This Friday 500 delegates from around the world will attend the UK’s largest Ruby event and Bath’s biggest tech conference.
The first Bath Ruby Conference is a one day, non-profit, single-track conference dedicated to serving Ruby professionals and brings together developers of all skill levels to hear from some of the Ruby community’s most inspiring and influential speakers.
What is Ruby?
In case you don’t know, Ruby is a dynamic, object-oriented programming language developed in Japan during the 1990s by Yukihiro Matsumoto to “help every programmer in the world to be productive, and to enjoy programming, and to be happy.”
“We’re very pleased to welcome the international Ruby community to the city for what we hope will become an annual event”
“Bath’s tech scene is really booming at the moment,” says conference organiser and talent-matching platform Cahootify co-founder Simon Starr (pictured left).
“We’re very pleased to welcome the international Ruby community to the city for what we hope will become an annual event.”
Who is the conference for?
The conference is specifically created for Ruby Developers and offers a curated selection of talks by six esteemed speakers from across the globe, focused on exploring new concepts, best practices and sharing skills and techniques.
The conference offers the opportunity to connect with hundreds of fellow Ruby developers from around the world, with delegates from Europe, Canada and the US attending. There will also be networking opportunities, two rounds of inspiring and engaging lightning talks and, of course, the afterparty:
NEWSFLASH! The after party is now confirmed: we’ll have a free bar at the venue right after the last talk at 17:30 🙂 http://t.co/VDnCgFjylm
— Bath Ruby (@BathRuby) March 4, 2015
Expert speakers and talks
You can see the full Bath Ruby Conference 2015 schedule here. You can see more info on the speakers and talks below:
Linda Liukas on ‘Principles of Play’
Railsgirls co-founder Linda will be exploring the principles of programming and play, and creating experiences that go deeper than learning logic:
“If code is the colouring pens and lego blocks of our times – the tools of creation – how do we teach the curiosity, joy and wonder to our kids? I spent last summer looking at programming and play: how to create experiences that go deeper than just learning logic.
So, just like Alice, I swallowed the blue pill and fell down inside the machine.”
Katrina Owen on ‘Here Be Dragons’
Founder of exercism.io Katrina will be speaking on the dilemmas we face when balancing our coding choices today with our responsibilities tomorrow:
“It’s not your fault. Code rots. We don’t hold entropy against you, but we expect you to give a damn.
This story is about code that brings new meaning to the word ‘legacy’. The accidental discovery of this body of code provoked a moral crisis. I wanted to pretend I hadn’t seen it, yet I couldn’t justify tiptoeing quietly away.
This talk examines the dilemmas we face when balancing our choices today with their cost tomorrow.
It’s not your fault. Even so, it is your responsibility.”
Tom Stuart on ‘A Lever for the Mind’
Conference favourite Tom’s talk is on abstraction: where it comes from, what it’s for, and how we can use it to make our programs better:
“Abstraction is a tool that magnifies the force of the human mind. The use of abstraction to make complex ideas manageable is fundamental to our work as programmers and to human culture as a whole. That’s why mathematics — the study of abstraction — is so important and powerful.
This is a talk about abstraction: where it comes from, what it’s for, and how we can use it to make our programs better.”
Sandi Metz on ‘Nothing is Something’
The author of Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby will be exposing hidden concepts with code to make your work simpler, your apps clearer and your life better:
“Our code is full of hidden assumptions, things that seem like nothing, secrets that we did not name and thus cannot see.
These secrets represent missing concepts and this talk shows you how to expose these concepts with code that is easy to understand, change and extend.
Being explicit about ideas will make your code simpler, your apps clearer and your life better. Even very small ideas matter. Everything, even nothing, is something.”
Other speaker include Ben Orenstein–host of Giant Robots Smashing into Other Giant Robots podcast and Saron Yitbarek of CodeNewbie fame.
Where is it happening?
Bath Ruby Conference will take place in the city’s historic Assembly Rooms, a Grade I listed building dating back to 1771, and will make full use of this stunning space, with talks taking place in the Ballroom, breaks held in the Tea Room and Card Room, and with the Octagon providing a stunning exhibition space for sponsors.
You can buy some of the few tickets left at the Bath Ruby Conference website. You can also keep up to date with conference news and updates on their Twitter feed: BathRuby
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