2014 - Year in Community Engagement

At BigBinary our team loves to engage with the community as well as help out in different ways. We love contributing to OpenSource, speak and attend different conferences, and help out in community meetups, organizing conferences, and events like RailsGirls .

Short summary

In year 2014 we presented at following 8 conferences across 6 countries.

• RubyConf Goa, India
• RubyConf Philippines
• RedDotRubyConf Singapore
• DeccanRubyConf Pune, India
• Madion+Ruby Wisconsin, USA
• RubyConf Brazil
• RubyKaigi Tokyo, Japan
• Golden Gate Ruby Conference San Francisco, USA

Rails and Ruby Conferences

At the start of our travel, we visited RubyConfIndia 2014. The conference took place at an amazing beach resort in Goa. The two days of conference were full of fun and interactions with the best ruby people around India. During the conference our team announced launch of Ruby India to help spread ideas and experiments from the Ruby Indian Community, as well as highlight content from people.

Soon after, I visited Philippines, to conduct a workshop on "Contributing to Rails" at RubyConf Philippines. It was amazing to meet the growing Philippines community. I was happy to spend time with some amazing Rubyists, like Nick Sutterer, Zachary Scott, Konstantin Hasse, Koichi Sasada San, PJ Hagerty, Andre Arko and so on.

After that I and Prathamesh went to Singapore to speak at RedDotRubyConf. We spoke on Arel and ActiveRecord. "RedDorRubyConf" was our first joint talk together at a conference. Again we met a lot of awesome people like Piotr Solnica, Grzegorz Witek, Yinquan Teo, Sayanee Basu, Chinmay Pendharkar and Winston Teo Yong Wei. We also visited Marina Sand Bay and Sentosa Island.

Back in Pune, we hosted the first ever DeccanRubyConf. Our team was busy working on tasks right from building the website, inviting speakers, planning, and other arrangements. The conference had good talks and some really useful workshops. it was a fun one day conference, with attendance of over 170+ people.

The conference also saw our team announce the launch of RubyIndia Podcast, which does regular podcast interviews with notable people from the Ruby Community and Indian Community.

Prathamesh and I, then left on around a one and a half month travel, to attend and speak at multiple conferences.

We started with Madison+Ruby, in Madison, WI. After several missed flights, and a storm, we visited our first US conference after a travel of 48 hours. MadisonRuby was a conference like no other. Several topics touched the humane side of Ruby and the community. We spoke on 'Building an own ORM using ARel'. Set in the cultural town of Madison, we immensely enjoyed the cheese-curds, farmers markets and game night arranged by the Conf team. A huge thanks to Jim and Jennifer Remsik, for hosting such an amazing event. Thanks also to Scott Ruttencutter for giving us space to work from his office and giving us a tour of the state capital.

We then visited Sao Paulo, Brazil for RubyConf Brazil and presented a talk on Building an ORM using ARel. It was a pleasure to meet Fabio Akita and the CodeMiner team. We made friends with Celso Fernandes and Paulo who were kind enough to help us around, since in Brazil primarily portuguese is spoken. We also met Rafael Franca and Carlos Antonio da Silva who have helped us a lot with Rails issue tracker.

Next Prathamesh headed to RubyKaigi, being held in Tokyo, Japan. He presented on Fixtures in Rails. He met Matz, creator of Ruby on his first day in Japan. Mostly all the core Ruby contributors attended RubyKaigi. He got to interact with Koichi Sasada San, Jonan Scheffler, Akira Matsuda, Godfrey Chan, Richard Schneeman and lot of awesome Rubyists. He also met with his JRuby Core Tom Enebo for the first time. Thanks to Yasuo Honda, Michael Reinsch for helping with Japanese food.

From Brazil, I first visited Miami, and was happy to visit The Lab Miami, WynCode and interact with Rubyists from Miami.

Before heading to San Francisco, for GoGaRuco, I was able to make a quick stop in Boston and visit AlterConf Boston. The theme of the conference was around diversity in tech and gaming industry.

My latest conference was in the amazing city on San Francisco. I presented about 'Building an ORM', at GoGaRuCo, which incidentally was the last ever GoGaRuCo. The conference taking place in San Francisco, saw an amazing turnout of crowd. I was able to interact with Sarah Allen, Yehuda Katz, Pat Allen, Sarah Mei, Ryan Davis. I spent most of the time along with Nathan Long, Randy Coulman, and Nathan's friend Michael Gundlach, who is the creator of popular plugin Adblock. I also ran into Chris Eppstein, creator of compass. All around it was one of the most amazing interactions I had in a conference.

2014, was an amazing year for our team. Together we presented or were part of 8 conferences, launched RubyIndia Newsletter as well as the RubyIndia Podcast, started with 6 new video series on topics from ReactJS to Rubymotion to Selenium, published numerous blogs, and contributed to a number of OpenSource projects.

2015, starts with our team presenting at GardenCityRuby Conf. We hope to get more such chances to interact and help out the community. Onwards to a new year!