DeccanRubyConf 2014. Hou De!

I attended it, enjoyed it and took part as a volunteer in Pune's first RubyConf - DeccanRubyConf 2014. As Hou De (let it be) name said, event went in the same way.

The day before conference, in the morning Vipul (one of the event organizers) and I picked up our guest speaker Koichi Sasada from the Pune Airport. Koichi is a Ruby core member and works for Heroku. We welcomed him and went to Hyatt Regency hotel where the event is taking place. Our guest checked into hotel and then we decided to go for a lunch at Malaka Spice restaurant.

We reached there and Koichi told us that he wanted non-spicy food (Safe food). We ordered non spicy food, but food was still too spicy for Koichi. However we enjoyed the food and had very good discussion about the Ruby internals, concurrency-parallelism, debugging in Ruby, Japanese culture and the Indian culture.

After lunch, we dropped Koichi off at the hotel and we left for our home.

Next morning was the event day and I woke up early and went to the event place. As part of volunteering team, I and other volunteers had tasks like giving pens, badges, stickers, T-shirts and coupon for night party to the attendees.

Attendees had started to come in slowly. Some attendees asked me about T-shirt size as I wore one of the conference T-shirts and from my T-shirt's size they decided their T-shirt size. It was a great experience meeting with different kind of people from around the India.

Keynote by Koichi kicked the event off and he talked about Ruby 2.1 features like,

• Required keyword parameter,
• Rational number literal,
• def returns symbol of method name
• Runtime new features (String#scrub, Binding#local_time and etc.)

Then he talked about performance improvements, Ruby 2.2 and how to speed up Ruby Interpreter . Click here for more details about his talk.

In between the talks, some new attendees had come for the conference who had not registered for the conference. They told me that they thought it's a regular Pune's local Ruby Meetup. There was some miss-understandings but they seemed interested in attending the event. I contacted Gautam as he was one of the organizers and told him about the issue.

Attendees kept coming till the afternoon.

After Koichi's talk, two sections had opened. One for talks and other for the workshops. TDD workshop was conducted by Sidu Ponnappa. I saw lots of attendees in this workshop and heard that it went very well.

The next talk was on Requiem for a dream by Arnab Deka. He talked about various tips and tricks including using "Higher order functions and Concurrency" in Ruby and other programming languages like Clojure and Elixir.

After that, Rishi Jain talked about Game Development - The Ruby Way. He discussed how to build a game in Ruby using Gosu library . It was a very useful session for game developers. You can find out more about it here

Next talk was on Programming Ruby in Marathi by Ratnadeep Deshmane & his friend Aniket Awati. This was one of the best talks of the event. The way they used the similar words from Marathi for Ruby's keywords and the examples made this talk remarkable. Their presentation style was nice too. Almost all attendees enjoyed this talk and they laughed a lot.

After this talk there was tea break for 15 minutes. Staffs from the Hyatt hotel were very helpful. There were serving tea and coffees to the attendees and overall did a good job of ensuring the event cruised along smoothly. This is in sharp contrast to the service RubyConfIndia received from Lalit Resort.

After tea break, I didn't get chance to attend other talks as attendees were still coming in and I was assisting them. But I heard almost all talks went very well.

In meantime, I was passing through main passage and I saw lighting talks board and decided to give lighting talk on my Ruby gem. Lighting talks is a short presentation that you can give about your achievement. You can also share your ideas and promote your library or any other projects.

Then we all had our lunch, lunch was good with lots of varieties with dessert.

After lunch I went for workshop on Deliver projects 30% faster, know your CSS by Aakash Dharmadhikari. Wanted to attend it fully, but some of the attendees had difficulties in internet connection, so I left the room to look into it.

Lightning talks were going to start so I took sometime to prepare for my presentation.

In the lighting talks, girls from Rails Girls Summer of Code, talked about their project and their progress on it. After that Prathamesh talked about RubyIndia.org and asked people to subscribe the newsletter. After that I gave talk on my Ruby gem RubySimpleSearch and you can find more on it here. The next speaker Rahul Mahale from Nashik asked people to help him in growing Ruby community in Nashik. All other lighting talks went very well.

After lighting talks, there was closing keynote On Solving Problems by Baishampayan Ghose. This talk made us think about how we write application in our daily routine. He talked about the architecture and he also explained the future is a function of past future = f(past). He also suggested that we should first understand the problem thoroughly and we should build the software. Talk was very informative and went very well.

After that Gautam came on to the stage and congratulated all the sponsors, organizers and volunteers. He also told that this event got large number of girls attendees than he had ever seen in any other conference.

After this event, there was party in Irish Village hotel. Me and my friends, we all went to the party. Party was superb and we all enjoyed it.

Thanks to all sponsors and organizers who made this event fun and enjoyable.

You can checkout more pictures of the conference from here.

Note: Photos are copyrighted by respective photo owners.