I attended Railscamp 2016 in Wellington NZ last weekend. Just wanted to collect a couple of notes on some stuff I saw there.

• The location was YMCA Camp Kaitoke, which was a really awesome venue. There was a lot of really awesome beer from local breweries too! Really good other drinks and stuff. Just above is a view from the deck of the main area.
• Saw an interesting talk by @raquelxmoss about “Creating a welcoming space for beginners”, she wrote up some notes here: http://www.raquelmoss.com/creating-a-welcoming-space-for-beginners/
• I got a chance to have a chat with Raquel about increasing diversity in the programming/IT/Tech industry. I realize that I am bad at this and would like to help (well, atleast not scare away women from learning and/or being included in technology stuff). Raquel also linked me to really useful resource here: http://conference.hopper.org.nz/ which I must study soon.
• Saw a really interesting talk from @terrcin about “Monday Madness! or Why we don’t use Scrum, and what we do instead”. He ran the same talk for the Auckland Ruby meetup, which I was unable to make it to due to something coming up last minute. That was a shame, but I’m looking forward to seeing slides soon as I thought there were a bunch of really awesome ideas there.
• There was a strong interest in Elixir and Phoenix. On the last night the question was asked: “Who has worked on or thought about Elixir/Phoenix stuff this weekend” with approximately ¹⁄₃ of the room putting up their hands. Maybe we are going to see a mass surge in use soon… I think aside from Machine Learning, Elixir is the next thing I want to learn - it has a lot of really interesting stuff, and seems really pretty easy to learn and understand. Also thee were a few talks about it, like this from Nigel who works for AddressFinder: http://blog.addressfinder.com.au/post/141506070132/elixir-new-tool-in-the-toolkit
• Warewolf (the game) was extremely popular, and many games were played. I think Railscamp is a little bit of a misnomer, maybe something like “Beer and Warewolf camp” might be more accurate. It was really a great time.
• The Ruby NZ AGM was held - that was kind of interesting. Cool to see a proper organization that “fosters and supports the Ruby programming language, its users and community in New Zealand”.
• Also - Art of Railscamp
• Couple random pictures on Flickr here: https://www.flickr.com/groups/2957873@N23/
• There are many more things I’m forgetting.

So as a full time Go developer now with very little to do with Ruby, why did I go to Railscamp? Because the Ruby community is awesome. I definitely want to go to future events! Thanks to the organisers and everyone else for making it a great long weekend.

TODO: Think about starting a Railsn00bs meetup in Auckland.