Ruby Open Air: Knowledge Sharing Brings Much Fun

by Alena VasilenkoJune 26, 2012

Check out how the participants of the event spent their time enjoying the presentations under the blue sky, 37 miles away from a busy city.

Table of Contents

Unconference highlights

On June 16, 2012, more than 80 inspired engineers came to Ruby Open Air featuring Lee Hambley, a technology evangelist and an active open-source contributor. What can be more natural in summer than arranging an unconference under the blue sky 60 km (37 miles) away from busy Minsk (Belarus)? Everybody was happy to leave the concrete jungle and visit a nice-looking agritourism area surrounded by forest with a sparkling lake nearby. The venue had a tent to protect the participants from weather whims. In reality, it was not a shelter, hiding from the accidental rain, but a cool cover from the sun.

Wherever you were sitting, at any corner of the site, you could enjoy the presentations, and now you can do the same reading this article at your office or home.

The sessions delivered were the following:

“Approaching web application deployment in 2012” by Lee Hambley (Gamburg, Germany)
“Modular web applications with Netzke” by Denis Gorin (Amsterdam, Netherlands)
“Nacked technologies” by Sergey Sergyenko (Minsk, Belarus)
“Continuations in Ruby” by Anton Vasiljev (Minsk, Belarus)
“Riak—a highly available key-value store” by Vladislav Gorodetsky (Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine)
“Getting started with Couchbase and Ruby” by Sergey Avseev (Minsk, Belarus)
“Adaptation of the semantic network model to the traditional ORM interfaces (based on Spira and ActiveModel)” by Vyacheslav Kravchenko (Minsk, Belarus)
“Cloud Foundry—Ruby open-source cloud platform” by Aleksey Klyuchnikov (Minsk, Belarus)
“Open source: Contributing is not a burden” by Sergey Nartymov (Minsk, Belarus)
“The LVEE engine” by Pavel Chebotarev (Minsk, Belarus)
“Using IronWorker efficiently” by Andrey Dyagel (Brest, Belarus)
“Real-life experience of using NoSQL data storage” by Andrey Novikov (Minsk, Belarus)

Lee Hambley talking about web applications deployment

Apart from traditional lightning talks and unpanel expert discussions, all attendees were involved in fascinating entertainment activities. That was truly great time for passionate football players, volleyball fans, and even brave archery novices.

In everyday life you are used to tackle all argues in an amicable way, while on the open air you could show who is actually right on a sumo tatami. You might think these guys lack some grace, but believe it is not easy to move in this “uniform.”

If you were not there that day, then you did not try a mini-tramp, play badminton, and catch a Frisbee.

Those who thought that their talent is not limited by Ruby expertise showed their literature gift. You definitely know the game “write the end,” when you are supposed to finish a saying. Smile reading the winning variant. “Lambda and proc picked into a bar…Got some drinks. Started conflicting. Lambda got out of control, and proc got out of the bar.”

The party continued with BBQ, beers, and a popular music band show.

We hoped that the participants would like the event, and we were happy to read a feedback from Lee Hambley. When he returned home, he posted a long detailed article dedicated to Ruby Open Air in his blog. Lee shared his general impressions about Belarus, recollected the event itself, gave some travel tips, etc.

“Go To Belarus. If you can’t go, hire their engineers. You will quite possibly be changing someone’s life. It’s a nation full of driven, passionate, friendly, curious, and intelligent people. Hire them to work remotely, as freelancers or via Altoros, or a similar company. Invite them to work, whilst visiting your company in your home country. The chance to practice speaking native English, whilst on location, and the quality of work you will receive is a win for both sides.” —Lee Hambley

The event was organized by Belarus Ruby on Rails User Group and Altoros.