My Experience at RubyConf India 2014

jerry

March 31, 2014

Jerry During Lightning Talk

A congregation of Rubyists would be a great place for any Ruby programmer to be. Have the same by the beach, and it becomes a dream. It was like a dream come true when it was announced that RubyConf India of 2014 would be held in beach resort town of Goa. Before we move on, please allow me to apologize for the poor image quality of some of the images.

The conference was scheduled for the weekend of March 22, 2014. We arrived in Goa on Friday and were checked in at The LaLiT Golf & Spa Resort, a true delight indeed. The ambience was serene and the rooms were grand.

Networking, one of the major aspects of any conference, started during the dinner. It was a pleasure meeting acquaintances and making new friends. We retired early since it had been a long day.

Most participants woke up late the next morning; an expected outcome on a Saturday morning in Goa. Breakfast was still hot and the talks had not started. The organizers had done a brilliant job of planning for the eventuality that nobody would be up early!

The registration was uneventful except that we got not one, not two, but three different t-shirts! There were also a few other goodies to choose from, including the password to the wifi!

The event kicked off with a welcome note from the organizing committee followed by the keynote. There were speakers from all over the world who had come together to share their knowledge on different aspects of Ruby.

A moment of silence for Jim Weirich

There were a couple of interesting talks during the day. One of my favorites was a presentation by PJ Hagerty on Ruby groups. He put on a pleasant combination of facts and humor that managed to pull in everyone from the audience, or at least me for that matter, into the essence of his talk. His talk was about regional Ruby groups, his experiences, his opinion on diversity of the members participating and his thoughts on events hosted by the groups.

Another interesting presentation was by Mario Visic, a senior developer at Envato. He talked about how to get websites to load faster and walked us through a sample step-by-step procedure on how to achieve the same. It was informative and easy to follow given his approach on stage.

Several other talks followed and at the end of the day came the lightning talks. I was one of the speakers and I spoke about RubyMotion and our project on animation libraries - RubyMation. There were few iOS developers and only 2 RubyMotion developers. So I had the pleasure of introducing RubyMotion, RubyMation and the awesome community working on it to the uninitiated.

The lightning talks were followed by the most interesting part of the day - the beach party. There was great food and great beverages. The beach, the party and a congregation of geeks made it an awesome evening.

The Hotel

Most of the participants turned up late the next morning due to obvious reasons. But once again, seemingly miraculously, someone had predicted the scenario and the day was set to begin only at 10.00 AM.

RubyConf India 2014

Except the keynote, the day was uneventful. The crowd started to thin out as the day progressed since people had to catch flights, trains and buses. By evening, we had less than half the population in the auditorium.

All things must come to an end, and so when Sunday evening came, the hotel hosted a celebration to mark the end of RubyConf as they happily showed the Rubyists the door! There were drums and lots of celebrations to mark the occasion. Just kidding :D. Actually, there was a wedding scheduled for the night, and so things were quite noisy.

To round it up, RubyConf India 2014 was an interesting conference to attend.