I had a fantastic time this year at RubyConf in Nashville! This year, I committed to trying out sketchnoting, or visual note-taking. I had a great time at Write/Speak/Code this past August at Denise Yu's excellent workshop "Telling stories with doodles" and have been meaning to experiment ever since!

Other sketchnoters I highly admire:

• Chiu-Ki Chan
• Nitya Narasimhan
• Amruta Renade

Here's a selection of my notes from the conference:

Principles of Awesome APIs and How to Build Them

Keavy McMinn
Excellent presentation on API development best practices!

ElasticSearch 5 or and Bust!

[Deleted User]

Molly's talk walked us through an ElasticSearch upgrade gone awry - and the recovery process.

OOP in Pictures

Ivan Nemytchenko
Nemytchenko's presentation detailed creating and using a visual language to teach OOP concepts -- with robots!

Ruby & Sentiment Analysis

Ben Greenberg
Ben demonstrated how to use free tools to create an app that tells you the "mood" of the news for the day.

What Happens when a Linguist Learns to Code?

Erica Sosa
Erica gave an overview of her journey from linguistics to programming, as well as going over the concepts that language learners in both fields deal with.

Fixing Performance and Memory Problems

Frederick Cheung
Frederick's talk led us through the process of finding sneaky memory leaks and gave us tools for hunting down the culprits.

Fun, Friendly Computer Science

Mercedes Bernard
Mercedes walked us through several key computer science concepts in an approachable way -- very helpful for interviews!

Late, Over Budget, and Happy

Amy Newell & Nat Budin
I very much enjoyed Amy and Nat's heartfelt and honest presentation of the lessons they learned during a skunkworks project.

Lucky You

Sandi Metz
Sandi dropped a ton of data on us for the third day's keynote, reminding us how very lucky we are to be in software - and how the demographic someone is born into is even more important than luck.