RubyConf India, 2015 was held in the first week of April in the fun filled and beautiful city of Goa. The announcement of the venue itself created excitement among people while the tickets were out for sale way back in October, 2014. As per the schedule people were expected to arrive at the venue on Apr 3 and the conference was scheduled for Apr 4, 5. The venue for the conference was ‘Cidade de Goa’, a beautiful resort by the beach side which added awesomeness to the conference. A residential conference lets you interact with a more number of people.
Day 0, (Apr 3, 2015) I reached Cidade de Goa at 11:00 am, it was good to know that we were being allowed an early check in whereas the check in time was mentioned as 3:00 p.m. People were dropping in gradually and the peak hours were between 2-4pm where the maximum people checked in. The entire day was to relax and explore the resort depending upon what time of the day you check in 😉 . Some of them relaxed in the pool while others enjoyed having beer at the poolside bar. Most of the veteran Rubyists were happy to meet their friends from the community. Day 1 was very relaxing and enjoyable. Later in the night, everyone was formally invited for dinner.
Day 1, everyone was geared up at the venue for the conference to begin. The registrations went smooth and clear followed by the welcome note by Ajey Gore(@AjeyGore). Everyone at the conference was looking forward to the keynote by Aaron Patterson(@tenderlove). @tenderlove did some pair programming with a pear and talked something fun, something reaaal fast! Then, was a talk by Christophe Philemotte(@_toch) where each one took a deep dive into the unknown depths of a project. He also had some Belgian chocolates to be distributed later throughout the day(yummmm 😛 ). The day was followed by talks with intermittent tea breaks and lunch as per the schedule. One of the talks ‘Writing Ruby in your mother tongue’ was interesting enough to grab everyone’s attention with some fun-filled jokes. Later in the day, Eleanor McHugh gave an excellent talk relating to security, her slides read “Privacy is always a requirement; privacy requires trust; building trust is hard; and securing trust is harder”. This was followed by some lightening talks and then was the beach party which everyone was looking forward to. The beach party began by around 7:45 p.m with some networking until the bar counter opened(and yeah, socializing continued after that as well!). There was karaoke and people were truly engrossed into it. The food was equally good as the party. Day 1 came to an end by the beach side. Kudos to the organizers for organizing a flawless dinner party for the attendees.
Day 2, Undoubtedly, it was difficult to be on time the morning after the beach party and thus the conference schedule got delayed by around half an hour which was fair enough as we tried to get everyone together and move ahead. The day followed with scheduled talks, ‘Aggrobot – Go fetch me an aggregation’ and ‘Writing Fast Ruby’ were some of the best ones. I too had a talk pre-lunch, which I believe might have been boring for most of the audience 
as it was a fairly beginner level talk on ‘Taking the ruby road to Front-end testing’ while on the contrary a guy tweeted saying mine was one of the talks he could understand 😀 . According to me, I did not speak that well, probably not my day or I got nervous looking at the larger number of audience or on trying to interact with the audience I got blown away with the sad response(I guess the attendees had all their attention on food and I was eating their time 😛 ). Could be anything but I myself was really disappointed with those 25 minutes. Even though my talk did not go well, but still I enjoyed the entire conference a lot except that! I am glad that I attended the conference this year and was the only female speaker at the conference (just to make myself feel good 😀 ). Goa being the venue added to all the fun. This was probably one of the best conferences I have attended till now 🙂 .
Not to forget, the food at the resort was pretty good at all times. Lastly, the closing keynote by Terence Lee(@hoe02) where he summarized the talks of the entire conference beautifully by including slides with take-away from each talk. He also talked about making contributions to ruby and ended his talk on a note “May the Ruby be with you”. Gautam Rege(@gautamrege) took over the charge for the conference wrap up and thanked each one behind the scenes who contributed to make this conference a success. Tea break followed the wrap-up and people were almost set to leave the venue though there were some lightening talks pending for the day. It was good to interact with a friendly and supportive ruby community throughout the two days. The conference was very well organised and planned. Kudos again to all the organizers.
RubyConf India 2015, Goa was simply awesome!
Anisha Narang 