Ruby Triathlon 2025

September is conferencing season for me, and this year, I decided to do the Ruby Triathlon, so I attended Rails World in Amsterdam, FriendlyRb in Bucharest, and EuRuKo in Viana do Castelo.

Rails World 2025, Amsterdam

This was my second Rails World in Amsterdam, so I kinda knew what to expect and the conference delivered again. The venue and organizing was all great as usual(thanks Amanda and the team!). The welcome drinks had a much better venue this time with plenty of outdoors place for us, but the sudden rain forced us in for a short period. I met some old friends then checked in to the hotel.

At the venue, we had a few new cool things. For instance there were phones to spark a conversation and I gave that one a try. Then I walked to the person on the other end of the line, we talked for a little and it turned out we exchanged emails a shortwhile ago. Small world!

The opening keynote was very inspiring as usual, besides the new stuff coming to Rails, David mentioned Omarchy and even did a live demo install on stage.

I was one of the MCs on the Lighting Talks track, thank Huntress for sponsoring that! The first two talks announced the Ruby Passport and Adrian Marin said at the end of his that Amanda’s parents will be working the Ruby Embassy and we should be nice to them even if they won’t be nice to them. I didn’t get that, until I went to get my stamp. They roasted us quite a bit before giving the stamp and it was pretty funny. I love this new initiative and want to get a lot more stamps into my passport. Thanks AvoHQ for sponsoring that! If you are interested about the passport, Adrian’s talk was recorded and can be seen here:

The rest of the talks were not recorded unfortunately, they were all pretty good and we had a pretty nice sized crowd for them.

When not at the Lighting Track, I spent most of my time on the hallway track, meeting old and making new friends, but I’ve heard that all talks were great, Marco Roth’s ReActionView one was the one everyone was really excited about afterwards. Luckily, I will have a second chance to watch it at EuRuKo!

The closing keynote from Aaron was pretty funny as usual and after that we had the announcement we were all waiting for: Rails World 2026 will be in Austin, Texas!

After the closing of the conference, we headed to the venue of the afterparty, sponsored by Shopify and it was amazing just as last year in Toronto. Then came the sad time to say good bye, but a lot of folks were coming to FriendlyRb and/or to EuRuKo, so at least I knew I will meat them soon.

In general the conference was great, the announcements sparked excitement and I had a great time meeting old friends and making new ones.

One more thing I have to mention. Seth brought a Go developer to the conference, Manuel. He was a really cool guy and I jokingly asked him if he is converting to Ruby. He said no of course, but he said the conference is amazing and he is impressed by the love we have for Ruby and Rails and how cool we are as a community. He also said that even he is fired up by the opening keynote. I loved to hear this feedback, and I feel the same. We have our differences(Minitest vs Rspec, monolith vs microservices, React vs Hotwire, etc), but we are pretty civil about it and can appreciate the tech we are all making a living off while also mostly enjoying what we do.

I highly recommend you to attend next year if you manage to get a ticket!

FriendlyRb 2025, Bucharest

On Saturday, I flew to Bucharest to attend FriendlyRb. After boarding my flight, it turned out there is a technical issue with the plane, and after an hour of waiting, they deboarded us and we got a new plane. It ended up causing a two and a half hour delay, but in the evening I arrived to Bucharest.

This was my second FriendlyRb, so just as in Amsterdam, I somewhat knew what to expect. On Sunday, I met my Ruby mentee for the first time in person! We are having regular calls for about 3 years but we were yet to meet. We went for a lunch and were joined by other attendees foe drinks in the afternoon. The next two days were pretty much the same, with more and more people arriving and joining us.

Bucharest is a pretty nice host. Food is nice and reasonably priced. Beer is a little expensive so I was told by Josef, our Checz beer expert!

First day of the conference was great, and since this was a single track conference, I actually watched all of the talks. We started with a businessy segment about how to run a SaaS and how to do marketing. I really enjoyed these talks, and I believe they are very much needed as we need to build more business on Ruby and Rails, so we can provide more opportunities for people to use them.

The next segment was about AI, starting with Obi telling us about Ruby tooling for AI integrations. After him, we learned from Kris about training a model, and after that, I talked about security concerns about AI assisted coding and the implementation of AI into features.

The we closed the day with two more talks and the walking tours to learn about Bucharest. By accident I missed my group and ended up walking directly to the after party venue. Once the tour people got there, we had a great time, with great food, vishinita and a lot of laughs. As usual, I stayed pretty late and left with the last few people when the place closed.

I was planning to sleep in the next morning, but my Airbnb had windows to a main road, and around 7am, the police started to control the traffic with whistles, so there went my sleeping in plans. Since I had no better thing to do, I went to the venue around 9, and other than the organizing team, I was the first, I assume the others were battling a hangover.

The morning talks were great, and we had an “Introduce your pet project” segment, were people could pitch their projects to the audience. We closed the morning with a SaaS panel, where we got a few great tips about running a SaaS. Then we closed the morning with Nicolas’ first ever conference talk and he did pretty well. Since I was pretty tired, instead of lunch, I went back to my place for a nap.

In the afternoon, besides the talks, we learned from Lucian how to brew a proper coffee and we had a very entertaining gameshow.

Unfortunately, Adrian announced that there will be no FriendlyRb next year. This is not a farewell, they just want to take a break, and I hope they will organize the conference again at somepoint. The vibe here is different, very cozy, you meet everyone and it is very welcoming and friendly.

In the evening we went for drinks and I called it a night early, since we had the day trip coming up the next day.

At the trainstation, we had our own couch we went to the mountains to see a palace. We had a nice guided tour inside, then a great launch with great conversations. A delayed train back to Bucharest forced us to play some poker at the train station. Once we got back to Bucharest we had our usual farewall drink and the sad time to say goodbye came. The next morning, I had to wake up at 3:30 to get ready for my early flight to Paris and then home.

Hugging my kids and my wife after being away for 10 days, was amazing.

EuRuKo 2025, Viana do Castelo

EuRuKo was a short flight away from home for me this year. I took the conference shuttle from Porto to Viana and it felt like the conference already started there. We had a great chat on the bus with the other attendees during the trip. Viana turned out to be a beatiful, walkable little town. I checked into my Airbnb, got my badge and went out for food. Slowly familiar faces started to show up and we stayed out for drinks and food for the night.

The conference venue was very good, we had plenty of space for the 500+ attendees. It had a nice hallway track at the sponsors area and I spent most of my time there, talking with people. We had an amazing opening with a band playing the drums, then Matz gave us a nice opening talk, then I watched the ReActionView talk I missed at Rails World because everyone told me how great it was, so I wanted to see what the hype is about. His vision is indeed pretty great, I hope he will get the support to see it through.

I did the hallway track for the rest of the day and we closed the day with a sunset DJ party, then karaoke. It was a lot of fun! Then we went to a bar, then to another and ended up home quite late as usual during conferencing.

The next morning I would’ve slept in, but I wanted to watch the talk from Carmine about RubyLLM, so I had to wake up in the morning. Since I am looking more and more into AI security, learning more about Ruby tooling in that space is useful for me. His talk was great and he even mentioned me :D.

After this talk, the emcees mentioned that they still have lighting talks slots available, so I convinced Nicolas to present a shorter version of his FriendlyRb talk and he did so and did well again in the afternoon.

Then we got to the end of the conference. They called the Ruby Triathlon participants on stage and we got a nice pack of gifts from the 3 conferences. Then they announced that Brno, Chech Republic got most votes for next year’s EuRuKo, hopefully the date will work out for me and I can attend.

We had a little closing ceremony with traditional local dancers and the time came to say goodbye to the venue. But the conference wasn’t over yet, I ended up staying out till 4:30 in the morning. After checking out from my AirBnB and looking for a place to hang out till the shuttle, I bumped into Amanda, then a group of friendly folks bumped to us, and we decided to go for launch together. And then time to say goodbye to these lovely folks came and I took the shuttle back to the airport. I hang out there with other conference attendees until they boarded and flew home in the evening.

Summary

3 conferences in 3 weeks is pretty demanding, and I even had a 3 days break at home after the first 2 weeks. But it was also a great experience. I met old friends, made new ones, learned a few things and had an amazing time. I said I am not gonna do such triathlon again, but now that I rested a little, I think I might do it next time as well if there is an opportunity.

I met 2 first time conference attendees at FriendlyRb and they both said they want to attend more in the future. So take my advice and go to conferences, make friends and have a good time.