At Treatwell, we use Ruby, and like all popular programming languages, there are conferences all around the world. One of those conferences takes place near our Italian headquarters; what a great opportunity!

Treatwell team @ RubyDay 2023

RubyDay takes place annually in the north of Italy, in the beautiful city of Verona, and GrUSP organizes it.

Both as developers and as a company, we have participated in previous editions, and it’s always a pleasure to attend the talks and an amazing occasion to meet old (and new) friends of the Ruby community!

Participation was a must

As a team of 12 Ruby developers, many of whom live in Italy, it was too good an opportunity to miss, so as soon as tickets were on sale, we started our journey for it!

The plan was to participate as a team representing Treatwell. So, we quickly gathered information about who wanted to participate in order to secure tickets and organize the logistics for transportation and accommodations.

Sponsorship

Since the community participation was supposed to be great, we asked the company to be a conference sponsor, which had the potential to bring visibility and value to both of them.

There were several sponsorship levels and after discussing with our finance team and tech leaders, we opted to go as Platinum Sponsor, which turned out to be the conference’s most prestigious sponsorship level!

Spread the brand

Being a sponsor allowed us to boost the brand awareness of Treatwell, and to better accomplish that we designed a unique range of branded merchandise.

We worked closely with our brand and design teams, and the outcome was amazing. At the end, we had custom flyers, gadgets, stickers, and t-shirts, branded for the RubyDay conference!

The talk

As we were coordinating all of this, a thought came to our minds:
Is it enough to attend the conference with the whole team and be a sponsor? Could we do more than that?
Sure, we can propose our own talk!

Finding the topic

Finding a relevant topic that would captivate the audience, while not revealing too much about our internal operations, wasn’t an easy task, but we found it.

It’s quite challenging to step into the role of an external observer and recognize the significance of many daily activities within the team and the project, which could hold value when shared.

We developed an extension of RuboCop (a widely used code formatter and linter for Ruby) to help identify a potential code logic issue, and we spent a generous amount of time understanding how to do it.

If a simple guide with real case examples existed, it would have been easier…

So we decided to share with the community what we had learned about this.

The speaker

I volunteered myself as the speaker, and although I had some apprehension as this would be my first time presenting at a conference, I thought it was an opportunity that was worth pursuing.

To start, I prepared a presentation which I presented in the periodic ceremony we had to share technical initiatives. The audience was represented by the tech teams at Treatwell who are interested in this kind of showcase and I received good feedback, both on the topic and on the presentation itself.

Submitting the paper

As in many tech conferences, there’s a phase known as the “call for papers”, during which individuals can submit proposals for talks, and if accepted, will be scheduled in the conference tracks.

I had no luck at the beginning; my submission wasn’t accepted. I must confess that this made me quite sad at first, but I quickly returned to daily tasks and continued with the preparations for the conference on behalf of the entire team.

About one month before the conference we received an email from GrUSP asking if I was still interested in the talk because they had received a cancellation. I was over the moon, a bit anxious, but definitively happy!

I promptly accepted and started working on my presentation which needed to be ready in less than a month.

Prepare, expose, fix, repeat

The design team provided me with a presentation template incorporating our company’s colors, themes, and logos. I worked with them to craft a tech brand logo to be used for this conference, with the hope that it will be used a lot in future events.

I went through multiple iterations of the presentation: I started with the one used internally and I started optimizing, made important topics clear, and adapted it to be projected in the conference room.

Colors and font sizes really matter, as well as keeping slides simple in order to let the audience follow your voice while looking at them. Several people helped me with that, and I’m very thankful to them.

In the days leading up to the conference, I repeated my talk many times, every time fixing little things and keeping an eye on the timing in order to fit in the proper length and leave some space for questions. My team was a valuable resource in this process, as they listened to the practice sessions and provided feedback.

Verona, here we come!

The conference took place on 16th June 2023 in Verona, and I went there the day before to meet the other speakers at the “Speakers dinner”.

It was only during that dinner that I realized I was at the same table as Bozhidar Batsov, the creator of RuboCop! The organization process that I followed during the last months must have been so intense that missed that detail! Anyway, I took the chance to introduce myself to him and we spent some time talking together: I definitely enjoyed it.

My talk was the second one on the schedule, so I had enough time to get nervous and prepare myself for the show!

I enjoyed every second of the talk, which raced by due to a touch of anxiety, despite a lot of speaker notes where I wrote to myself: “SLOW DOWN”.

In the end, it went very well! I also survived a question from the RuboCop creator!

Team building

The conference served as an excellent team-building experience, we spent the whole day together and also had dinner in a nice restaurant in the evening.

Working remotely obviously limits sociality, but on this kind of occasion, you definitely enjoy every moment spent together and give the team some well-deserved fresh air!

To the next one!

As soon as the video recordings are available, I will update this article with it.

For now, I really wanted to thank everyone who helped make this dream come true!