The first edition of Deccan Ruby conference, Pune was held on 19 July, 2014 at Hyatt Regency, Pune. Their tag line “होऊ दे!” somewhere related to having fun. By the time I reached, keynote had already started. Being the regular practice of any conference, registrations were accompanied with name stickers, badges(of Josh) and T-shirts. The day started off well with interactions in the first tea break right after the keynote. The arrangements were done well in coordination with Hyatt and you could hear the sound of ringing bell after each tea break. Post the keynote, there were parallel tracks for Workshops and talks. Most of the attendees including me rushed for the workshop on “TDD 101 – Get it before you dismiss it!” by Sidu Ponnappa Chonira. The workshop was good in all but couldn’t meet timeline and continued longer, eating some part of the free slot as per the schedule. The volunteers in the workshop helped everyone test drive their code. This couldn’t have been simpler than writing code for a calculator . Ah, but it was flooded with questions! Nevertheless, there was something to learn at the end. Talk on ‘Writing ruby ” होउदे ” way, yes in Marathi !‘ was quite entertaining though and the speaker gave a lightening talk as well on the same. Undoubtedly, the food was awesome(Hyatt.Mediterranean fish++).
Post lunch, talk on “Dashboard for DevOps” had interesting stuff. Right after that, one of the speakers talked about rolling your own web framework in 30 minutes. In the parallel track, Workshop on “Deliver projects 30% faster, know your CSS” was being conducted. Lightening talks aren’t boring anytime because of the short duration 😉 . One of the lightening talks included a student talking about her Rails Summer of Code and eventually they could find someone there who could help them. Meanwhile, I talked to few people in person about “Women in Open Source Award” by Red Hat. Some of them felt motivated and promised to contribute more. Coming towards the end, the closing note by Baishampayan Ghose was well drafted and interesting. One of his slides mentioned: future = f(past) [Future is a function of past]. Takeaways from his talk were to understand the problem well before you jump to any solution, ignore history at one’s own risk, give importance to design and make it a deliberate practice. Deccan ruby conf could have worked better on the T-shirt design instead of stamping it with sponsor’s logos! There was Futsal planned for football lovers post the event and a party at Irish Village, though I did not attend either. Overall, it was a good one day conference and got a chance to meet the ruby community.
Anisha Narang 