May 19, 2016

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RailsConf 2016 Recap

At Cerner, we love Ruby and Rails and use it prominently in our cloud based solutions. When we found out RailsConf 2016 was going to be held in the hometown of Cerner’s headquarters in Kansas City, Missouri, we were excited for the opportunity to support the conference by attending as well as being a sponsor and hosting one of the official after parties.

RailsConf 2016 took place in the heart of downtown Kansas City. From day one, the atmosphere was buzzing. We usually send a few engineers to RailsConf every year, but since it was in Kansas City, we were lucky enough to send 50+ engineers to soak up all of the knowledge and news that was being shared across three session-filled days.

We were a silver sponsor this year, which provided us with a booth space where we could share Cerner’s story with Rails developers from across the world.

In addition to meeting all of the wonderful Rails developers and getting the chance to tell them about Cerner and how we are huge into Rails, we also had some fun at our booth with some multiplayer gaming action…

…and our daily raffles. We gave away some some awesome BBQ from Joe’s KC and a Phantom 3 Professional drone. Congratulations to both winners.

And for even more fun, we hosted one of the official after parties after the closing Day 1 keynote at No Other Pub. During the party, RailsConf attendees got a chance to mingle and talk to our developers and architects in a casual setting…and the free food and drinks certainly made for a great time.

In addition to all of the fun, one of our distinguished engineers, Nathan Beyer, gave a talk about lessons we’ve learned using Rails at Cerner.

RailsConf 2016 was a great event, and the fact that it was in our backyard, was icing on the cake. We wish it would be held in Kansas City every year, but we are already looking forward to RailsConf 2017 in sunny Phoenix, AZ.

culture engineering
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