A year of ruby meetups in Kitchener
Tags: ruby, rails, opensource
Published: 2019-12-23 04:43:53

I've been living in Kitchener for over an year and in the first time I attended to the ruby workshop I created my [first PR](https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/34233) to Rails 🎉

It was quite simple of course, but in that workshop I've learned that it's not that hard to do open source. Eventually I found a small problem in Rails and I created [another PR](https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/36470).

Then I started doing more open source in projects that I was using at work like [viscacha](https://github.com/mezis/viscacha/pull/3), [sprockets](https://github.com/rails/sprockets/pull/599), [lightline.vim](https://github.com/itchyny/lightline.vim/pull/398), tabulous PR [#1](https://github.com/webdevel/tabulous/pull/2) and [#2](https://github.com/webdevel/tabulous/pull/3), [vscode-run-rspec-file](https://github.com/thadeu/vscode-run-rspec-file/pull/8) and hopefully this list is only going to grow overtime.

In other ruby workshops, it was really nice to be able to help other people's projects.

The meetup when [Jay El-Kaake](https://github.com/jayelkaake) gave a talk about [how to make Rails faster than the speed of light](https://www.meetup.com/kw-ruby-on-rails/events/260999605/) was really interesting, I've learned a few things on how to do speed tests, how to reduce latency when connecting to your app/postsgresql/redis and much more!

In the workshop focused on [Hacktoberfest](https://www.meetup.com/kw-ruby-on-rails/events/265685895/) I helped a developer to participate and I decided to participate myself which was great. 🌟


<img src="https://lucasprag.com/assets/images/posts/hacktoberfest-email.png" alt="The email I got saying that I've completed the Hacktoberfest challenge." />

I missed the talk about Rails and Docker, that was a shame, I wish I could have made for that one.

In the [Career, Business and Software Development](https://www.meetup.com/kw-ruby-on-rails/events/259429067/) talk by [Martin Basiri](https://twitter.com/martinbasiri) I've learned one thing or two about the business side of tech companies. He also talked about his first endeavor which was earphones that made it easier to untangle their cable - 4 seconds less than others - and how it failed when wireless earphones got popular.

It was quite inspiring to see so many students and developers asking interesting questions in the [Building a Career in Technology](https://www.meetup.com/kw-ruby-on-rails/events/266616653/) talk by [Rob Sciuk](https://www.linkedin.com/in/robsciuk/) and [Ralph Janke](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ralphjanke/).

Not all meetups are very productive, but the last one of 2019 was really special and this is why:
- I talked to someone who was new to Ruby, did the classic blog tutorial
- I did open source by working on an [issue](https://github.com/kwruby/kwruby.ca/issues/35) to automate the deployment of the [KWRuby's website](http://kwruby.ca/).
- we talked about [Elixir](https://elixir-lang.org/), pattern matching and [Declan](https://twitter.com/dwhelan/) gave us a lesson -- almost a talk by itself -- on aspects of the Erlang's OTP
- we talked about new things comming up to Ruby like pattern matching on ruby 2.7
- and there were lots of Pizza 🍕

Definitely one of the best ruby workshops. So many things happened in just one meetup.

Big thanks to [Andrew](https://github.com/acant), the person behind this group and all the people who have helped him.

If you are in Kitchener/Waterloo I strongly recommend you to attend a few times to the [KWRuby meetup](http://kwruby.ca/). If not in the area, try to see if there are groups in your city. It's totally worthy.

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<h3>2020 is going to be great! 💎</h3>
</center>