My experience with RubyKaigi 2019

Hello, It’s Phát again, a software engineer at ShareWis.
In this post, I’d like to share about my experience when attending RubyKaigi in Fukuoka, this year. Anyone who works with Ruby probably know that Ruby was created by Matz, widely used in Japan and then worldwide.
Thanks to my company, ShareWis, as an Ed-tech startup, we have a learning encouragement culture, and so that my company has sponsored all the costs for their staffs to attend tech conferences as their willings. Before RubyKaigi, I’ve just attended a few tech conferences in Vietnam, and RubyConf Malaysia 2017. When joining ShareWis last year, I heard that the next RubyKaigi will be held on April 18 till April 20, 2019, in Fukuoka and will have chance to meet the creator of Ruby language, the language I’ve worked with for 5 years, I was really excited and can’t wait till the day it happened. For your information, RubyKaigi is the annual Ruby conference organized in Japan, one of the biggest conference in Ruby community, hundreds of Rubyist from all around the world gathered to spend 3 days expanding their knowledge and discussing future development path of the language.

Why You Should Attend a Technical Conference?

To know what your unknowns – It’s really important, just by listening to a talk doesn’t make you know deeply about the topic. But thank to them, you can know what you don’t know, and have some keywords to learn more about it later, by yourself, with the help of Search Engines, Books, and by the way, you will have the contact of the presenter of the speech, you can kindly send follow-up questions to them.
Learn solutions from other skilled professionals, there are many talks that are practical ones, and chances are a presenter is giving a talk about an issue you are grappling with, or some skill you would like to utilize in the future. All you would need to do is go to that session and listen in on the presentation.
Chances to meet many great developers all around the world and expand your network. Networking, after parties, sharing ideas and opinions…
Reviving your passion for the technologies you work with or continue to love what you do. You can read a lot of articles told that Ruby has no future or Ruby is dead, etc… But when attending RubyKaigi, and see how active the Ruby community is, you will have no doubt about Ruby’s future.
Encourage you to learn more to advance your career, when you meet many great developers and feel how good they can be, you have more motivation to be one of them.
Keeping you up to date with the trends.
Technical conferences can be fun too.

Why I think RubyKaigi is a good Technical Conference.

Focusing on Ruby, and fully focused on technical topics. So there were no coach speeches, only those purely practical ones.
40 minutes (some technical conferences I attended in the past just have 15 or 30 minutes talks) for each talk with many topics from speakers that are experts in the field.
RubyKaigi has four parallel speeches, so you can choose which topics you are interested in, and skip the other ones – which you are not familiar with. Having the choice, this one thing made the whole conference much more enjoyable. For me, I didn’t have enough experience (and interesting) with machine learning, so I have skipped all talks related to it and choose ones related to code quality, performance improvement, RSpec, Serverless, GraphQL, etc.
Not just Matz – the Ruby Creator, many Ruby (or Rails) contributors and influencers attended RubyKaigi as well, you have chance to getting to know all the great people around.

Matz in his opening keynote – talked about Future of Ruby – Ruby 2.7, Ruby 3.0

My colleague and me in the opening keynote.

Besides, this was my first time in Fukuoka, as well. The city is really nice, I love it. Regarding to local food experience (my favorite things to do when traveling) I’ve tried motsunabe (a Japanese hot pot dish with beef tripe) and tonkotsu ramen. However, because the conference was hold whole-day long and I went back to Osaka and then Vietnam right after the 2nd day of the conference so I don’t have enough time to discover places in Fukuoka. I probably will come back here again.

Are you going to join RubyKaigi 2020, will be organized in Nagano, Japan? I hope we can meet up there.

(Phat)