Tropical.rb, an intimate experience that brought the whole LATAM Ruby community together

I'm still in Brazil, but I have that feeling that "it's over". It's that feeling you get after you had the most wonderful time on a getaway with friends, and you forgot the monotony of work and life.

Tropical.rb was a surprise to me. The Brazil Ruby community was surprise too! They are more than welcoming; they go out of their way to make you feel at home.

So many friendly people came together to celebrate Rails at LATAM's largest Rails conference, and what a celebration it was!

The talks

The best speakers you can think of came together to share their experiences with the audience.
The talks were about all that's trendy and relevant now and probably some things that we'll hear about in the future. We've had talks that eloquently taught and reminded folks about how to write clean code and refactor technical debt, talks about how to give back to the community and keep Rails going for 100 years from now, but also about internationalization, semantic search, async Rails, and red-black trees (whatever those are). Hotwire and Turbo Native had their spotlight on the stage, as did WASM, Kamal, Thruster, and Propshaft.
I felt a bit out of place with my "How to build a business on Rails and Open-Source" talk, but the reactions and conversations I had afterward confirmed my suspicion that more and more Rails developers want to break out of the nine-to-five job and try something new.

We also had a great AMA session hosted by Robbie Russel with Amanda and Bruno Miranda. So many valuable ideas came out of that conversation that I would suggest everyone watch when it comes out.

Organization

The organizers did a splendid job of ensuring everyone had a good time. You could see the smiles on everyone's faces. They had surprises for the attendees, one after another.
Even if we didn't stick to the schedule, no part of it felt rushed. We all wanted to be in it and enjoyed the experience.

I made friends

On a personal note, I made friends. So many new and close friends. Close to my heart but far geographically.
But it's okay; I have a hunch that we'll see each other again and relive all that we felt in São Paulo.

I also met many online friends from Twitter and Discord in person, many of whom were with me on my journey with Avo.

Thank you!

Thank you, Cirdes, Débora, Juliana, and Rafael, for hosting this incredible celebration of Rails. I know it was scary and risky to bring back Tropical. rb after all these years, but it was all worth it!
Good job!

But I want to thank the wonderful Ruby community in Brazil and LATAM, which made me feel like I was home when I was so far away.

This community rocks!

PS: You can follow my "live-tweet" session here.