RubyKaigi 2013 was a 3 day, multi-track conference held in Tokyo, Japan, between May 30th and June 1st. Last year, RubyKaigi was not held, and SapporoKaigi kind of take the leadership as the main Ruby conference in Japan that year.

But, in 2013, @kakutani decided to reboot RubyKaigi, so here's the second season of RubyKaigi who was definitely the major Ruby conference in Japan this year.

Talks

As you can see in this schedule, it was tough to decide which talk to attend to with a multi-track conference. I won't review all the talks I attended, but I'll try to present a few ones.

This year, Ruby is 20! In order to celebrate this event, several talks were about Ruby's history. It was fun to listen to Keiju Ishitsuka, who named Ruby as Ruby, talking about Ruby birthday, and telling us that the official birthday of Ruby wasn't probably the real one. It was maybe the following day or the day after. This talk was even more interesting since it was given just after the keynote by Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto, the creator of Ruby.

In this keynote, Matz talked about his motivation, the impact of the Japanese crisis in the 90's on Ruby, and the fact that a simple Hello, World! programm took him six months before properly running in Ruby. A Hello, World! programm may look very simple, but to achieve that in Ruby, Matz had to elaborate the Object model, decide what a String is, and before printing out the result to the screen, IO must have been implemented. Not so trivial.

I would also like to talk about TRICK (Transcendental Ruby Imbroglio Contest for rubyKaigi). In this presentation, the results of TRICK 2013 were announced. The point of the contest was to write the most Transcendental, Imbroglio Ruby program. Check out the entries on the github repository, you will be suprised by those, and the fact that each of them are running fine with Ruby!

Check out this list for link of video of all the talks.

Community

A conference is not just a list of great talks, it is also the occasion for the members of a community to meet each other and with than 500 people coming from all around the globe, RubyKaigi put things to a brand new level for Rubyists. Even for someone not speaking Japanese, there were tons of people to talk to.

Thanks to RubyKaigi, I could meet awesome people from Taiwan, Australia, America, Germany, Japan, and even France !

Events surroundings

At the occasion of RubyKaigi, several other events were been held in Tokyo. The biggest one was RubyHiroba which was held at Microsoft Japan on June 2nd. RubyHiroba was more like a barcamp, where everybody was encouraged to participate and to propose ideas. So, RubyHiroba was about various topics such as lightning talk, about Sass, Railgirls, etc.

Apart from RubyHiroba, there was also RubyMotion Kaigi 2013, DCI meetup w/ @saturnflyer for Rubyists, Asakusarb pre-event, and ElixirKaigi. There was also dinner and drinkup (thanks @github o/).

Well, lots of opportunities to meet with Rubyists from all over the globe.

Language

At SapporoKaigi, the organizers did a great job at providing resources in English, and even some translations on a irc channel during the talk. Following the steps of SapporoKaigi, at RubyKaigi, all Japanese talks were translated by professional translators. Users of this system unanimously found the translation excellent. You should check RubyKaigi: Making a Japanese Conference Accessible to the World by Pat Shaughnessy.

As you can see, not speaking Japanese is now neither a problem nor an excuse for not attending RubyKaigi

Overall, I was more than pleased to have the opportunity to enjoy RubyKaigi, and hope I will participate again next year!