Hello, I want to talk to you about my visit to the city of Phoenix Arizona, where I was attending RailsConf 2017. Well, I want to begin by saying that this was my first international conference, I had never attended one of such magnitude and much less had been in another country. Lots of firsts for me.
This was the twelfth edition of the conference from which I learned many things. The talks that I learned and liked a lot were:
* IN RELENTLESS PURSUIT OF REST where Derek Prior explained the restful architecture.
- Another one that I liked was the panel: – DEVELOPER HAPPINESS THROUGH GETTING INVOLVED where they taught us that we need to have a balanced life, since it could affect my performance as a programmer and especially affect my happiness with my profession. I think it will help me change some habits in my lifestyle as a programmer.
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Another one of the talks that I loved was TRICKS AND TREATS FOR NEW DEVELOPERS in which I felt identified, David the speaker talked about good practices in the code and how to make a restful controller and I really love it because it allows me to improve and to polish my abilities as a developer.
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Another talk I enjoyed was RAILS APIS: THE NEXT GENERATION which talked about Building a consistent API for a large and long-running monolithic API on a tool-segmented engineering team.
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My favorite talk was PRACTICAL DEBUGGING by Kevin Deisz, in which he spoke on how to debug efficiently. The reason why I liked it a lot was because there are cases that I live daily as a developer and I really realized that I was not debugging in the right way; it taught me that I should have a lot of attention to detail, and how to read an error thrown by the console.
Also, the Keynote talks were very important to me because I got to meet David Heinemeier Hansson, who is the creator of Ruby on Rails Framework, and Aaron Patterson, who contributes to the core of Rails. Both were very exciting and really inspirational.
Leaving the technical side of the experience, I think the networking is an essential part of attending a conference since you get to know people from many countries and that is super great, it allowed me to practice my English and meet people who develop with the same tools as I do.
Another thing that I loved about attending RailsConf was that I could meet with my colleagues, regular attendees like me, who work with Rails every day; it allowed us to interact in an environment outside of work and create a friendship. It was really fun to share with them this experience and all the parties, we attended two cool parties which were sponsored by Engine Yard and Honeybadger; which was cool since we got to know the people who program those services that I use day to day.
Another thing: the Swag! I never imagined that I would find so much swag together, many internationally recognized companies were present, it was exciting to go for t-shirts of the technologies we use since – as a developer – we love to wear these kinds of T-shirts.
In general, going to this conference really opened my mind, inspiring me to continue improving and polishing my skills as a software engineer and giving me one of the best experiences I have had in life. Thanks to MagmaLabs for making real this experience out of my country, and to the organizers and participants who are really what makes this event possible. I hope to see you next time!
