Yozu in Amsterdam – Rails World 2023 Conference

It’s conference season in the tech space, and we sent our Lead Developer Chris Moore to Rails World 2023 in Amsterdam!

Rails World is a new Ruby on Rails conference organised by The Rails Foundation, bringing together over 700 Rails enthusiasts. It features technical talks, demos, workshops, networking, and keynotes about the latest features and best practices relevant to the Rails community.

The 2023 event was held over October 5th and 6th at Beurs van Berlage, and Chris has been kind enough to share his experiences of the trip.

Was there a lot of buzz about the event?

Absolutely! Rails World 2023 was the inaugural conference organised by the newly formed Rails Foundation, marking one of the first major Rails conferences since the COVID-19 pandemic, which saw many events cancelled.

The excitement in the community surrounding new technologies like Turbo, Strada, and Kamal, drove interest in sharing and discussing these innovations with attendees during conference talks.

With limited ticket availability, they quickly sold out in just 45 minutes!

What content really stood out for you?

All the talks from the event are available on the Ruby on Rails YouTube channel, so I’d encourage people to take a look.I was particularly interested in Jay Ohms’ section, “Strada: Bridging the web and native worlds,” and Joe Masilotti’s talk, “Just enough Turbo Native to be dangerous.”

Both covered different aspects of how Turbo Native can be used to create native-feeling mobile applications that are driven by a Rails web application. Developers can create mobile apps with full-feature parity to their web versions, essentially for free, and then progressively enhance them with native features where appropriate. I’m excited to try these techniques in my own projects.

Overall, something that truly stood out was the enthusiasm for the future of Rails, both as a framework and a community. All the talks and attendees were brimming with ideas on how to leverage Rails to create applications in the most efficient manner possible.

Finally, of course, the freshly baked stroopwafels provided by AppSignal left a lasting impression!

Why do you believe these conferences are beneficial for the Rails developer community?

The Rails World 2023 conference was exceptionally beneficial – it provided an opportunity to establish a road map for the future, focusing on what people love about Rails – the ability to empower small teams to develop rich web applications quickly and efficiently.

How does attending conferences like Rails World 2023 support your role at Yozu?

For me personally, attending Rails World was a tremendous opportunity to exchange ideas with fellow developers and meet members of the community whom I’ve admired for a long time. It also allowed me to raise the profile of Yozu, with the hope of connecting with other Rails developers who might be interested in joining us to shape the future of Ruby on Rails.

For more information about our available development vacancies – or a career at Yozu – please visit the Yozu Careers website