Riccardo is a long-time Ruby enthusiast. He bought a Mac after his roommate Fabio showed him that Ruby came preinstalled from the terminal, and TextMate was a natural progression. This was around Ruby 1.8.0 and Rails 2.2, circa 2009.

In 2010, he landed his dream job: a Ruby on Rails developer at HEAnet in Dublin.

Fast forward to 2024, Riccardo had the honor of being on stage for RubyDay (organized by GRUSP) alongside other like-minded individuals. There, he met Emiliano and had the best dinner of his life with Bhozdar, thinking, “I’ll never miss a RubyDay again!” He was sad when his friends from GRUSP later told him there wouldn’t be another RubyDay in Italy, as they preferred to concentrate on other conferences.

Fortunately, his love for puns (Ruby Conf… sounds a lot like “Rubicon,” a river a few kilometers away from Riccardo’s hometown in Italy) and a strong community of like-minded Ruby lovers made the magic happen. We obtained GRUSP’s blessing to continue this great experience for Ruby developers in Italy and to infuse it with our own creativity.

On August 1st, a few heroes from Modena met Riccardo in Lido degli Estensi for a beer, and a crazy idea came to mind: “Can we really do this?”

And the rest, as they say, is history!

What about you? Will you cross the Rubycon with us?