Kiwi Ruby 2019 at Te Papa
The Ruby community holds conferences all over the globe, using local and international speakers, for Rubyists of all levels. The latest conference was a single day of talks held at Te Papa in Wellington which is two blocks from Abletech’s headquarters.
Kiwi Ruby 2019 was well organised and enjoyable. There were generous sponsors, and lots of extra activities for visitors to the region. The conference team did a fantastic job. The vast majority of speakers were really interesting and although we enjoyed all the speakers, we also had a few favourites…
Our highlights:
Jack Purvis
Jack’s creative visual presentation was a highlight of the day for Abletechers. Jack’s a visual artist and his talk included live coding and VJing. He demonstrated his app Visor which is an IDE for programming music visualisations in Ruby. His visuals wowed the crowd as did his live code written in Ruby.
Nick Johnstone
Another popular speaker was Nick Johnstone who explored the idea of alternative front-end languages and ‘Ruby in the browser’. Nick gave a live demo of using Ruby to write code for the browser by converting it to JS via WebAssembly. His demo of his Prism project went without a hitch — he wrote code in Ruby and ran it in his web browser. His talk ended with a twist - his entire presentation had been running using Prism in his web browser!
Michael Dowse
Michael opened the conference with his talk about abstraction in the context of his four-year-old daughter Charlie as she learns how the world works. He’s an entertaining speaker and was enjoyable to hear from. He suggested that asking ‘why’ is a recursive function.
Shaun O’Connell & Sophie Price
Shaun and Sophie’s design consistency talk was really insightful. They spoke about how Flick is rolling out pattern libraries, high-quality code and a new passion for design systems. They gave an insight into YAML, how developers & designers interact and what abstractions are most useful.
Pete Nicholls
The closing talk was also a goodie. Pete Nicholls spoke about ‘‘Ethics-driven development’. He touched on a variety of challenges in the tech industry which present ethical dilemmas that aren’t being managed, and our responsibility, as technologists, to do better.
We’ve been big fans of Ruby for ever
