Last month, I went to RubyConf in San Antonio and it was an amazing experience. I went to RailsConf back in March and really enjoyed that so I was excited to get to do it again but at a slightly smaller conference.
I’m continually amazed by the awesomeness of the Ruby community. I have honestly never had a bad experience at a ruby conference of any kind and everyone is just so nice! Everyone’s there to make friends and learn and it makes for an awesome environment. Additionally, its smaller size ended up really being one of the benefits of RubyConf. I was able to make so many new friends and meet people just by walking up to them and saying hi. You can do that at RailsConf as well but I feel like maybe people do it less because it is so big, it can get a bit intimidating and people will stick more in groups.
The talks at RubyConf were amazing. The Ruby in Depth track was very good and I learned a lot of really fascinating things about how Ruby works. It answered so many things that I’ve been wondering but never really knew how to ask and getting more in depth knowledge of the inner workings of Ruby has been a prime goal of mine for the last couple of months. I’ve been reading Ruby Under the Microscope and even gave a talk on the Ruby VM at a meetup for almuni of my code school which I’ll be writing a post about later. Now that I’m a bit more experienced and know what’s going on, I was overall just able to get so much more out of these talks than I was when I went to RailsConf.
My one regret from RubyConf is not signing up as a mentor for the opportunity scholars program. I was an opportunity scholar at RailsConf and so I definitely believe in paying it forward and now becoming a mentor, I was just nervous to sign up because I’d never been to RubyConf before so I thought I wouldn’t be the most helpful mentor in the world. Once I was there and got to meet a number of the mentors and scholars though I realized I was being silly. My experience at RailsConf more than prepared me so that I could have helped someone navigate the talks and I realize I’ve been to enough Ruby community events now that I actually know a fair amount of people and could help someone make some new friends too! I’m not sure if I’ll be doing RubyConf or RailsConf next year (hopefully both) but I’ll definitely make sure to be a mentor no matter which I do.