The Venue

RubyConf Portugal was held in Braga in a beautiful location - Theatro Circo

The talks

The talks were diverse, I’d say that one third of them was about Ruby related details and libraries, part of them were different stories of struggles, problems and successes and the rest about future of Ruby and how it compares to other languages.

Koichi Sasada

Koichi Sasada in his talk “Evolution Of Keyword Parameters” described his journey of optimizing keyword parameters and this feature history from Ruby 2.0 to 2.2

Piotr Szotkowski

Piotr Szotkowski in “Ruby Smells” walked us through some examples of code smells and encouraged to use Reek (check it out).

Kylie Stradley

Kylie Stradley - “Amelia Bedelia Learns To Code”. This talk was presented in a storybook form and in a funny way showed different beginner’s mistakes.

Pedro Moreira

Pedro Moreira in “Unreliable Narrators And Legacy Code” spoke about code comments and examining code using git blame. He also explained how and why to empathize with developers working on legacy applications before you.

Sabrina Leandro

Sabrina Leandro - “Rewriting Code And Culture”. I found this talk very interesting because it was a story of successful rewrite of a monolith application. This application had unnecessarily complex code and test suite that ran for hours. I recommend watching this talk online later, when organizers share it.

Sam Phippen

Sam Phippen in “Extremely Defensive Coding” talk explained the idea of defensive coding on example of Rspec method stubbing. It’s worth watching online.

Panel

“Beyond Ruby - Programming Languages”

Sean Griffin

Sean Griffin - “Designing A Great Ruby Api: How We’re Simplifying Rails 5”

Christian Weyer

Christian Weyer - “Industrial Rails”. This talk was interesting and unusual because Christian presented a different perspective and different problems of using Rails in industrial environment like airports and warehouses. Worth watching online later.

Davy Stevenson

Davy Stevenson - “Orders Of Magnitude”. Very well prepared speech on how human perceive numbers.

Steve Klabnik

Steve Klabnik in “What Rust Can Teach Us About Ruby” talked about similarities and differences between those two languages. I liked it because it was inspiring to try out Rust and had nice handmade slides ;) Worth watching online.

Sergio Gil

Sergio Gil - “5 Hidden Gems Of The Ruby Standard Library”

Avdi Grimm

Avdi Grimm - “The Sould Of Software”. Great non-technical talk, food for thought that forced us to contemplate future and impact of Ruby. Certainly worth watching online.

Overall impressions

I had great time at RubyConf Portugal and it was worth coming. I’m glad that the atmosphere was so nice. People were very open and friendly and it was a great opportunity to talk to interesting developers and experience great talks.

I definitely plan to come next year!