I have finally been able to attend a RailsConf, the 2015 edition was my first ever. And I got to say hi to people like @dhh, @wycats, and many more. Thanks Cisco for sponsoring this trip.
The attendance on the conference was totally amazing, heaven knows how many, but it looked like a couple thousands of rails developers attended the @dhh keynote. And @dhh delivered a good one. Unlike the last year’s talk, this year it didn’t cause a huge noise because it was mostly about announcing new features of rails to be released with Rails 5. However, some rails core committers took it to twitter to share their surprise when they heard about Action Cable for the first time at the keynote. But everyone kept it limited to some trolling!
The @tenderlove keynote was the one that I really liked of all the talks that I attended. He is expected to be funny, and in front of a hall full of rails developers, he indeed delivered a fun talk, mixed with some serious performance improvement techniques and amazing new feature announcements coming with Rails 5. I envy his presentation skills. He talked about performance testing bundler on a system with a hundred thousand gems. It was quite fascinating to see how he was able to improve a polynomial time algorithm into a constant time one to cut down bundler boot up time, essentially speeding up all rails and ruby applications. Great work.
Of course, the conference talks are made available on videos and are open for anyone to watch. However, attending a conference is more about meeting people on the hallways than about listening to their talks. At least to me, that’s what I want from a conference. For example, I met Chris, a guy that was working on a gem to wrap InfluxDB interface under an active record like abstraction. Thought that was cool. Met a guy named Charles, who works for a startup company writing software for automated airline landing. Met a guy named John, who writes his own online game.