About

Helsinki Ruby Brigade is Finland’s premiere Ruby User Group. Whether you’re just curious about Ruby or are a wizard at it, everyone is welcome.

If you’d like to host a meet-up or if you have an idea for a talk, please get in touch with use either through our Meetup page or email. Talk ideas can also be submitted through our Sessionize page.

Give a talk?

We’re always looking for potential talks for meet-ups. Finding a talk or two is usually the hardest part of putting together a meet-up.

A talk at a meet-up doesn’t need to be especially long or polished, so if you have even an inkling of an idea for a topic that might yield a talk, please don’t hesitate to get in touch, even if it’ll only make for a 5-minute lightning talk.

Some evergreen topics for talks are:

• What’s new in Rails version X?
• What’s new in Ruby version Y?
• How to use that cool library you recently discovered?
• How you solved an interesting problem at work?

For the first time in our history, we recorded and published talks from the May 2023 meet-up, and will probably do so again in the future. However, if you’re giving a talk you’ll always have the option to not have your talk recorded or published, no questions asked.

Hosting a meet-up

We’re always on the prowl for new hosts.

Hosting a meet-up is fairly easy and low effort for the most part. There are a couple of ways that meet-ups are hosted, usually:

1. Host it at your offices. This is usually a nice option for companies based in Helsinki. All that is required is seating, a projector or TV, and your choice of drinks, snacks, or food.
2. Arrange a meet-up at a bar or pub or other event venue. Many bars have private cabinets that can be reserved at little or no cost, just make sure that they have a projector available for talks. Your company might want to open a tab for a portion of the evening, but this is by no means compulsory.

For the first option, you obviously need to have your company backing you, but a meet-up at a bar can be arranged by anyone.

It’s not compulsory to have talks at meet-ups, but they are a nice way of spreading what you’ve learned lately and good for fostering discussion.

We’re also open to other ideas if you have them…