Rubyfuza is Africa’s premier Ruby-language conference held each year in South Africa at the beginning of February. This year’s conference took place from 5 – 8 February at the Strand Hotel in beautiful Cape Town. Approximately 150 people, (many of whom were female Ruby developers!), attended sessions presented by speakers from South Africa, the United States, Canada, and Denmark.
Everything started Wednesday evening with a open top tour of Cape Town. Thursday morning’s talks kicked off with Thoughtworks developer Charlene Tshitoka who delivered an excellent keynote address about software development in an African context. Ben Janecke followed with a discussion on remote pair programming and Rory McKinley gave a highly entertaining talk about TDD (test-driven development). Other highlights from Thursday included John Anderson’s talk about objects and Daniel Acton’s presentation on the various Google APIs that are available for Ruby on Rails applications running on Google Compute Engine. The evening’s social event, sponsored by Github, took place at Neighborhood, a trendy local watering hole on Long Street.
Friday’s sessions included many more informative and motivating talks and another group dinner, held at The Grand Café, a chic waterfront venue, offered everyone the opportunity to enjoy stunning views, good food and good conversation. On the last day, many attendees participated in a Code Retreat focused on software design principles, while others joined Introduction to Functional Programming or Scrum Simulation. During the weekend before the conference they also held a RailsBridge and AWS workshop.
The aim of Rubyfuza is to allow Ruby developers to share knowledge and connect with other members of the technical community in South Africa. This was Polyglot Programming’s third year participating as a speaker and, of late, also a sponsor. With our South African ties we really enjoy being a part of this event. South Africa has some real thought leaders in the tech space and is, without a doubt, a tech scene to watch in the coming year.
I am a native South African who got started in software when I landed my first data analysis job after college. The intersection of data, software and medicine fascinates me and I love to write software that makes a difference. I am available for hire!
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