After two very exciting and enjoyable days, the Barcelona Ruby Conference (2014 edition) is over, so here are a few things I’ve learned about and/or liked. I’ll mention these in no particular order as long as the memory is still fresh.
Over one of the lunches I discussed ways to improve coding skills online with some people at my table. For those interested in mathematical puzzles I suggested to have a look at Project Euler, at site that offers interesting and sometimes very hard to solved problems. Someone recommended rubeque, where you can “hone your Ruby skills by solving small Ruby problems while competing against other Rubyists.” Then there is Ruby Koans, where you can learn Ruby by making test cases pass.
One Tom Stuart presented some ways to avoid literals in Ruby in his (lightning) talk. Awesome, funny and probably not meant for production code.
The other Tom Stuart talked about his favourite algorithm, the Burrows–Wheeler transform, in his lightning talk.
Erik Michaels-Ober showed how to write fast Ruby. His examples showed that the faster code can also be the code that’s easier to understand. I hope that he’ll put his slides online sometime, because a) they contain all the examples he presented and b) they were very nicely illustrated.
Leon Gersing‘s presentation “Keep Software Weird” was inspiring, funny and, well, Zen. A quote from his talk: “Code is a living representation of who you are, right now.”
I also really enjoyed talking to the people form KeepFocus (including, but not Limited to Jakob, Palle and Jan).
Thank you to everyone involved in making this conference so enjoyable and exciting!
