Why I enjoyed the Hamburg Ruby Unconf

Where do I start? There was nothing I enjoyed most. It was just a perfect mix of everything: The organization, the talks, the people, the food, and of course the party. But let’s start at the beginning.

Hamburg at the EuRuKo

The story started 8 months ago, at the European Ruby Conference in Budapest. For choosing the next city where the conference is going to take place, people could propose a city. Two guys came up with Hamburg and they reached an awesome second place.

After realizing the amount of people that want to have a Ruby conference in Hamburg, the co-founder of the Hamburg Ruby User Group with the support of other people organized this year’s Ruby Unconf.

What is an Unconference?

The principle of an unconference is that the agenda is created by the attendees at the beginning of the conference. People can present the topics they want to talk about and afterwards everyone votes for their favorite ones. This way, the daily agenda is organized and fits perfectly to the attendees interests.

The Hamburg Ruby Unconf

When we arrived at the location, the HAW Hamburg, we first went to the registration place. We got our identification card as well as some awesome presents, like a bamboo coffee cup and stickers, lots of stickers! Is there any developer that doesn’t like stickers?

Afterwards, the two conference days followed more or less the same schedule: present the topics, vote for your favorite ones, and join the different talks. We were joining some super interesting talks like:

• Background Jobs at Scale by Kerstin Puschke
• The (even longer) Road from Capistrano to Kubernetes by Tobias Schwab
• Ruby is Full of Surprises by Jan Lelis
• Property Testing by Ana Maria Martinez Gomez
• Preconnect, prefetch, preload, pre-what? How to speed up websites with Resource hints by Robin Drexler
• An MP3 player for very small, small and big kids by Christoph
• It looks like ruby, but it doesn’t Quack! by Ole Michaelis
• UX Sketching 101 by Fabian
• The Crystal Language from ~scratch~ ruby by Sérgio Gil

There was also catering during lunch time so we didn’t have to find any restaurant nearby and, trust me, the food was delicious.

Party time!

Yes, we are developers, but we also like to party 🎉.

At the end of the first conference day, the event continued at the Bidges & Sons bar on the Reeperbahn strip. There, we met a lot of people from different parts of the world. We were having some interesting talks with them over some cocktails.

Two Unais are not enough

People from our company were surprised when I joined ePages and we became two Unais working in the same team. They haven’t heard that name before.

So it was even more surprising for our CTO when we found a third Unai at the Hamburg Ruby Unconf:

Special mention

I would like to say a big thank you to all the people that were involved in organizing this conference. It wouldn’t have been that great without you. This of course also applies to the presenters. All the talks that we joined were super interesting and we could take away learnings from all of them.

So, yes. I’m definitely going to join the Hamburg Ruby Unconf next year again 😁.

About the author

Unai Abrisketa is a Ruby on Rails Developer. He is fond of clean code, and always eager to learn new technologies.