Last week happened the biggest Ruby-related conference in Latin America, RubyConf Brazil. Our team was present in this edition, which by the way, was particularly interesting, therefore I’d like to share some highlights.

The first highlight comes from the night before the event. We went to a bar with some conference speakers. It was really fun to chat with everyone there. Besides, Serdar Doğruyol, who talked about the Crystal framework called Kemal, brought us a box of Turkish Delights. And when I say “delights”, I mean it :yum:.

During the event, I made new friends and met old ones. I had great conversations about hiring, team building, technologies and mainly Ruby and Elixir. It is very clear that the community is more mature than ever.

Talking about Elixir, this year there were a high number of languages being talked about. As I could list, I’ve seen talks about Clojure, Crystal, JavaScript, Go, Ruby and Elixir.

Another thing that caught my attention was the large number of people trying Elixir in Brazil. I was even more surprised to know that a lot of them already have production-running apps. Here are some interesting talks about Elixir:

• 10 things I’ve learned in my first Phoenix + Elixir Project (a Rubyist point of View), by Fabiano Beselga
• Building a Twitter clone with Phoenix and Vue.js, by Philip Sampaio
• Measuring your Elixir application, by Renan Ranelli (Milhouse)
• How Elixir helped us scale our video user profile service for the Olympics, by Emerson Macedo
• Phoenix for Rubyists, by Mike North
• Elixir dev to prod: challenges encountered, by Guilherme Nogueira

In addition, eight coworkers from Plataformatec spoke at the event. Some about Ruby, some about Elixir and some about development process and culture. I’d like to greet them and also list their talks:

• From ASP.NET to Rails: the best parts, by Philippe Hardardt
• How does Rails Work?, by Flavia Fortes
• How to fix projects, by Wesley Zapellini
• Rails 5 and its new features by examples, by Yoshio Teruia
• Debugging Techniques in Elixir, by Erich Kist (this talk was presented in English in last ElixirConf)
• You’re not alone, go to production with Elixir, by Igor Florian
• Ruby on Rails Security: common faults and some not so obvious, by Diego Viera
• The Zen and Art of Refactoring, by Lucas Mazza

Also, I am very excited to say that Ebert, the first Plataformatec product, went public during the event. I am very happy we made it. It’s a tool we’ve been using internally and for our clients, which now is available for everyone.

Ebert has helped our team by doing continuous static analysis on GitHub repositories and delivering it straight to Pull Request. By automating some checks, it allowed us to focus on important issues. If you haven’t checked it yet, give it a try.

The last highlight is that Fabio Akita will not be part of the conference organization anymore. That said, Locaweb already twitted that the event will continue next year.

Well, that’s all for now. I hope you’ve enjoyed the event as much as we did. Tell us your thoughts on the comments below!