Tokyo Ruby Kaigi 05

Photo of Paul McMahon

Paul McMahon

Founder of TokyoDev

Speaker

Tokyo Ruby Kaigi 05, a regional Ruby Kaigi, was held last night at EC Navi’s company bar Ajito in Shibuya. Ajito is a popular place to hold tech events, in no small part because they have a fridge full of free drinks, and I was just there last week for ITEigo. This Ruby Kaigi emphasized communication, and as such, there wasn’t traditional presentations.

The event openned with Masayoshi Takahashi leading a discussion about the fun ruby, which is also the subject of his book, たのしいRuby, for which he has just released a revised edition. In contrast with the Takahashi method presentations he is famous for, this time Takahashi only had a whiteboard to back him up. Instead of lecturing the audience, he solicited everyone to contribute what they found fun about ruby.

Session

After the discussion led by Takahashi, the kaigi broke into smaller discussion groups.

The first group I participated in was about Rails. People in the group had applications that were running Rails 1.X through 3.0. We discussed different deployment solutions, and Unicorn seemed to be the most popular solution.

The theme of the second group was testing, and for some reason I ended up leading the discussion despite my broken Japanese. Of the eight or so people in the group, all but one or two used Rspec. When writing specs, they used Japanese sentences, which causes some issues with readability (because of the difference in sentence order between Japanese and English). I introduced some of the testing libraries I use, such as shoulda and factory_girl. During the wrap up, when each table presented to the rest of the kaigi what had been discussed, I was cajoled into doing the summary.

I really enjoyed the participatory nature of this event, and thanks to the organizers for putting it on!

More about the author

Photo of Paul McMahon

Paul McMahon

Founder of TokyoDev

Paul is a Canadian software developer who has been living in Japan since 2006. Since 2011 he’s been helping other developers start and grow their careers in Japan through TokyoDev.

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