Rubyday 2016, 6th edition: the Italian conference on the Ruby ecosystem
Done! Once again we wrap up the 2016 conference with great satisfaction!
Now in its 6th edition, the event was a success in terms of both attendance and talk quality. A very high number of attendees from abroad gave it the scale of a European conference. Once again we share this success with our friends at Nebulab and Welaika, with whom we began this organizing adventure last year in Piedmont.
Now in its 6th edition, the event was a success in terms of both attendance and talk quality. A very high number of attendees from abroad gave it the scale of a European conference. Once again we share this success with our friends at Nebulab and Welaika, with whom we began this organizing adventure last year in Piedmont.
The context
After Turin 2015, this was Florence's year. At Cantiere we were “playing at home”, and the experience we've built up over the years organizing Better Software allowed us to guarantee a high standard of logistics from the outset. The city's name and beauty certainly played a big part in drawing people from all over Europe and beyond, but the program, the international speakers and the commitment of all the organizers to make this event epic were without a doubt the driving force behind it all.
The main new feature was the event's XL format: we extended it to two super-intense days, with two parallel tracks on Friday, November 25, and no fewer than 6 workshops on Saturday. All the program details, including session descriptions, are available on the website http://www.rubyday.it/schedule/.
The talks
Luca Guidi during the packed workshop
The call for papers flooded us with interesting proposals and, of all the talks we eventually chose (not without difficulty), here are a few that particularly impressed us:
Refinements - the Worst Feature You Ever Loved
By Paolo Perrotta — http://www.rubyday.it/schedule/refinements-the-worst-feature-you-ever-loved/
Paolo dug into the intricacies of Refinements, explaining the controversies surrounding its development, its flexibility, and also how easily questionable features can mislead you. The talk covered various use cases and the ambiguities that have made Refinements not very popular in the community.
Make Ruby Functional Again!
by Devon Estes — http://www.rubyday.it/schedule/make-ruby-functional-again/
Devon showed us a few ways to use Ruby with a functional approach, without giving up many aspects of object-oriented programming, with particular attention to code maintainability and ease of testing.
Running Ruby on a Raspberry PI
By Ju Liu
During the workshop, after an interactive audience vote between Ruby and Elixir, Ju Liu gave a live coding demo using the winner, Elixir; juggling various sensors and input methods, Ju Liu recreated a Mission Impossible scenario. Fascinating, theatrical and fun as always, Ju Liu's talk had us compulsively buying boards and toolkits to play with this board (of course we voted for Elixir!)!
What's next
2017 is just around the corner and we're ready to organize the next edition, putting the feedback we received to good use (if you haven't already, here's the survey: https://it.surveymonkey.com/r/5FDRD65) and bringing in some new things too!
We don't have a date or venue yet... any suggestions?! :)
