This was my first Ruby conference. Balkan Ruby 2019 is the second edition of this conference and comparing speaker lineup to the previous year is evan stronger than the year before. It is a small conference with 150+ attendees and only one track of talks. One great thing about small conferences is that you can talk to a lot of the people including the speakers.

Next I want to talk about the talks themselves and which are worth your time looking up Balkan Ruby’s youtube channel. I will not talk much about the most famous speakers that had both keynotes (Eileen Uchitelle and Aaron Patterson). The talks were amazing and are worth watching.

Beside those two talks I think there are other 5 talks that are worth your time. Here are speakers with titles and score:

  • Tung Nguyen: Jets: The Ruby Serverless Framework (10/10)
  • Edouard Chin: Getting ready for internationalization, Shopify’s case study (10/10)
  • Soutaro Matsumoto: An introduction to typed Ruby programming (9/10)
  • Fernando Mendes: you. and the morals of technology (8/10)
  • Amr Abdelwahab: Deconstructing a hype: What people think is wrong with Ruby? (7/10)

One thing that the conference could improve is to enable the attendees to ask speakers questions at the end of the talk. There would be little more work for the organizers that would have to run with mics but I think this would be worth it. During the conference organizers said multiple times that we could ask speakers questions in the hall way. But this is not scalable. Maybe there was some interesting question and great answer that I just wasn’t a part of.

Overall the Conference was great. Ruby community is vibrant in Bulgaria. Sofia is nice city to visit, a lot of sightseeing and amazing food to eat.