Being a Ruby developer in Oz

Andrew GrimmPre-Sapporo RubyKaigiTokyo meetup

Outline

Ruby events in AustraliaMeetups

Hack nights

Railscamps

Rubyconf au

Working in Australia

Living in Australia

Ruby events in Australia

Meetup groups

Ruby (or|on) Rails Oceania

Major cities have monthly meetups

Aim is for 3 talks (@ 15 mins) and 3 LT (@ 5 mins)And drinking

Some cities also have meetups on other topics such as Javascript, functional programming or python

Hack nights

Held every month in Sydney

Sometimes have theme

Sometimes people suggest topics on the night

Try to collaborate

Railscamps

Held twice a year

Hacking, talks, including showing off what you worked on during the weekend

Drinking, werewolf, card games, settlers of Catan, obstacle courses, and drinking

By far the most regular railscamps in the worldMaybe we like drinking!

Rubyconf au

Held next year for first time

Call for proposals currently open

Please submit a proposal!

Working in Australia

Pay

Good news: Australian economy has not suffered like America, Europe and Japan. We're in the middle of a resources boom.

Bad news: Real estate (and cost of living) is very expensive

Foreigners working in Australia

Several RORO attendees are from foreign countries

Some people have encountered problems with bureaucracy

Others have found Australia much better than elsewhere

Country of origin shouldn't be a problem outside of academia

Academia may recognise some universities more than others

Work culture

Smaller programming scene (but less competition)

Smaller startup scene

Living in Australia

Egalitarian society

Australia sees itself as a very egalitarian society

Customers ride in the front of taxis

We don't tip (Japan doesn't tip, but we don't tip because we're too rude, Japan doesn't tip because they're too polite)

One of the oldest democracies in the world

America got the puritans, while we got the convictsWe joke we got the better part of the deal

Attitudes towards Japanese people

As good as the attitudes of most western countries towards nihonjin

Australia has lots of migrants from lots of countries, so you won't stick out

Deadly wildlife

We do have a wide variety of interesting wildlifeEven male platypuses are venomous!

But the risk for someone sipping a latte in Sydney is pretty low