Last August I got an email with the following text

Congratulations!!! We’d love to include your talk – Digesting MRI by Studying Alternative Ruby Implementations – at RubyConf 2019.

As RubyConf is the largest (~800 attendees) and longest-running gatterhing of Ruby developers, this was really exciting news for me. RubyConf 2019 was held in Nashville, Tennessee, and it was my first time going back to the US since a couple of years.

Preparation

As I gave the same talk at RubyConf Indonesia, the preparation for RubyConf was a little bit less stressful although I changed a lot of the content. One of the perks of RubyConf is to get paired with a speaker mentor. My mentor was Barrett Clark and it was tremendously helpfull to run through the slides with him and do a rehearsal. Additionally, I presented at the South West Ruby meetup and asked friends and collegues (special thanks to Henne :wave:) for feedback. All in all I felt good prepared going to RubyConf.

Talks

The opening Keynote was like every year by Mats and he was giving an overview what we can expect in the next releases of Ruby.

One of my hightlights was the talk about Ruby Next in which Vladimir Dementyev explains different approaches of how to include features of future Ruby versions into Ruby Current. The talk covers extensive monkey patching and even writing a transpiler.

A really entertaining talk was from Julian Cheal implementing a cocktail robot with Ruby.

Sandi Metz opened the last day with her keynote. Sandi is one of my favorite speakers and is really great in explaining. On the last day there was also the ‘Ruby Implementations’ track. Ryan Lopopolo, which I met the night before at dinner, talked about Artichoke, a Ruby implemented in Rust. Charlie and Tom introduced what is new in JRuby and last but not least I gave my talk too. As it was the last day, the conference was not super busy anymore but I reckon there were around 100 people attending my session.

Hallway Track

Beside the super interesting talks, I also met and chatted with a lot of other Ruby developers, participated in the traditional 5k run and did some sight seeing. The most important part of the conference was that I could meet some open source developers which I collaborated online with but never meet in real live like Charlie, Tom and Daniel.

Recording

Slides