Engineering

Keeping this impetus in mind, Daniel, Mila and I made our way to beautiful Barcelona, Spain, to join hundreds of other developers in enjoying the Barcelona Ruby Conference.

After enjoying a late dinner and exploring the area in which our AirBnB appartement was located on Friday, we gathered at the AXA Auditorium on Saturday morning for registration. Some sweet merchandise was handed to us during the registration process and as such were ready to see MC Dr. Nic give the introduction to the conference in an amazing combination of lasers, space suits and humor.

Notable talks of the first day of the conference also included:

• The amazingly funny Vincent Martí on Garbage Collection and other shortcomings in Ruby
• Sandi Metz on Software Development Rules, when to adhere to them and when to break them.
• Jeremy Walker on “Refactoring your Productivity”
• Corey Haines talking about Design Patterns, their uses in Software Development as means of communication and their implications for the notion of Evolutionary Design – “Design Patterns can be our friends, if we just know how to use them appropriately”.

In the evening we joined the Xing Beach Party and had a great time with a few drinks, a volleyball tournament, and chatting among developers from all over the world.

On the second day, the following talks managed to spark discussion among us:

• Paolo Perrotta focused on the notion of being a „Hunter“ or a „Gatherer“ when embarking on Software Development projects and embracing the evolutionary cycles of the “fittest” technology versus the “best” technology.
• Bryan Helmkamp talked about „Building a Culture of Quality“, the vicious cycle of sloppy code and gathering metrics in the Software Development Process.
• In „Yak shaving is best shaving“, the ridiculously funny Aaron Patterson introduced us to his equally funny cats, pear programming and took us on a trip down the rabbithole that starts with fixing a miniscule bug in Rails and ends up with benchmarking Ruby metaprogramming techniques.
• Reg Braithwaite provided a high-level perspective on Ruby and its community – as a seasoned developer he stated that Ruby’s biggest advantage is its community itself. None of the technological advances are able to top that. Also Monkeys and Typewriters!

We skipped the Codegram party to be able to do some sightseeing. We especially had fun with Gaudi (you must speak German to fully understand that sentence).

All in all the BaRuCo conference was an awesome experience with remarkably funny and thought provoking talks that are sure to be discussed further within the realms of the Zweitag fortress of solitude. We congratulate and thank the organizers from Codegram for making this event possible.