The people have spoken. Wicked Good Ruby Conf, Boston’s first annual Ruby conference was a major success. Over the course of two days Rubyists from around the world joined together at the World Trade Center Boston to share ideas, discuss best practices, and have an overall epic time. (did I mention the open bar?) Thanks to the team at EverTrue (you guys rock) I was able to attend and share my experience with you.

I could talk about everything I learned — the countless ways you can automate your entire home with a basic understanding of Ruby, why there really is no such thing as bad code, or why Sandy Metz won’t actually show up at your front door if your methods contain more than five lines of code. However, I would much rather focus on my biggest overall take away from the whole weekend– why I think that as developers, more specifically Ruby developers, we are some of the luckiest people in the world.

Sandy Metz made an interesting point in her keynote when she touched on the fact that all of us somehow, in some way or another, ended up in this awesome profession where we get to turn ideas into reality. Perhaps your parents were programmers and had you writing code before you could walk, perhaps you started your technical journey by simply wanting to create a cool website when you were younger, or maybe you read the most recent tech blog about how everyone should learn to code and recently decided to switch career paths. The point is that it doesn’t matter how we all got here, but what is most important is that we are all here, sharing knowledge, making great friends, and building cool products.

Every person I crossed paths with over the course of the weekend seemed to be overly ecstatic about discussing anything and everything Ruby. With skill sets ranging from beginners to industry veterans there were plenty of interesting conversations to be made. Learning to code is by no means an easy task. We spend dozens of hours a week huddled over our computers running into bugs, reading and re-reading error messages, and sometimes working late into the night just to see some green dots scramble across our screen (because of course you’re testing…right). Why do we spend a countless number of hours digging through stack traces trying to find what went wrong simply to get some basic code to run? It could be the wizard-like feeling of commanding our computers with the pressing of a few keys, the ability to turn dreams into reality, or maybe it is just the free beer and food at many similar events. While these are all valid possibilities I strongly believe that the biggest force driving each and every one of us to continue to perfect our craft and remain just as excited as the day we first popped open a text editor is the amazing community we have found ourselves surrounded by. A community that offers random students like myself free tickets to amazing events. A community that doesn’t care whether you wrote code before you could tie your shoes or just learned the difference between an array and a hash. A community that puts on amazing conferences, such as Wicked Good Ruby Conf, that keep our community growing. Given all of this I’m not surprised I met attendees from places as far away as the Netherlands and Australia. We truly are some of the luckiest people in the world. Of course we get to write beautiful, abstract code every day, but we are also a part of one of the strongest, most helpful communities I could imagine. So thanks, because without you — the developer, the mother, the son, the student, the mentor — this all wouldn’t be possible.

Huge thanks to EverTrue for the ticket. Without you guys I would have missed out on an amazing weekend.

Also, an eternal thanks to the organizers and the Ruby community at large — without all of you I’m not quite sure where I would be.

Would love to hear about your positive experiences!

@askwheeler

github.com/alexwheeler