by Last week in Detroit, from May 7th to 9th, the 2024 edition of the RailsConf took place, the world’s largest gathering of Ruby on Rails developers. As part of this wonderful community, we were there exchanging ideas and contributing to it! In this post, I will talk about our experience at the conference.
In the opening of the event, we got some news that, even though sad, made us all eager to enjoy the RailsConf as if it was one of the last ones… because it was. Right at the beginning, the organization announced a new era for Ruby Central events. This decision does not come for any sad reason but as a part of the initiative of Ruby Central to have RubyConf as its flagship event and a new focus on supporting regional events and the open-source community. Also, instead of announcing the location of the next RailsConf at the end of the conference like they do every year, they did something different… that I will address at the end of this post. But they already mentioned that RailsConf 2025 will be reimagined to celebrate the Rails community and the legacy of the conference.
Day 1
The opening keynote presented by Nadia Odunayo, founder and CEO of The StoryGraph set up the inspiring tone that every conference deserves! In her presentation, Nadia talked about the challenges and all the principles she held on while working on The StoryGraph that make it work and worth it.
On the first day of the event, I presented a talk called “Ruby on Fails – effective error handling with Rails Conventions”. It was really moving to contribute back to the knowledge of the community, sharing part of my experience acquired during my time at Codeminer42. The recording is not live yet (I will update this post as soon as they are released), but you can see the slides used in the presentation here. I need to admit that it was very satisfying to finally find a use for the joke in the title of the talk.
As part of its commitment to the community, Codeminer42 sponsored the expenses of my travel and stay, being included as one of the travel sponsors of the conference. It’s very important for us to contribute to the community in every way we can, and we’re eager to know more about the next steps of the Ruby Central events.
The other talks were filled with content that I liked a lot! It was so good to see subjects that I appreciate like Domain-Driven Design, Object-oriented design, and maintainability, like in Karynn Ikeda’s talk “What’s in a Name: From Variables to Domain-Driven Design” and Sweta Sanghavi’s talk “Plain, Old, but Mighty: Leveraging POROs in Greenfield and Legacy Code”.
Day 2
Different from last year’s edition, the second day of the RailsConf 2024 was focused on more active interaction between the participants. Most of the day was filled with workshops where the participants could have hands-on experience with subjects like TDD, database queries, and a pitch party for build-it-quick projects! It also had the presence of several open-source maintainers so the attendees could have direct contact with them, get to know their projects, and even collaborate with the projects. It was great to see open-source projects that are built by humans to humans.
The second day ended with a game night! Some attendees took board games and party games to the conference and people could interact in a deeper and funnier way. As a board game addict, I had a blast! Try to imagine a table of 20 or so Ruby developers playing a party game and this will give you an idea of how cool it was. I truly hope other conferences do the same!
Day 3
The third and last day of the conference got back to the common schedule of talks and again some of my favorite subjects in development were mentioned! Seeing Domain-Driven Design techniques mentioned in Jared Norman’s talk “Undervalued: The Most Useful Design Pattern” was so refreshing! Like last year, mentorship was a very important topic on the conference as well, and it was specially addressed in Alistair Norman’s talk “Pairing with Intention: A Guide for Mentors”. To be honest, the whole Norman track was awesome! If the term “Norman track” sounds confusing, I’ll leave it up to you to figure it out by looking at the conference schedule.
Close to the end of the event, there were two rounds of lighting talks that I have to admit: I wasn’t expecting to be so good! For real, there were people implementing raytracing using ActiveRecord, techniques on how to have a healthier life and mind, learning initiatives, activities from folks of the scholarship program, and even a talk to convince you Burlington is the best town in the US. I don’t know how many people were convinced by it, but I got intrigued by the idea of adding maple syrup to cappuccino.
The closing keynote by Aaron Patterson (aka "Tenderlove") was an excellent way to close an event. If you’re like me and love jokes as well you’ll feel you laugh and learned a lot of things at the same time during his talk! There was a very important topic he mentioned that I couldn’t agree more: I was so disappointed for not seeing a single Robocop statue or souvenir in Detroit, come on!
Wrapping up
Whew! These were three intense days, I’ll tell you that! Speaking at RailsConf was one of the best experiences I ever had as a developer, and I can’t wait to see what are the next things from Ruby events. Oh! And as promised, I’ll tell you now: instead of announcing the location of next year’s RailsConf, there is a form where you can vote for options for the location and even suggest a different one, you can see it by clicking here.
As for my next adventure, I’ll be speaking about Domain-Driven Design on the frontend at DDD Europe 2024. See you there!
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