First Florence on Ruby meetup of 2016
Restarting Florence On Ruby was one of the promises we made in our New Year's resolutions post, and yesterday we kept our word! Our offices hosted the first meetup of 2016: the #FLOR reboot! Here's what happened.
A quick recap
The Florence on Ruby (or #FLOR) meetup started in 2012 as a gathering for Ruby enthusiasts in and around Florence. The first event, even though it was organized almost for fun among a few acquaintances and promoted with just a couple of social posts, brought in lots of new faces, to everyone's amazement: where had all those Ruby-loving nerds been hiding??!
Events followed for a couple of years, covering topics not strictly limited to Ruby/Rails but ranging from agile development techniques to JavaScript libraries.
Unfortunately, due to lack of time and resources, the meetups came to a halt. Until yesterday!
Last night
The meetup followed the usual format: 2 short talks, then dinner with speakers and guests to share ideas and opinions and discuss the topics.
About thirty attendees filled the space provided by Cantiere, and once again we were amazed by the turnout.
The two talks were given by David Librera and Stefano Verna. Here's just a quick overview, since technical blog posts on both talks will be published soon.
The room, clearly too small!
Silvio Relli kicks off the evening
Testing? Why not?
David showed us a way of structuring projects that streamlines the testing process, so you can figure out what's really worth testing and what can be skipped, avoiding wasted time and duplication.
David
Promises, generators, async/await!
Stefano walked us through the solutions historically used to tackle "callback hell" in JavaScript, from ES6 to the asynchronous approach adopted in ES7.
Stefano Verna at the console!
Call for papers and what's next
We also see FLOR as a "training ground" for the upcoming Rubyday 2016, which will take place in Florence in November 2016 and which we're actively helping to organize.
Even though yesterday's talks were given by Cantiere's devs, we want to stress that FLOR is open to everyone!
We'd like at least one talk at the next event to be given by a guest, so we invite everyone to submit a proposal on the website.
We're planning to hold the next event in a venue that can host more people, sometime around late April or early March. Stay tuned!
