Balkan Ruby '25 - The long term

I love traveling! It's a fact. I like traveling to different places and meeting different people. Conferences make that possible and more interesting because the people I will meet will most likely have something in common with me.

Balkan Ruby is one of those events where I feel like at home. It might be the proximity to my country and all of that but I have a feeling that the people have something to do with it.

The theme this year was "For the long term" so the talks were about that.

Andrey started the conference with a very great conversation-starter talk about coding with privacy in mind where he outlined how our personal data can be so easily linked together from different sources, so the easiest way to protect the data is to not record it.

Pawel who started building apps "since the last century" showed us that even an "old dog" (sorry Pawel) can learn new tricks.

He openly admitted in front of a bunch of developers that he vibe codes from time to time and he enjoys it. Them proceeded to demo a voice-operated dog that listens to commands. What's that all about?

Bohzidar, after about 10 minutes of jokes and puns spoke about the beginnings of Ruby and how it influenced the whole programming community from Homebrew and Markdown all the way to how modern package managers work. It was quite a crazy story.

Yaro’s talk was about how AI is influencing our developer lives, about how it can help in the day to day work and most importantly why each one of us should pick it up so we are not left behind.

Julia had a very nice talk about how they do things at Harvest. She talked about the Rails pre-1 version codebase, the Delta Force team but also about a few "this is the last things, I promise..." 🤨 other ways she improves the codebase and why we leave the codebase better than we found it.

Jeremy gave an incredible overview about how he escaped limbo and refactored two of his projects with the utmost precision. Almost made me feel bad about my coding techniques 🫣

There were other great talks that covered mental health, coping, improving and just having a better outlook on the work-life balance.

I really can't recommend it enough that you go and watch the videos when they'll come out.

The theme was "For the long term" but the hallway conversations were around AI.

"Why, why now, why me, should we, will we, will it" and so much more questions around that.

I loved that the conversations went in both directions ranging from "I'm not using it", or "I don't like it", to "I use Cursor" or "Windsurf is better", all the way to "I really tried vibe coding and I think there's something there."

I gained a lot of perspective on where things stand and where they are going so if you want my take on AI and coding... definitely use it! It's a whole spectrum between "vibe code all the things" to not using it. First use a smart IDE like Cursor and then try a bit of vibe coding to build boring stuff like bash scripts, tedious tasks or even prototypes to get a feel for how the project could look like.

We didn't just attend Balkan Ruby, but we made a whole thing about it.

Me and Paul did a few days of in-person retreat, where we spoke about the future of Avo and did a bit of coding alongside that.

We also were in the position to sponsor the drinks 🍻 for the entire conference which was so rewarding.

Balkan quickly became that event where we could go, hang out, make plans, execute, but also connect with the community, make new friends and learn in the process.

Genadi and the team did a great job this year too. I hope they continue that for many more years to come so if you're looking for a cool event in the spring, definitely think about visiting Balkan Ruby.