Last weekend I had the great chance to be part of BaRuco. A Ruby conference in sunny Barcelona. Believe it or not, it was my first time visiting this great city.
BaRuCo, organized by :codegram, was a fine Ruby conference with a bunch of great talks. The agenda was quite dense. 8 talks per day. Maybe a bit too dense but I will talk about that later.
Cosmo Caixa
First of all I really want to thank the organizers for choosing the venue: Cosmo Caixa, a technology museum, is a great place to stay for two days. Actually it is a kind of museum I have never seen before. Cosmo Caixa exhibition is quite unstructured with no real topic and it is a good thing. If you visit Barcelona you have to visit this place!
Talks
There are some talks I like to mention:
PROGRAMMING WORKOUT, BY MICHAŁ TASZYCKI
Michal talked about the passion to continuous learning. How you keep your fire burning to improve yourself and stay focused. Plus some tricks to set your goals wisely.
TRACING YOUR WAY THROUGH RUBY, BY ELISE HUARD
A great talk about using dtrace and how to probe your Ruby application if anything else does not give you that granular level of insight. Aaron Patterson already added dtrace probes to MRI, but we have to wait for Ruby 2.0.
RUBYMOTION FOR FASTER CLIENT/SERVER DEVELOPMENT, BY RANDALL THOMAS & TAMMER SALEH
The two guys of Thunderbolt Labs gave a good insight to using RubyMotion in client projects. RubyMotion promises to develop iOS application in Ruby. The presentation included information how RubyMotion development differs from your known Ruby development (eg. you cannot use require and gems).
IT'S NOT HOW GOOD YOUR APP IS, IT'S HOW GOOD YOU WANT IT TO BE, BY JOSH KALDERIMIS
If you have never seen Josh on stage - go for it! This talk explained how the guys of Travis CI use several techniques to monitor what's going on in their application. Ranging from using ActiveSupport Notifications to add custom log entries. Papertrail to aggregate and browse their logs. Josh told me that his talk will be online soon.
Seen crititical
As I mentioned the schedule was quite dense, hence most of the time was spent sitting in the Auditorium. But besides listening to great talks, most of us who attend at a conference want to use some time to meet other developers. Chat about what you do and how you enjoy it. There was no real chance to skip a talk in advance to prolong a nice chat you just started during the short coffee break. The space outside of the auditorium was shut off for the "real" guests of the museum, so everyone automatically moved in again.
See you there next year!