Baruco is my excuse for the yearly pilgrimage to Barcelona.

It’s always a great pleasure coming back and the conference program is excellent, ram-packed with really really good talks.

Truthfully, it’s just sheer pleasure to be able to sit back and watch a few talks without having to get up and run to prepare the next speaker ;).

The organisation is very good and having gone through the ordeal with the EuRuKo team I’ll just ignore any small faux-pas and smile. Kudos to the team for a job (very) well done. And guys…nobody expects the Wi-Fi to work.

Matz, Sandi Metz, Katrina Owen, Avdi Grimm, Chris Kelly, Matt Wynne…ok, I won’t list the whole line up. The talks were great, the discussions in the breaks and the party even better and getting to meet up with old friends and acquaintances is…priceless.

One thing I would have done differently (well, we did do differently at EuRuKo) would be to stretch the intervals a bit more, to give people more time to talk between talks. But it’s a delicate balance and the chosen format puts more talks on offer which is also great.

I managed to squeeze a lightning talk (I even have slides for it) on the two principles a team needs to follow when setting up it’s project development environment.

There’s two talks I would add to the show-to-every-one-because-it-explains-things-better-than-you-ever-will category. These are Sandi Metz’s “Rules” and Corey Haine’s “Design Patterns And The Proper Cultivation Thereof”.

For sheer win-win in entertainment and knowledge I’ll push Katrina Owen’s “Here be Dragons” and to start a spirited discussion I’ll just show you Reg Braithwaite’s “What Developing With Ruby Can Teach Us About Developing Ruby”.

If an outsider ever drops in for a visit at a Ruby conference he might get the impression that Rubyists keep patting themselves on the back and congratulating themselves on what a great, friendly and welcoming community they have. And he might leave with a slight “puff, them Rubyists think too much off themselves”. That would be a mistake. The community is this language’s strongest feature. The people are approachable, open minded, hard working and knowledgable. They will go out of their way to welcome new members and are generous with their time and knowledge.

Every Ruby conference I have been to has been a pleasure and an inspiration mainly because of the people attending and Baruco was no exception. It was rather a very nice confirmation of the rule :).