Ruby FunDay in ThoughtWorks Pune

Ruby FunDay is a Barcamp-inspired (but less 'self-coordinating') community event that has its origins in Delhi, initiated by the Ruby enthusiasts at Geekeerie

The 2nd edition of the event happened in Pune and of course, ThoughtWorks provided its full support.

On Sat, 21 Feb 2009, ThoughtWorks Pune (India) hosted Ruby FunDay 2 at its office. It was co-organized with Sur and Manik from Geekeerie.

Thanks to some collective promotion efforts, which included invitations to various mailing-lists and online write-ups, we ended up with 180 registrations! What's even more surprising is that over 110 actually turned up! It was a diverse but energetic crowd, comprised of students, fresh grads, and industry folks: a mixed batch of people having no experience, limited experience, and good experience in Ruby/Rails.

The lined-up sessions had something for everyone, both the newbies and advanced folks. The quality was also pretty decent: not very surprising as 4 out of the 7 sessions were by ThoughtWorkers:

1. Basics of Ruby - by Sur from Geekeerie
2. Ruby OOP: objects finally dethrone classes! - by Aman King, ThoughtWorker from Pune
3. Using Ruby to drive functional tests in Selenium - by Vijay Nyayapati, ThoughtWorker from Pune
4. Web application testing using Watir - by Sai Venkat, ThoughtWorker from Bangalore
5. Introduction to Merb - by Cies Breijs, a freelancer from Netherlands
6. Integrating voice and sms gateway with Rails - by Saurabh Purnaye, a developer at Clarion Technologies
7. Test::Unit vs RSpec vs Expectations - by Aman King (again) (read more here)

Folks left the event, which started at 11am and ended at 6pm, with a lot of satisfaction and an appetite for more events. They seemed to be impressed with ThoughtWorks and ThoughtWorkers.

Some feedback we got was that next time we should have parallel tracks with sessions tagged as either "For Newbies" or "For Advanced". This'd help keep advanced folks from getting bored in basic sessions, and keep beginners from getting overwhelmed in advanced sessions. Personally, I also wish I'd gotten more relaxed time to spend talking with the attendees. That's an activity I really enjoy but it becomes difficult if you're busy coordinating or giving sessions.

Read some of the reactions to the event (all positive!! yaay!):

• http://chirantansjournal.blogspot.com/2009/02/ruby-fun-day-2-and-visit-to.html
• http://geekeerie.com/blog/2009/02/26/ruby-funday-at-thoughtworks-pune
• http://expressica.com/2009/02/21/rubyfunday-is-going-cool-at-tw-pune

Some pics:

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/30839876@N02/sets/72157614256048709/detail
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/anildigital/sets/72157614261301390
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/85532443@N00/tags/rubyfunday2

In conclusion, I'd like to thank all the ThoughtWorkers who helped make this event a success, by preparing arrangements for the event, volunteering during the day, and by speaking at the event. And of course, I applause the passion that the Geekeerie folks have: their bringing Ruby FunDay from Delhi to Pune in an effort to get Rubyists from all over together is something to appreciate.

Looking forward to fun times ahead!

To be notified about future events at ThoughtWorks, join these groups:

• ThoughtWorks Geek Nights
• ThoughtWorks Events

Tags: technology:events, technology:ruby, technology:thoughtworks Last modified 07:42 Tue, 8 Sept 2009 by AmanKing. Accessed 799 times Children What Links Here Share Except where expressly noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.