![\"America's](\"http:\/\/cms.peatix.com\/images\/blog\/blogsg_02_tenderlove.png\")
<\/p>\n\u201cAwesome! @tenderlove in the flesh!\u201d, exclaimed one tweet.\u00a0 If that makes you curious, this is how @tenderlove looks like:<\/p>\n
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But no, it is not quite what you are thinking.\u00a0 @tenderlove<\/a>, or rather Aaron Patterson, is a core team member of the Ruby programming language, and we were at the Red Dot Ruby Conference 2013<\/a>.\u00a0 Rubyists (or Ruby developers) form a tight-knit community.\u00a0 The open fanboy-like behaviour towards the most active contributors of Open Source projects of Ruby and Rails was just an expressive way of saying thanks.<\/p>\n Matz<\/a>, the person who conceived Ruby, meant for the language to help people \u201cenjoy programming and be happy.\u201d\u00a0 It comes as no surprise then that being lovely was the order of the day at the conference.\u00a0 Even before it was time for #FridayHug.\u00a0 Slides declared \u201cI <3 Ruby\u201d, a speaker compared himself to another speaker\u2019s cat and thank you tweets flooded @andycroll<\/a>, the person who kickstarted RDRC.\u00a0 Attendees were seen helping organisers restock drinks.\u00a0 There were lots of chuckles about an all-girls team hiring.\u00a0 When I briefly mentioned that the ticket price was high, two people immediately argued that it was easily the best value-for-money conference they ever go to.\u00a0 It almost seemed like the most negative behaviour was either grumbles that \u201clast year\u2019s food was better\u201d or a tweet campaign by speaker Akira Matsuda<\/a> to request for a debugger.<\/p>\n Why?\u00a0 After all, content is king, and the diversity of topics and strength of the speakers shone through.\u00a0 For 915am on Day 1, Aaron Patterson\u2019s talk that kicked off the conference was very technical.\u00a0 In contrast, Jim Weirich spoke on Code Kata, a simple but effective programming exercise that could be followed even by novices.\u00a0 There were lots of calls for attendees to try new things, like JRuby and EmberJS, leading to a half-joking remark that \u201cit wouldn\u2019t be a Ruby conference if we didn\u2019t talk about JavaScript.\u201d\u00a0 And in an existentialist moment, one speaker Paul Gallagher asked \u201cwill I still be a Rubyist in 5 years?\u201d<\/p>\n The most precious things are often the most fragile, and there is a strong sense that nobody takes for granted the strong sense of community that pervades Ruby and Red Dot Ruby Conference.\u00a0 At PeaTiX, we\u2019re here in Singapore to build a community of organisers, learn from them, but also push them to do better.\u00a0 We have lots to learn from RDRC and salute them for the wonderful event.<\/p>\n Image credits: America\u2019s Next Top Engineer<\/a>, RDRC\u2019s Flickr<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cAwesome! @tenderlove in the flesh!\u201d, exclaimed one tweet.\u00a0 If that makes you curious, this is how @tenderlove looks like: But no, it is not quite what you are thinking.\u00a0 @tenderlove, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":880,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6,12],"tags":[20],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eventblog.peatix.com\/experiences\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eventblog.peatix.com\/experiences\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eventblog.peatix.com\/experiences\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eventblog.peatix.com\/experiences\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eventblog.peatix.com\/experiences\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/eventblog.peatix.com\/experiences\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eventblog.peatix.com\/experiences\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/880"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eventblog.peatix.com\/experiences\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eventblog.peatix.com\/experiences\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eventblog.peatix.com\/experiences\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Man](\"http:\/\/cms.peatix.com\/images\/blog\/blogsg_02_neocat.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"#FridayHug\"](\"http:\/\/cms.peatix.com\/images\/blog\/blogsg_02_fridayhug.jpg\")
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