Euruko 2016

I’m Ömür, and I am a software developer at Pisano, a Turkish tech startup. We are building a product which enables businesses to communicate better with their customers. You can find more details about us here. While building our product, we use Ruby on Rails (RoR) for our API. Therefore, we are always trying to improve our understanding of RoR so that we can develop better solutions for our customers.

To have a fine grasp of the technologies we use, attending technical meetups plays a crucial role. Therefore, we decided to attend one of the annual international Ruby meetings, Euruko (short for European Ruby Conference). The conference was held in Sofia, Bulgaria on 23–24 Sept. We were so excited that we bought our tickets months ago.

The conference itself was very well organized. It was just at the heart of Sofia. Apart from the super delicious Bulgarian snacks and fresh-smelling coffee, it was the first time that a conference t-shirt fit me exactly. A big applause for the organizer team. 👏

Before getting started on this post, I was thinking of mentioning one or two speakers who inspired me most, but now I realize that it is very hard to pick a winner. Although we had Ruby as our focus, the topics of the sessions varied significantly, and I found myself delighted with the content after each session. In Pisano, we’ll explore GraphQL, Thanks to Marc-André Giroux and I’ll definitely try implementing a project with Elixir, thanks to José Valim.

However, the speech, “What I Have Learned from Organizing Remote Internship for Ruby Developers” which was delivered by Ivan Nemytchenko was fascinating for me in particular. As some of you may already know, we organized a software camp this summer which lasted for six weeks. Although Ivan followed a different approach, we share a common purpose: delivering what we know to junior developers and walking them through their apprentice years.

In his speech, Ivan mentioned that a junior needs “a business context, a reason why something should be done and why it needs to be done in a particular way.” It was the exact problem we had during the software camp. I wish we had a chance to talk with Ivan before our camp. That would have helped us a lot. In our next software camp, we’ll try to give the participants real projects and real business context to work on.

This year was the first time for our software camp, and we are very determined to organize it every year. It means that by this time next year hopefully, we will have finished our second software camp and we will have an even greater deal of experience. So, you might see me on stage in the next Euruko for a lightning talk or maybe a longer one, who knows? :)

To sum up, Euruko conference was amazing in every aspect, and we are very excited for the next Euruko which will be in Budapest. Yaay! 🎊 Long live #Ruby 🖖