Bengaluru: RubyConf India 2011, hosted by ThoughtWorks, a global IT Consultancy on May 28th and 29th at the Royal Orchid Hotel, was a phenomenal success for the second year in a row. Over 400 delegates from 126 companies from around the world attended the event. Supported by Ruby Central and the Innovation and Technology Trust, the conference was sponsored by ThoughtWorks (Platinum & Technology Sponsor) and co-sponsored by Castle Rock Research India (Gold Sponsor), C42 Engineering, Heurion, Heroku and Allerin (Silver Sponsor). PCQuest was the official media partner.

Ruby is a dynamic programming language that offers an ideal development environment for Agile practitioners. It has one of the most active open source communities worldwide which produces and supports tools and projects like Ruby on Rails – a powerful web application development framework that works well on different platforms, and significantly reduces time-to-market and operating costs.

The Ruby community in India has grown considerably in the last few years. RubyConf India provided a platform for Ruby enthusiasts from across the country and from outside India to network, share ideas and learn from each other. This year, in an effort to encourage more people from other cities to attend RubyConf, ThoughtWorks secured reasonably priced accommodation for out-of-town attendees who needed a place to stay. They also provided free accommodation to women attendees from outside Bangalore who required it.

Talking about how it felt to be in India for RubyConf for the second time, speaker Nick Sieger said, “The passion and enthusiasm of the attendees at this year’s RubyConf was palpable, and it was heartening to see. Hopefully, this enthusiasm will be harnessed to ensure that the Ruby community in India grows and becomes stronger. I see next year’s RubyConf India being bigger and better than ever, and I look forward to seeing even more participation from the global community.”

The overarching theme of the conference was ‘community’. The two-day conference started on a high note with renowned Rubyist Yehuda Katz’s keynote address, “Building Rails Apps for the Rich Client”. This was followed by a diverse mix of talks by 26 speakers, including a videoconf keynote address by Chad Fowler, and a pre-recorded video presentation by Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, the creator of Ruby. The closing keynotes (both non-technical) by Chad Fowler on the first day, and Nick Sieger on the second day were extremely well received. Chad spoke about how important it is to provide good service to customers, and Nick spoke about Matz’s vision for a global and inclusive community, and the steps that can be taken to make this a reality.

Some of the most talked about sessions were Ola Bini’s keynote address on the evolution of Ruby over the last 18 years, Prateek Dayal’s presentation on Backbone.js, Yashasree Barve’s talk, “Rubyizing the Dev and Ops in an Enterprise”, and a very entertaining presentation by Brian Guthrie and Srushti Ambekallu on Continuous Delivery in Ruby.

Speaking about the community involvement at RubyConf India 2011, Ajey Gore, Head of Technology at ThoughtWorks India said, “The support from the Ruby community this time around was overwhelming. We had more speakers, more sponsors, and we received twice as many proposals as we did last year. With inspiring and enlightening talks by some of the best Rubyists from around the world, this was a tremendous learning opportunity for me and everyone at the conference. What really struck me was the diversity of the attendees and speakers – it truly was an international community event.”