The Why and Who behind the London Ruby Unconference

Last Monday night I presented the London Ruby Unconference 2017 at the London Ruby User Group. 

I have attended this meeting regularly for the last six years and have spoken seven times. If you want to check my talks these are here. 

In the last one, last year, I programmed live on stage! I did this presentation twice, in Oxford and in London, with great success with help from the audience!

After the meeting, we had a good discussion about the Unconference at the bar and two of the questions that came up were (1) why I organise this event and (2) if I was the single organiser behind the event.

I thought that I should write this message to answer these questions and mention the teams behind the organisation.

The Why

I originally had the idea of the Unconference last year. I am a prolific networker and I have attended NodeConf, Elixir London, uConf (Microservices Conf), JQuerySF - yes, in San Francisco!, Bath Ruby and Brighton Ruby. 

After experiencing the Ruby events in the UK for the past two years, I feel that I want more: 

I want to hear about the latest trends. I have been in software for more than 20 years and I crave for new trends such as Artificial Intelligence, Serverless Architectures, that I have not seen these in the existing Ruby events. 

I want more variety. A lot of the best events are multi-track with plenty of different sessions to choose from. And they have workshops to learn specific skills.

I want more with less. Last year, I needed a big budget and a lot of time to go to several conferences and access industry experts from the developer communities.

I want to develop meaningful friendships. I find it difficult to develop meaning relationships attending events of technologies that I don’t know anything about. To be honest, this was the main reason I gave to my close group of friends!

In April last year, I volunteered as a conference organiser and speaker for the Progscon Conference, the Programming Conference, where I spoke about Ruby and compared it to Java and Javascript.

David Gimelle, the main organiser and a Scala Developer himself, helped me shape the idea of a Ruby event and Nigel Runnels-Moss, a veteran software craftsman with over 25 years of experience, suggested the format of the Unconference and wrote the event description that is used today.

Nigel Runnels-Moss has been a long-standing participant at XP Day, LJC Unconference and Socrates, and have 'Opened the Space' at a number of events in London.

The Who

As David, Nigel and I started putting together the plan for the Unconference, we found the cost of a large central location in London to be substantial. 

Thanks to my previous involvement with ThoughtWorks and attending Elixir London, I met Akash Bhalla, Director of Engineering at carwow, and he offered to sponsor the event at their Headquarters in Holborn.

carwow will sponsor the venue again this year and their co-founder and CTO, David Santoro will be present with Pericles Theodorou, Pedro Chambino, Michael Wagg, Alex Fakhri, Ken Alex Fassone, Anson Kelly, Muyiwa Olu and others from their strong developer team that will be helping to coordinate the event on site, and Jason Wong supporting with logistics.

From Codescrum, my company, I with my brother Miguel Diaz and Mario Urrea are helping with the digital marketing, talking to contributors and helping to put the blog posts together. 

We have now 9 posts from contributors: Tetiana Dushenkivska, Ismael Celis, Adam Lancaster, Ivo Anjo, Gerhard Lazu, John Cinnamond, Hrishi Mittal and Sam Davies that introduce their contribution to the event with a workshop or a discussion topic.

The Future

In this photograph I appear with Yukihiro Matz Matsumoto, the inventor of Ruby, I met him last year in San Francisco and I have invited him to lead a remote discussion on m-ruby, his last project. I hope he can join us this time, or in one of the events in the future.

David and I had the opportunity to discuss the idea of organising a larger Ruby conference for London. If you are a Ruby developer and like this initiative, please support the Unconference attending!

Please share this event on Facebook with your colleagues and support the community to make it happen!

Click below, get your ticket now! and see you at the event!