Rails Summit is the annual conference for the Ruby and Ruby on Rails communities, the largest in Latin America. The first edition took place in October 15th and 16th of 2008 and had 21 international speakers. It was 2 full days, with 2 parallel sessions and lots of knowledge exchange about agile software development.

The conference was organized by Locaweb, having more than 550 attendees. The blogsphere reaction was very enthusiastic and, because of that, we are doing it once again with the second edition.

Ruby on Rails

The Ruby on Rails web framework was created in 2004 by the danish programmer David Heinemeir Hansson (DHH), currently a partner at the renowned web 2.0 company, 37signals. His idea was to create a set of technologies to ease a developer’s work while creating dynamic and interactive web applications, with quality and sustainable maintainability. For that end, he chose the Ruby language, created by the japanese engineer Yukihiro Matsumoto (Matz), back in 1993. This language is inspired by others such as Smalltalk, Perl, Lisp and brings in a mixture of paradigms, making for a lean, fluent and, specially, rewarding language to work with.

Adding the Ruby language with all the accumulated knowledge on web development that we gathered in the recent years, Ruby on Rails brings the most moderns concepts of software engineering. The Ruby on Rails community grew very fast, creating a very rich and diverse ecossystem, obsessed by quality and always walking forward into new technologies, not only restricting oneself to just Ruby, but also experimenting with CouchDB, Erlang, Git, and more.

The Brazilian Ruby community started to organize back in 2006 and also grew rapidly. It is still a niche market, but many agile companies are already taking advantage on the leverage that the community has already delivered.

Whom is this event for?

This is a technical conference, therefore we assume that every attendee has a background in software development, such as programmers, technical leaders, teachers or even project managers or decision makers with knowledge in software programming. This is an excellent opportunity for companies to reach the best programmers in the market, in the same way this is an important moment for the community to tighten its bonds of relationship.

More than just technology, it is very important to understand the Ruby community culture, therefore, if you’re getting yourself started in Ruby and Rails, this is also an excellent opportunity to get in touch with senior developers and learn the Ruby way properly. Bring your notebook, look for known people, share code, exchange ideas, experience new techniques.

This is a unique opportunity to meet some of the biggest names in the international Ruby community.