Back in March Bath hosted it’s biggest ever tech conference as 500 Ruby developers attended the UK’s largest Ruby event, the Bath Ruby Conference 2015. The conference saw developers from all skill levels come from around the world for the one day, non-profit, single-track conference featuring some of the Ruby community’s most influential speakers.
The conference was specifically created for Ruby Developers and offered 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 feedback we’ve received from speakers and attendees has been overwhelmingly positive, and we look forward to welcoming the Ruby community back to Bath next year”
The event was also aimed at promoting diversity within the development industry, with four of the six speakers being female and a high proportion of women in attendance. The conference was also able to raise £3,500 for the homeless charity Shelter.
Don’t worry if you missed it, we’ve got you covered as we have collected the footage from the speakers here.
Linda Liukas – Principles of Play
The Railsgirls co-founder Linda explores the principles of programming and play with this inspirational presentation about teaching children to code through play.
Ben Orenstein – Live Coding
Speaker Ben bravely takes on some live coding through a pair-programming exercise with the entire audience.
Saron Yitbarek – Learning Code Good
Saron talks to the attendees about how she went from bio-chemist to software developer and how CodeNewbie grew out of a study group with her friends.
Katrina Owen – Here Be Dragons
Using a novel 8-bit video game analogy to “level up” as she went, Katrina Owen talks the crowd through refactoring a legacy codebase.
Tom Stewart – A Lever for the Mind
Here, to the envy of high school teachers everywhere, Tom manages to get the audience excited about maths with his talk on abstraction. “Strap your mind into the hulking exoskeleton of mathematics and throw complexity out of the airlock.”
Sandi Metz – Nothing is Something
Sandi wrapped it all up by teaching us techniques for exposing and clarifying the hidden complexity that works its way into most pieces of code.
Lightning Talks
Throughout the day there were also 10 5 minute lightning talks from members of the audience, including a live demonstration from Sonic Pi the open source synthesizer that can turn sweet code into sweeter music.
After the event, organiser Simon Starr said “The feedback we’ve received from speakers and attendees has been overwhelmingly positive, and we look forward to welcoming the Ruby community back to Bath next year.”
Sorry you missed it? You can watch for announcements on next year’s conference at the Bath Ruby Conference website or keep up to date with news and updates on their Twitter feed: @BathRuby. While you are at, why not keep up to date with all the Tech events and news in Bristol and Bath by following us @TechSPARK?
- You may like: Bath:Hacked 2.1: Using public data for good
And, if you want to see and meet up with startups from the South West with something interesting to show off, don’t miss Venturefest Bristol & Bath on 9 June.
