Early in the morning (or late at night) on January 9th, I arrived at Sheremetyevo Airport in order to meet Josh Calderimis from Travis-CI. The printed nameplate was left at home, but by a lucky chance, we met with Josh almost immediately and his first phrase was: "toaster? I am hungry, you got toasts?". I won’t say that this question, asked with a smile on my face, baffled me, but I didn’t expect that all the remaining days of my stay in snowy Moscow, the guys would come up with more and more jokes about the toaster and toasts.
By the way, we officially apologize for their absence at the last conference, everything is simple - they were eaten by the speakers before the start of the speech.
С Gregg Pollack from Envy Labs it turned out no less funny - having met him a little later, we successfully drove around all the "famous traffic jams" and instead of checking in at the hotel, he asked to drive him around the city. As an excursion, we decided to stop by the city of Dzerzhinsky, where Gregg was most interested in the Nikolo-Ugreshsky Monastery. Despite the severe frosts, we managed to feed the swan geese, which live in large numbers on the territory.
Concerning Fabiou Akita (from Codeminer42) and Douglas Campos (from RedHat), then with them I had, perhaps, the most unusual dialogue in my life:
— Hello Alex, we managed to freeze even in Germany, and the pilot said that it is even colder in Russia!
“Don't worry, I brought you hats and scarves so that you don't die on the way.
- A hat is okay, but a scarf ... what is it and how to use it?
- In what sense?
- Where to put it on? Show us.
After a short magical hand pass, everyone was packed and ready to leave the airport. However, until the very departure, the guys had great difficulty moving through the fresh air, since in their area the temperature rarely drops below 20 degrees Celsius in winter - forgetting to look at the weather forecast, these desperate guys arrived almost in T-shirts and shorts.
But the most important thing is that the lack of toast and morning coffee did not prevent us from organizing a great event on Friday.
Half an hour before the start of registration, we found a fairly large number of people waiting for it to begin - this gave us confidence and hope that not a single report would go unheard, although we had several technical hitches during the conference.
Gregg's talk was the first on the program (which he was very happy about, as he promised a lot of technical stuff that would have been much less digestible after lunch) - he quickly took matters into his own hands and began to tell the conference participants about code changes in the Rails 3 core. Gregg did not miss - the audience literally woke up, took all his words with which he described new techniques of use.
The second to come on stage was Fabio Akita, a speaker from distant Brazil, who began to talk about various techniques for scaling highly dynamic and interactive applications on Rails.
Many participants were looking forward to his speech, as Fabio is one of the most famous and visible "engines" of the Rails community in South America, and even before the start of the conference, it was obvious that the topic of application scaling would be in high demand.
Ivan Evtukhovich went on stage in a great mood and with a no less noticeable report - about how Evil Martians (to whom we say a huge thank you for their help in shaping the conference program) prepared the Russian Groupon. Such a conversation (in the vein of Rails) was heard for the first time in Russia, and therefore listening to the first report and watching slides in Russian was doubly interesting - before Ivan, no one had ever talked about organizing work in such popular and voluminous Rails projects from the Moscow scene.
Finally, the last (before lunch) report was devoted to the practices of using JRuby - despite the burned-out converter and the inability to display slides on the big screen, Timofey Klimenko from HotSpot managed to talk about some interesting aspects of using JRuby and the JVM platform in general.
Simultaneous translation worked at the conference (foreign speakers were translated into Russian, Russian reports were translated into English) - Douglas Campos, who was the penultimate speaker, noted that there were very interesting moments in Timofey's speech, which he himself was going to talk about.
Then there was a two-course lunch (the speakers again ate the third dish for all the participants))) — a good opportunity to chat with colleagues.
Maybe the dinner really didn’t live up to someone’s expectations, but you also understand - we don’t cook ourselves) Anyway, a toaster is, first of all, not a meal, but knowledge and an opportunity to communicate with famous speakers:
And just chat
Increased concentration of gray sweatshirts:
During the conference, the lounge area was open all the time, where you could lie on ottomans and chat with friends. Thanks to the Reg.ru company, who fed us with popcorn and soldered them with cola!
After dinner we had the honor to see Konstantin Khaze, who was unable to attend live due to visa issues, but this did not stop him from giving a meaningful report on the history of Sinatra, how it was created and what the future holds for this wonderful project.
One of the most striking reports was from Joshua Calderimis:
Josh became the star of the .toaster {ruby}-conference - it immediately became clear that he intended not only to tell interesting details (regarding Travis CI), but also to put on a little show, raising the whole room to its feet.
A branded shirt, a smile and gorgeous slides on napkins will definitely be remembered by everyone for a long time, as well as the most convenient way to break a large product into its component parts, managing it in this form.
Douglas Campos, tired after the flight and unable to sleep at night due to the time difference, rested during the reports of his colleagues...
… but when it was his turn to take the stage and talk about JRuby, he visibly perked up. Coming out with a microphone, he literally began to bombard the hall with his short and energetic phrases - I think after Douglas' words, many again believed that JRuby is convenient, fast and efficient, that it should be used as a replacement for MRI.
Finally, the youngest speaker - Jonathan Layton, who is now only 22 years old and counting down the days until his next birthday, spoke about Active Record, which he was directly involved in developing as a member of the Rails Core team. John is a promising young man who went to college only because "it helps to better understand some mathematical and logical problems, but otherwise it is useless" 🙂 Of course, this was a joke on his part with some truth, but John actually produces the impression of a wise specialist who will soon take the place of CTO of a London startup. But I promised him not to divulge details, so I'll have to keep my word.
At the end of the conference, there was a traditional drawing of prizes - this time, in addition to gadgets from Yota and tickets for the next toaster, we played branded Habramike and our new board game "":
As a final note - after-party:
We hope you have a good impression of the conference .toaster {ruby} - we will definitely make another conference on Ruby, since now foreign guys are ready to help us.
The next .toast will be dedicated to JS and will be held on Friday, April 13 - do not miss our devil's show.
PS Special thanks to the guys from for help in preparing the conference program. By the way, they for development on Ruby on Rails, and for the participants of the conference they provided discount coupons that were in the packages of participants.
Source: habr.com