It's 11am and I've just left Recife. I'm flying towards San Paolo, the first of three connections to come back to Italy after speaking and attending the TropicalRuby 2015 Ruby conference in Porto do Galinhas.
I'm looking outside the small window of the plane: the weather is sunny, like most of the days I spent here, and I'm thinking about all the great time I had here in Brazil.
My mind is still digesting most of the information I absorbed at the conference. Avdi's keynote was mindblowing, one of the best keynote I've seen in a very long time, probably second only to Jim Weirich's lambda calculus keynote (that by the way I still haven't completely digested after a long time).
The location of the conference was absolutely gorgeous and the idea to split the conference between talks and activities was brilliant. Activities were an excellent opportunity for speakers and attendees to break the ice and having fun together. And let me tell you that talking at a conference where speakers can be on a stage wearing flip-flops it's a priceless benefit.
My talk was about maintaining a 5 years old Ruby project. I illustrated patterns and best practices we developed and adopted at DNSimple to ensure the long-term maintainability of our codebase, I advocated Shark Conservation and distributed Italian "Saluzzesi" chocolates.
I also ended up teaching scuba diving during a scuba diving baptism session in Porto de Galinhas. I still can't believe I travelled to the other side of the world, to speak at a Ruby conference and I ended up talking about sharks and teaching scuba diving to Ruby developers. That was amazing, and I'm really thankful to the Ruby community to make all this possible.
Unfortunately, we had a few problems with audio and video and some talks, including mine, were not recorded. However, the slides are available at Speakerdeck.
Thank you to all the Tropical Ruby organizers for their hard work. They were always present, before and during the conference, supporting every speaker need, from travel suggestions to accommodation.
Ciao Brazil!
Cross-posted from the DNSimple blog.