwards compatible with ASCII, and you can decode characters inside a stream.”
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How to deal with getting a very bad code review. This topic encouraged devs to have some empathy and make an effort not to shame the receiver who can be left feeling embarrassed, stupid or angry with themselves after receiving negative feedback. Here’s a TED talk about delving into shame and confronting it.
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Our devs also enjoyed the deep dive into Hello, World! They found it interesting to see how Ruby code is interpreted by MRI into assembly code.
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There were helpful skills-based talks on topics like accelerating learning, reaching your potential, mentoring, parenting and how you can use your skills to help people without profit motives.
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Goodie bags — these were popular, especially the AddressFinder swag 😉
Find out more about why AddressFinder sponsored Kiwi Ruby.
Kiwi Ruby is a community event run by volunteers, overseen by Ruby New Zealand.
The organisers are Merrin Macleod, Raquel Moss, Rose Lu, Nahum Wild, and Philip Arndt. Between them they’ve run Rails Camps, Rails Girls events, and local meetups for many years.
They thought it was time for New Zealand to have a Ruby conference so they mustered the time, energy and support and mixed it with initiative, to make Kiwi Ruby happen. Thanks for bringing it home 💖
Originally published at blog.addressfinder.io on November 8, 2017.
