I've been living in Kitchener for over an year and in the first time I attended to the ruby workshop I created my first PR to Rails 🎉

It was quite simple of course, but in that workshop I've learned that it's not that hard to do open source. Eventually I found a small problem in Rails and I created another PR.

Then I started doing more open source in projects that I was using at work like viscacha, sprockets, lightline.vim, tabulous PR #1 and #2, vscode-run-rspec-file and hopefully this list is only going to grow overtime.

In other ruby workshops, it was really nice to be able to help other people's projects.

The meetup when Jay El-Kaake gave a talk about how to make Rails faster than the speed of light was really interesting, I've learned a few things on how to do speed tests, how to reduce latency when connecting to your app/postsgresql/redis and much more!

In the workshop focused on Hacktoberfest I helped a developer to participate and I decided to participate myself which was great. 🌟

I missed the talk about Rails and Docker, that was a shame, I wish I could have made for that one.

In the Career, Business and Software Development talk by Martin Basiri I've learned one thing or two about the business side of tech companies. He also talked about his first endeavor which was earphones that made it easier to untangle their cable - 4 seconds less than others - and how it failed when wireless earphones got popular.

It was quite inspiring to see so many students and developers asking interesting questions in the Building a Career in Technology talk by Rob Sciuk and Ralph Janke.

Not all meetups are very productive, but the last one of 2019 was really special and this is why:

• I talked to someone who was new to Ruby, did the classic blog tutorial
• I did open source by working on an issue to automate the deployment of the KWRuby's website.
• we talked about Elixir, pattern matching and Declan gave us a lesson -- almost a talk by itself -- on aspects of the Erlang's OTP
• we talked about new things comming up to Ruby like pattern matching on ruby 2.7
• and there were lots of Pizza 🍕

Definitely one of the best ruby workshops. So many things happened in just one meetup.

Big thanks to Andrew, the person behind this group and all the people who have helped him.

If you are in Kitchener/Waterloo I strongly recommend you to attend a few times to the KWRuby meetup. If not in the area, try to see if there are groups in your city. It's totally worthy.