Wolfpack Digital x Friendly.rb 2024 Conference: A Celebration of the Ruby Community

This year's edition of the Friendly.rb conference took place on September 18-19, 2024, in Bucharest, and we were thrilled to participate not just as attendees but also as partners in the event.

Adrian, our co-CEO, and Victor, our Head of Web Development, joined the two-day event and told us their impressions.

Now in its second edition, this annual Ruby conference provided an intimate setting for Ruby enthusiasts, developers, and thought leaders to connect, learn, and share ideas.

For us, the event was a fantastic opportunity to showcase our expertise in Ruby development, highlight the role of technology in our solutions, and reaffirm our dedication to the Ruby community.

About the Friendly.rb Conference

Friendly.rb is an event that brings the Ruby community together from all corners of the world. This conference is a melting pot of developers, experts, and enthusiasts who gather to share knowledge, network, and collaborate. It's the perfect occasion to showcase the latest trends, projects, and innovations within the Ruby ecosystem, and attendees had the unique opportunity to learn from industry leaders, share their own experiences, and connect with like-minded professionals.

The Friendly.rb venue & atmosphere

Friendly.rb took place once again in a charming, small theater in the city center of Bucharest. It was the perfect venue, providing an intimate and cozy atmosphere where over 100 attendees could fully engage with the speakers and each other. The choice of location allowed for closer interactions, creating a comfortable environment that fostered collaboration and networking.

Adrian Marin, the main organizer of the conference, took great care to ensure that all attendees had a memorable experience in Bucharest, even outside of the conference. He provided an insightful list of activities, restaurants, and local sights, making it easy for participants to take full advantage of the city during their stay. This added personal touch made Friendly.rb feel more than just a conference—it became an all-encompassing experience.

The Wolfpack Digital Booth: Connecting and Sharing Ideas in Web Development

One of the highlights for us was setting up our Wolfpack Digital booth in the networking room, where coffee, snacks, and conversations flowed freely. The booth became a natural hub for exchanging ideas and meeting new people. The atmosphere was casual yet vibrant, allowing us to engage with other Ruby enthusiasts, talk about the development tools we use, and discover common interests with fellow attendees.

The booth also gave us the chance to network with the conference speakers and learn more about their development processes, workflows, and projects. From casual chats over coffee to more in-depth technical discussions, it was an excellent opportunity to build relationships and gain new perspectives on the work being done in the Ruby community.

A Diverse Range of Talks

The talks over the two days covered various topics, ensuring that there was something for everyone and providing valuable insights that we could integrate into our day-to-day projects. If we look at the agenda, we saw some really interesting topics: "Invalid byte sequence in UTF-8" by Rosa Gutierrez, "OWASP Top 10 For Rails Developers" by Greg Molnar, "The 8-Second Nightmare: How One Change Reduced Latency by 99.9%" by Nabeelah Yousuph, "Ruby in the Billions" by Celso Fernandes, "SQLite on Rails: Everything you need to know" by Stephen Margheim, "Building for web and mobile in 2024: Production story and brighter future with Rails 8" by Hana Harencarova, "Fibonacci Funhouse" by Kyle d'Oliveira, "10 commandments and 7 deadly sins in 2025" by Yaroslav Shmarov, "A day in the life of 2,000 developers" by James Carr, "Embracing Uncertainty: Thriving in Complexity and Legacy Code" by Benjamin Wood, "Stop overthinking and go create things" by Olly Headey.

🎤 Victor, our Head of Web Development, also joined the stage and gave a talk on accessibility in web apps. He discussed the European Accessibility Act (which, by the way, starting June 2025, will be enforced on European customers facing tech products) and provided code examples of how developers can follow the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) standard for Accessibility.

Victor gave the audience some testing strategies, like using the Lighthouse Chrome tool or extension for accessibility reports, pally, which offers automated accessibility testing running on Node, and more and a few libraries like the accessibility library that catches accessibility errors, govuk-frontend-rails, for pretested accessible UI components and a11y-rails which offers an accessibility testing framework easy to add in CI/CD (In case you're seeing this for the first time and wondering what all this CI/CD is about, we have an article that explains it all). 

When asked to pick a favorite, it wasn't easy to choose just one, as each talk brought something unique to the table.

However, we were particularly impressed by the “SaaS Lessons Learned” talk given by Tom Rossi, our partner from Buzzsprout. Tom emphasized how to build a team and why using Rails helped with its mindset and trajectory. A lesson he learned along his journey was that every product needs to have a motto and to use it like a north star that will guide every action. For example, is adding new features worth the effort, or can it overcomplicate things?

Another great session was the one given by Julian Cheal, "Massively Multiplayer Ruby Game with the Dragon Ruby". He presented the Dragon Ruby, a game engine in Ruby, and showed the audience how easy it is to develop games using Ruby. He had two live demos with games he developed. He designed the interface for these games, wrote the business logic and the game engine in Dragon Ruby, and created a multiplayer option by calling a Rails server.

A Friendly, Engaged Ruby Community

What truly stood out for us at Friendly.rb was the sense of community. Ruby has always been known for its friendly and involved people, and this conference was a testament to that. The smaller, intimate setting made networking feel more natural, and countless ideas emerged from conversations with other attendees. We walked away from the event with a list of new gems and tools we're eager to explore, many of which were created by people we met at the conference.

The event also highlighted the ongoing efforts to grow the Ruby community in Romania. The Friendly.rb team, along with a group of dedicated volunteers, are working hard to build a vibrant Ruby ecosystem through regular meetups and the Ruby Romania platform. It's exciting to see the community take shape, and we look forward to getting more involved in future initiatives.

A Partnership Built on Passion for Ruby

Partnering with Friendly.rb this year has been a memorable experience for us. Not only did it allow us to contribute to an event that celebrates Ruby, but it also gave us the chance to share our own experiences and connect with like-minded developers. Adrian, our co-CEO, and Victor, our Head of Web Development, left Bucharest inspired and ready to implement the new learnings and ideas they gained.
We have one of the largest Ruby communities in Transylvania at Wolfpack Digital, and we take pride in our expertise in developing apps and pushing the boundaries of what Ruby can achieve.

Why do we love Ruby on Rails so much? 💎

Well, there are a few answers to that:

Ruby on Rails is developer-friendly - The syntax is as close to English as possible, and it is easy to learn, read, and follow. Additionally, the Rails conventions make it easy for developers to move between different Rails projects - so it is extremely easy to handover a project, especially from the agency side, to the client or from a team to another one within the same company, and to add people to your team without breaking the code on the go.

Enhances fast development and prototyping - With Rails, you can focus on your business logic rather than spend time with configuration and building layer after layer in your architecture. This makes the development process faster, no matter how complex your web product will be. 

Ruby on Rails is a mature framework - The framework is established over time, with a great community and clear convention over configuration. Another advantage of its maturity is that it usually solves issues that other frameworks don’t and offers guidelines and principles that help business - e.g., DRY (don’t repeat yourself) or time and cost-efficiency.

It has a business-oriented approach - Ruby on Rails helps the development team focus on the problem the web app is trying to solve and ensures the framework is used to get the work done most efficiently. With this approach, you can easily scale your business over time, refactor, or add new things to the product without being blocked by the technical side.

If you want to learn more about Ruby on Rails, we have a few blog posts on this topic. 

Conclusion

As we look ahead, we're excited to continue supporting events like Friendly.rb, strengthening our ties with the global Ruby community, and developing powerful web applications using Ruby on Rails. 

We're encouraging you to check the projects we have developed using Ruby on Rails over our 9 years of experience, and if you have an idea for a project, you can contact us here.