Ruby Association Travel Grant Attendance Report - Emma Beynon
In November 2016 I travelled to Matsue, Japan to attend the RubyWorld Conference 2016
thanks to a travel grant which was kindly awarded to me by the Ruby Association. I’m aJunior Developer at the Government Digital Service which is based in London, UK. We areresponsible for leading the digital transformation of the UK government. I work on one of theteams that supports GOV.UK, which is the main place for citizens to find government
services and information, and it is mostly built using Ruby and Rails. I joined theGovernment Digital Service in April 2016 and this is my first software development job.
Previously I worked in marketing for about 6 years. In my last role at a small start-up I wasexposed to programming after working closely with software developers there. They
encouraged me to learn programming myself and I found that I really enjoyed it. Eventually I
decided that I would enjoy programming full-time much more than marketing, and made acareer change into software development. I attended ‘Makers Academy’ in London, which isa 3-month intensive coding course. During that time I learned Ruby, Javascript, Rails andmost importantly the core skills of being a developer. Doing this course enabled me to findmy current job.
I decided to apply for the RubyWorld travel grant after seeing it posted in the Ruby Talk
mailing list. As a relatively new developer, I haven’t been to many conferences yet, and I
thought this would be a great opportunity to attend a well-established conference dedicatedto the programming language I use. I also felt that RubyWorld would enable me to learn
more about the language, discover how other companies are using it, and meet Rubyists
from other countries. Therefore I was thrilled to be awarded the grant and looked forward tothe experience. RubyWorld didn’t disappoint; over the course of two days I listened to many
fantastic talks. I’d like to share with you some of my favourites from the conference.
I arrived on day 1 of RubyWorld to a keynote speech from Yukihiro ‘Matz’ Matsumoto, thecreator of Ruby. He started by taking us through the original principles of Ruby;
development efficiency, productivity, programmer happiness and a focus on humans. Hewarned us against “karoshi”, the Japanese phenomenon of death by working too hard, andemphasised that as programmers we should be lazy. It was great to revisit Ruby
fundamentals such as DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) and duck typing, and remind ourselvesof what Ruby has made possible for programmers. I was honoured to meet Mr Matsumoto
at a reception hosted at the end of the first day, which was one of my highlights from theconference.

In the afternoon Kenta Murata from Recruit Holdings talked to us about machine learningand data science. This is not an area of programming that I have much experience with, so I
found this talk particularly interesting. Kenta discussed the current place of Ruby within datascience, which is behind Python and R. While there are several relevant libraries available
in Ruby, they tend to be much slower and less integrated than Python libraries. He believes
that without serious intervention, Python may take Ruby’s market share as companies place
more and more importance on data science. In order to counter this, Kenta proposed that
Ruby data science libraries should be unified, and that the resources available to Python andR should be translated to Ruby libraries. He is already working on this, and made a call forcontributors to help him achieve this goal.

The first day closed with Tetsuya Hirota who gave an inspiring talk about teaching
programming to children in a small Japanese town called Makinohara. Tetsuya wanted hisdaughter to learn how to program, but found that classes were only available in larger cities.
So, he decided to start his own classes to teach his daughter and other children too. He
detailed some of the issues he had to overcome, such as worrying that other childrenwouldn’t want to do it, and a concern that he had never taught before. Finding a suitablevenue was also a challenge, as many local places didn’t have suitable wifi provision, orwould cost a lot of money. Fortunately, Tetsuya is now running 2-hour classes twice amonth for up to 5 students, and they’ve learned so quickly that they are now preparing anentry to a Smalruby competition. It was wonderful to hear this story and see a fantastic
example of the Ruby community spirit in action.

Day 2 opened with a keynote address from Daisuke Horie and Edward Thomson of GitHub.
Daisuke explained the idea of GitHub as a social network for developers. Using GitHub,
developers can share and collaborate on software with each other, also known as ‘socialcoding’. This approach helps facilitate open source work, and as more and more open
source projects have moved to GitHub, it is now a central community for the practice.
Previously, developers had to ask permission to contribute to a project. Now, they’re able tomake their own copy of a project, familiarise themselves with the code and contribute when
they feel ready to. Edward then spoke about his own experience working at Microsoft,where open source culture used not to exist at all. The organisation had concerns thatmalicious code could be checked in, and didn’t see the value of outside collaboration. Afteracquiring a small company that used open source software heavily, Microsoft started
experimenting with open source by making some of its code available on GitHub. It is now
one of the organisations with the most open source contributors on GitHub. Microsoft alsostrongly encourages internal open source, also known as “inner source”, whereby
developers on different teams contribute to each other’s internal projects.

Kao Chien Lung from 5xRuby in Taiwan finished day 2 with a talk about introducing Ruby tolocal campuses. He explained that Ruby is only really popular with startups in Taiwan, andthere was a feeling that languages such as Java would be more useful for students to learn.
5xRuby was founded to challenge this assumption and provide Ruby training courses andhost events in order to develop the local Ruby community. There were difficulties inachieving this; he didn’t have any teaching qualifications, and teachers weren’t convincedthat it was a valuable subject for students to learn. However 5xRuby came up with several
strategies to overcome this. They approached students directly with an offer of free shortcourses, and hosted events like Rails Girls to raise awareness. Eventually teachers started
to trust them more, and allowed 5xRuby to run a class, even though no funding was madeavailable. They taught a small group of students to begin with, but later evolved to a class ofover 30 students. After proving their value, more and more schools have asked them toprovide classes and they have now taught over 1000 students. In order to make the project
financially viable, 5xRuby hire some of their students and train them to become professional
Rubyists to work on real world projects. The company now has 16 employees, of which half
are former students.

It was a pleasure to hear from so many great speakers at RubyWorld. I’m really glad I
attended the conference, and I hope to visit again in the future. Thanks once more to theRuby Association for offering me this opportunity.