Disclaimer: This article consist of my brutally honest review about Ruby Conf India 2015, If you are prone to depression, heart attack while reading criticism, please STOP reading this letter now and move on.
I know organizers worked hard to organize this event and I thank you for that but this does not mean I am happy with the way it was organised. I have complaints, so do lots of people I know. Someone has to raise voice, for now I am taking this responsibility.
1. Why Discriminate ?
I was given accommodation in Justa-panjim while most of the conf attendees were in Cidade-goa, those two hotel are incomparable. Justa-panjim didn't have enough water for bathing, forget about swimming pool, beach.
I didn't had complained if everyone was given accommodation in Justa-panjim, Yes I am being jealous here..!!! I paid conf fees(lite tickets.. yes thats how early I booked my ticket.) and I deserve to be treated equally , why discriminate ?
2. Where's Ruby ?
In some of talks, I was wondering if this is ruby conf. If I go to ruby conf, I expect talk related to ruby and not about Hadoop, web component etc. If I want to know about Hadoop , I will go to hadoop conference.
3. Talks or Tutorials ?
You can teach how to write your own Active Record and use React in Rails project (without knowing why to do that) in 20 minutes, but it does not help anyone. I don't know if you actually care if someone learns from your talk or not. If you do care then you must know that I am attending conference to know about your experience of writing new Active Record, why you needed new Active Record and what challenges you faced, similarly I am interested in knowing why and when I should use reactjs in my rails project and what made you use reactjs instead of writing rails views ?
Lastly I want to mention 2 talks which I enjoyed
i) Aggrobot - go fetch me an aggregation By: Shadab Ahmed
ii) Talk by Bryan Helmkamp
Hoping to see talks like these in future ruby conferences.
I know organizers worked hard to organize this event and I thank you for that but this does not mean I am happy with the way it was organised. I have complaints, so do lots of people I know. Someone has to raise voice, for now I am taking this responsibility.
1. Why Discriminate ?
I was given accommodation in Justa-panjim while most of the conf attendees were in Cidade-goa, those two hotel are incomparable. Justa-panjim didn't have enough water for bathing, forget about swimming pool, beach.
I didn't had complained if everyone was given accommodation in Justa-panjim, Yes I am being jealous here..!!! I paid conf fees(lite tickets.. yes thats how early I booked my ticket.) and I deserve to be treated equally , why discriminate ?
2. Where's Ruby ?
In some of talks, I was wondering if this is ruby conf. If I go to ruby conf, I expect talk related to ruby and not about Hadoop, web component etc. If I want to know about Hadoop , I will go to hadoop conference.
3. Talks or Tutorials ?
You can teach how to write your own Active Record and use React in Rails project (without knowing why to do that) in 20 minutes, but it does not help anyone. I don't know if you actually care if someone learns from your talk or not. If you do care then you must know that I am attending conference to know about your experience of writing new Active Record, why you needed new Active Record and what challenges you faced, similarly I am interested in knowing why and when I should use reactjs in my rails project and what made you use reactjs instead of writing rails views ?
Lastly I want to mention 2 talks which I enjoyed
i) Aggrobot - go fetch me an aggregation By: Shadab Ahmed
ii) Talk by Bryan Helmkamp
Hoping to see talks like these in future ruby conferences.
We hear you Anil!
ReplyDelete1. Regarding accommodation -- There was no discrimination. We knew we could count on the support from people from companies the organisers knew well. We needed 20 more rooms which Cidade could not provide. We chose JusTa because it was the closest hotel that we could manage with. You were sent an email, /CC'ed to your company head regarding this. Thanks for your support and understanding.
2 & 3. Opinion about the talks is very subjective and we appreciate your candid view. We never expect everyone at the conference to like / dislike every talk. We try to get as much variety as possible as long as it's related to Ruby / Rails and tools that the Indian Ruby community use in their jobs.
In my opinion - take a walk to the other side too!
+ Submit a talk
+ Get involved in organising the conference to make it better (the way you would love to see it happen)!
Quick note: It's easy to criticise but when you are on the other side, you may see a different picture. Trust me - I have done both (criticise and organise a conference) ;)
- Gautam
(Added as Unknown, only because I am too lazy to login)