RubyCats at Codemotion Warsaw and EuRuKo!
Codemotion Warsaw 2016 Conference
On 15-16 September we had a chance to participate in an awesome event – Codemotion Warsaw 2016 Conference. Many interesting talks and people! But let’s start from the beginning.
We started with keynote by James Weaver about “Navigating all the knowledge”. It was fascinating to see how we can look for what particular records, e.g. people, genes etc., have in common. One of exercise case was what Michał Pazdan and Robert Lewandowski have in common ;)
James Weaver (Image: RubyCats Team)
Next we went to “Understanding legacy untested code via Exporatory TDD technique” by Oleksii Fedorov (Pivotal Labs). We were told what a mutation is, how to test the code step by step, what to do when we face big refactories.
Oleksii Fedorov (Image: RubyCats Team)
Alina Gnerre (Class-it) presented “Use of gamification techniques in app UX for smart cities projects” showing some success stories and examples like iCity and NotiCity. We also learned about gamification and smart cities concepts.
Alina Gnerre (Image: RubyCats Team)
Iryna Nezhynska (Visual Designer) in her talk “Beyond product features: how to get noticed by early adopters” taught us about emotional and psychological aspects of customer positioning and tying the customer with the product.
Iryna Nezhynska (Image: RubyCats Team)
Florin Patan (YouView TV Ltd.) convinced us, why we should consider “Getting started with Go”. He mentioned many pros of Go, editors, users, libraries and resources.
Florin Patan (Image: RubyCats Team)
“Agile used to be really cool” by Wojtek Erbetowski (Growbots) was a set of important notices about working with other people and some time for breathing deeply while meditating.
Wojtek Erbetowski (Image: RubyCats Team)
“The first fifteen lives of a software engineer” were described with humor by Nikos Zinas (Workday). The speaker took us on a journey through different stages in dev’s life. He told us what went good, what went wrong, what’s the best environment to grow.
Nikos Zinas (Image: RubyCats Team)
The first Codemotion Warsaw 2016 day ended with a nice afterparty, where you could talk to interesting people in a comfortable atmosphere.
Having a very positive experience from the first day we came for the second. And we weren’t disappointed :)
“Reverse engineering the clean code” by Jakub Marchwicki (108 creations) was a really thought-provoking speech about i.a. implementation patterns, UX mistakes, design incl. API design etc. and memory model.
Jakub Marchwicki (Image: RubyCats Team)
Then we went through “Google Dataflow: The new open model for batch and stream processing” thanks to Robert Kubis (Google UK Ltd.), who talked about different dataflow options and changes in time.
Robert Kubis (Image: RubyCats Team)
“Nobody likes working with you” by Luis G. Valle (Novoda) was a funny, but also very thought-provoking and important talk about rules of good communication and cooperation.
Luis G. Valle (Image: RubyCats Team)
In “Breaking Bad with GitLab CI” Ivan Nemytchenko (Developer Advocate – GitLab) told that one of bad habits is not automatizing the routine tasks. Bad habits may be caused by fear of CI system, of installing, configuring, learning and using new tool.
Ivan Nemytchenko (Image: RubyCats Team)
“Regex fundamentals” was explained by Juliette Reinders Folmer (Advies en zo) in a very engaging and positive way. We learned about regex usage, users, result types, engines, terminology, syntax and testing.
Juliette Reinders Folmer (Image: RubyCats Team)
Codemotion Warsaw 2016 was not only extremely interesting, but also so well organized that we were surprized to hear it was the first Codemo in Warsaw ever. We both were lucky to catch Codemotion Warsaw t-shirts at the ending ceremony. Yes, CATCH because they were thrown in the air! :D We were also happy to have another chance to meet with KaUlah Team again. And we couldn’t wait for EuRuKo and meeting Team Joda there :) And we’re looking forward to another Codemotion conference!
EuRuKo 2016
On the 23-24th of September we were happy to attend EuRuKo 2016 conference in Sofia, Bulgaria. It was our first time in this city and of course at EuRuKo. And we were to give our first lighting talk in front of such a big audience.
What we noticed just after /or even before ;)/ our plane landed, Sofia is a beautiful place, with an original atmosphere and surrounded by mountains.
We had luck to be hosted by Adam Niedzielski, a programmer from Poland now living in Berlin, supporting Rails Girls Summer of Code and active in our helpdesk channel.
We came to Sofia on the 22nd of September in the early afternoon. EuRuKo organizers came up with the idea of having pre-event gathering this day at CowOrKing Space by Puzl. It’s a very nice, quite a new place for co-working in Sofia. We had the opportunity to chat with some nice people before the official start of the conference.
EuRuKo took place in a cool venue – National Palace of Culture /NDK/ with a beautiful panoramic view of the city.
NDK (Image: RubyCats Team)
View from NDK (Image: RubyCats Team)
It started with a Keynote by Yukihiro Matsumoto, who told about Ruby development plans and what we can expect from Ruby 3. And when ;) And about reducing our brain consumption. ;)
Matz (Image: RubyCats Team)
Then Xavier Noria in his “Little Snippets” talked about making good quality code and good quality social relations e.g. how to discuss different approaches to solving the problem and that the greatest quality the programmer can have is empathy /for maintainers of our code/.
Xavier Noria (Image: RubyCats Team)
“Rules, Laws and Gentle Guidelines” were presented by Andrew Radev. It was i.a. about the law of Demeter, not making commits at 3 a.m. and that for some devs for some reasons it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission.
Andrew Radev (Image: RubyCats Team)
Amazing blue hat wearer, rubykaraoke & Rails Girls supporter Terence Lee showed us how to work with Kafka logs, events and streams in ”Simplifying Logs, Events, and Streams: Kafka + Rails”.
And then subject of “GraphQL On Rails” was covered in detail by Marc-Andre Giroux.
Marc-Andre Giroux (Image: RubyCats Team)
Gorgeous Grace Chang talked about how Yammer went from having a single person as an on-call engineer, to a team that satisfies customer needs in “Herding Cats to a Firefight: The evolution of an engineering on-call team”.
The last speech of the first day was about “How Sprockets Work” by Rafael Mendonça França.
Rafael Mendonça França (Image: RubyCats Team)
So we came to the Lightning Talks. Ours was the third, just after Team Joda’s. We talked about how it is to be a total newbie in the world of programming by the example of our own histories – from our coding beginnings to Rails Girls Summer of Code. You can see our slides here. We had some positive feedback after our LT, for which we are very grateful.
LT list (Image: RubyCats Team)
RubyCats' LT (Image thanks to Team Joda)
The evening was for social events. First we had a supper with Team Joda, our coach Basia and some other friends. After that we went to EuRuKo official afterparty in the Mixtape5 club. We took part in voting for EuRuKo 2017 hosting city. We voted for Budapest and it won, having just a few votes more than Rome! And then there was a lot of dancing and trying to chat with people /it wasn’t easy to hear each other ;)/. We want to thank all of you, who approached us with some kind words about our lightning talk!
Budapest won! (Image: RubyCats Team)
The second day of EuRuKo started with another programming language creator’s speech – with “Idioms For Building Distributed Fault-Tolerant Applications With Elixir” by José Valim. The speaker provided a lot of information about Elixir and technological challenges like a need to use all cores when doing anything with computers.
José Valim (Image: RubyCats Team)
Advanced developers got instructions on “How To Begin To Develop Ruby Core” by Hiroshi Shibata /incl. merging, testing, reporting bugs/ .
Hiroshi Shibata (Image: RubyCats Team)
Carina C. Zona gave an amazing speech about “Consequence Of An Insightful Algorithm”. She showed how important it is to use a proper algorithm, as there’s a risk of harming people imposed on it. We listened to it with bated breath.
Carina C. Zona (Image: RubyCats Team)
Anton Davydov in his “Viewing Ruby Blossom” presented us the charming Hanami framework.
Ivan Nemytchenko explained “What Have I /has he ;)/ Learned From Organizing Remote Internship For Ruby Developers”. He presented us the requirements for interns, their needs and what they can get from internship. The speaker talked also about common mistakes made by interns and problems that can occur in a team. Then about what went wrong and what went right during his “experiment” and what are the conclusions. Another interesting parts was a graph of usefulness showing the real progress in time, advantages of contributing to open source and how to reconcile the needs of different team members, including seniors and juniors. And lots of cool drawing as usual :)
Ivan Nemytchenko (Image: RubyCats Team)
André Arko showed us advantages of having paid project team instead of only volunteers. He also told us what is planned about development of Bundler and Gemstash, as well as about the Ruby Together community.
André Arko (Image: RubyCats Team)
Nick Sutterer made us aware of thinking restrictions caused by MVC obssession and what API changes are needed.
Nick Sutterer (Image: RubyCats Team)
And guess what – there was another afterparty in the evening ;)
What we strongly liked about EuRuKo and especially miss now was the people side of the event. We met and talked to many nice people. We fulfilled our dream of meeting Matz in person. Unfortunately we didn’t catch José Valim, but maybe it will be possible even in Poland :) We also have new cat-friends in Sofia, met during lunches near NDK.
RubyCats with Matz (Image: RubyCats Team)
RubyCats and one of new cat-friends (Image: RubyCats Team)
We’re very sad that wonderful EuRuKo is over and look forward to EuRuKo 2017 in Budapest!