Wroclove.rb - day 2
If you haven’t read it yet, see day 1 first.
Even though the second day of Wroclove for me started with a mild hangover, I knew this is going to be the best day of the whole event. It wasn’t the "oh my god I don’t want to live" kind anyway, only a mild headache so I quickly pulled myself together and we went for a nice breakfast at hotel restaurant and then back at the conference. Unfortunately it turned out that Luca, Lotus Framework author missed his plane so the schedule was reworked a bit.
The first talk was about Volt and I have to admin it completely blew my mind. I enthusiastically tweeted about it and I have to agree with Andrzej - it did remind me of how easily I could do stuff with Rails at the beginning and how amazing it felt. I hope Volt is going to end up being one of the major players in our Ruby/Rails community, though as the author said himself, there’s still a lot of work to do and it’s going to take a lot of time before that happens. There are also important things missing from Volt and it’s not even 1.0 now but as far as I’m concerned - I’m sold (and I really hope I’ll have the opportunity to call myself Volt developer at some point in the future)
After the first talk we had a massive power outage (no VOLTage ;)) that lasted for about an hour so organizers decided to do a lunch break before the problem is resolved. We used that time and went to the Wrocław train station so I could buy my train ticket earlier and avoid waiting in line the day I was leaving. I haven’t been to the Wrocław’s train station for quite a while and I have to admit it’s really nice (I definitely loved power plugs every dozen meters) but they really could work on how many counters are open during the day because it took me a while to get through and buy my ticket. The parking is free for the first 30 minutes though so it wasn’t a big deal.
After we got back, it was time for Nick’s Trailblazer talk. Like I said before, Nick is a great guy and he proved it beyond measure by beginning his talk with joking about how he’s actually Luca, that he’s from Italy and this talk is going to be about Lotus. Then he proceeded to discuss how drunk he was previous night, showed photos where he and other people (including my humble person) were heavily drinking including photos of our trip to kebab place and was simply being Nick. After everyone had a good laugh he stopped for a moment and then gave a really interesting and enlightning talk about what his project, Trailblazer is, how to use it, what kind of problems it solves and why and just buy his book and buy his book and buy his book already :P
After Nick’s talk there was a panel about post-Rails world where they discussed so many things that I’m pretty mad at myself for not keeping notes. The most important and humbling thing I got from everything they said is that I still have, like, A LOT to learn about programming, app development, design patterns and ways of structuring code and resolving problems. I actually felt a little out of place for a moment when they started discussing things I only heard a little about before the conference like CQRS or DDD. Guess I still have a lot to learn, don’t I?
Next thing on agenda was something I thought won’t be as fascinating as what I’ve heard by now. Boy, how wrong I was! Nicolas gave a great talk about Sonic Pi, an application for something called live coding, which is basically programmatically creating music at the stage using Ruby, rather than by writing the code beforehand. It’s actually a pretty great toy and can bring you lots and lots of fun you take your sweet time learning it, even though like some of the people in the crowd noticed, it’s not really suitable for professional music production. But it’s fun!
Last of the longer talks during that day was about Event Storming but to be honest I was already so exhausted and loaded with new information I barely listened to it (I haven’t got much sleep lately so it didn’t really help my concentration either). I guess I’ll just have to listen to it again once the recordings from all the talks are available online :) As for the lightning talks that came after that, the most interesting one was probably about crashing Ruby.
After we got back to our hotel we ordered two pizzas and grabbed some beers from the grocery store. There was a party in Mleczarnia but I’ve decided to skip it and after Maciek and Krzysztof left I’ve spent a nice evening in hotel room watching tv show on my laptop. I was pretty exhausted at this point so I tried to go to sleep early but ironically, I couldn’t fall asleep until 3 AM. Oops!
That’s how day 2 ended for me, either this evening or tomorrow I’ll try to write about day 3. Take care!