The Ruby community stands out among others due to being one of the most engaged ones in the engineering world. And Railsware simply could not miss one of the key events in 2018 – RubyC conference ran on June 2-3 in Kyiv, Ukraine.
This was the 5th RubyC, that gathered 350 Ruby enthusiasts from USA, UK, Germany, Serbia, Italy, Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus. Railsware was delighted to become a golden sponsor of the event.
Sharing Railsware Domain Knowledge on Building Products
One of the highlights of the event was a presentation by Railswarian Artur Hebda “Code is not important… or is it?”. Artur presented Railsware approaches to finding the balance between shaping product vision and writing the code. He spoke about how we address tech debt and prioritize tasks in a short- and long-term perspectives. We’ve shared the slides on Speakerdeck.com. 
Artur opened Day 2 (quite a challenge!), and efficiently collaborated with the audience. The presentation ended up with several interesting questions from the participants, and a discussion on that matter.
New Approach To Conference Participation Experience
We decided to create a new approach to collaborating with event attendees while being a sponsor. For this, our People and Marketing team designed #RWQUEST – a gamification activity leading a person towards proactive engagement with Railsware brand.
To win, #RWQUEST participants had to compete 4 simple steps:
- Make a photo in a Railsware Galaxy photozone with #RWQUEST hashtag, and post it to one of their social media accounts
- Read a story about Railsware products and solve 2 riddles based on it
- Complete a survey on the product creation experience
- Go on a STICKERS HUNT and gather the widest variety of RW stickers*
*all together, we had 41 different kinds of stickers
The user-friendly #RWQUEST leaflet served as a guide through the steps, and even had a pocket to store Railsware stickers.
The following targets were reached:
- Providing a better exposure to Railsware brand via social media
- Promoting RW products in a fun and engaging way
- Researching the Ruby community for product creation approaches and technologies
- Representing Railsware design via each single piece of gamification material
RubyC guests had an opportunity to win one of 3 main prizes – branded Railsware T-shirt, JBL portable speaker or Oculus Go standalone VR-headset (only 4 weeks after launch!). The final fight for the prizes was tough! Congratulations to the guys who made the final list of winners!
The results were inspiring. 12% of the RubyC audience were deeply engaged in our gamification (those who completed all of the quest steps). This does not count a much bigger number of event participants invited to join #RWQUEST. We have collected additional data for our product creation research (check the results here). Railsware social media posts showed a significant increase in reach (up to 40-50%).
Conclusion
We intended to make RubyC a valuable experience both for the conference guests, and for Railsware. By using the outstanding chance to collaborate closely with the Ruby community, our team gained new insights on what matters the most for the audience. One more advantage was receiving lots of valuable feedback on our products, and on applying Railsware approaches to different contexts.
We have networked with a large number of Ruby engineers and visionaries, sharing experience and presenting our domain knowledge, approaches and products we create. Railsware will definitely visit RubyC again next year. Looking forward to it! 