Rubyconf Taiwan 2014 Recap

Last month I had the honor of being able to speak at Rubyconf Taiwan with a talk about Analytics for the Busy Ruby Developer.  Rubyconf Taiwan is a two day,  two track conference dedicated to all things Ruby that had roughy 290 attendees.  The list of speakers this year was pretty impressive with Matz,  Charles Nutter,  Linda Liukas and 25 other speakers from around the world.  The attendee list was just as diverse.

This was also the first time that I used my Google Glass Keynote slide notes prototype while giving a talk.  By using my phone as a hotspot I was able to create a reliable network and everything worked flawlessly.  On a side note,  unlike the US,  Taiwan has really inexpensive pre-paid Sim cards with unlimited data.  I personally used 12 gigs over a 10 day period.

While the talks were great,  like all conferences the hallway conversations really made the event.

Some takeaways from them.

• People are always curious about Glass and liked the idea of using them for speaker notes.
• I really want to do more to actually contribute to Ruby Core and JRuby
• Rubuto could be a great way to do glass development  (Thanks Charles)
• MRuby on IOS looks like a lot of fun and could be an alternative to using Ruby Motion.
• Taiwan has a healthy startup ecosystem and is developing a healthy Ruby ecosystem.

For me the thing that really made the conference was the Rails Girls Follow on event on Sunday held at the TedX Taipei offices.

The Taipei Rails Girls chapter is one of the most active in the world with over 300 members.  One of the presentations was a panel that included the founder of Rails Girls,  the creator of JRuby and the creator of Ruby.  What a great way for women aspiring to be Rails developers to learn about the community and Ruby!

Afterwords we went upstairs to check out the Maker Lab.  I wish I’d had more time to try out some of the gear!

Many who are in the Rails community know the saying “Matz is nice so we are nice”.  Thanks to this some have coined the term “Rubyfriends” who are people you meet through the Ruby community.  It was really nice to see some old Rubyfriends and meet new ones.