Helvetic Ruby - Second Edition

Another helvetic ruby conference after just six month, how lucky we are!

Generous hallway track

Helvetic ruby 2024 was a single track one day conference. The schedule was mostly like this: half an hour of talk, followed by half an hour of a break. This gave plenty of space to the hallway track. Personally I loved this format and giving that much space to exchange among the attendees.

And while I didn’t love the atmosphere of the venue (Technopark Zürich), it was good to have such a big area dedicated to networking and exchange among those Rubyists.

The talks

Some very nice talks, my favorites were:

• Youssef Boulkaid - Ask Your Logs on how you can improve your logging, by making them structure, enriched and searchable. And then you can answer completely new questions that were quite hard to answer before.
• Daniel Colson - The Very Hungry Transaction on how tricky it can get if you are not careful with your transactions, also the talk was beautifully illustrated and wonderfully paced!

The range of attendees

I met Andi, who started learning Ruby a month ago with rubymonstas.ch and I met a Rails core team member within the same hour. Gotta love this variety of people!

Additions this year: Open Source Hacking Meetup & Hike

This year the day before the conference they organized an ruby open source hacking meet up. And some people went on a short hike to the Uetliberg the day after. These little additions, organized by the helvetic ruby team, really make a difference, repeat please!

My own lightning talk on Phlex

Phlex is a Gem to building HTML fast and elegantly. While it gets some recognition (just passed 1 Million downloads on rubygems.org, I believe it’s still not talked about enough. I would have liked to do a full talk on it, but was very unsure whether I would have enough time to not get overwhelmed, with the many things going in my life right now. So I presented a 5-min lightning talk at the conference… which may have been more stressful than a full talk in the end.

I was not sure how to convey the beauty of Phlex in such a short amount of time. Well, that was until the very morning of the conference… when I woke up, I had the inspiration for a better talk than the one I have now given :-) . I even performed that talk in the hallway track one hour before my actual lightning talk when I was asked: “But I don’t get Phlex, how is it better than ERB…”, I opened VS code and started writing a simple Phlex component and how you can shape it. And getting the response at the after this impromptu talk in front of two people was: “Ah I get it…”, what more do you want?

I’ll try to record a video of that “alternate lightning talk”.

See you next year!

I definitely want to be part of it again next year in Geneva. Early bird tickets are available right now