This document summarizes the Ruby developer community and lifestyle in Australia. It outlines the regular meetups, hack nights, and conferences that bring Australian Rubyists together, including monthly Ruby meetups in major cities and biannual railscamps known for hacking, talks, and socializing. It also discusses working as a developer in Australia, noting the strong economy but high cost of living. More broadly, it characterizes Australian culture as egalitarian and describes attitudes towards foreigners and Japanese people as welcoming despite the presence of dangerous wildlife.

1. Being a Ruby developer in Oz
Andrew Grimm
Pre-Sapporo RubyKaigi
Tokyo meetup

2. Outline
● Ruby events in Australia
● Meetups
● Hack nights
● Railscamps
● Rubyconf au
● Working in Australia
● Living in Australia

3. Ruby events in Australia

4. 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

5. Hack nights
● Held every month in Sydney
● Sometimes have theme
● Sometimes people suggest topics on the night
● Try to collaborate

6. 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 world
● Maybe we like drinking!

7. Rubyconf au
● Held next year for first time
● Call for proposals currently open
● Please submit a proposal!

8. Working in Australia

9. 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

10. 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

11. Work culture
● Smaller programming scene (but less competition)
● Smaller startup scene

12. Living in Australia

13. 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 convicts
● We joke we got the better part of the deal

14. 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

15. Deadly wildlife
● We do have a wide variety of interesting wildlife
● Even male platypuses are venomous!
● But the risk for someone sipping a latte in Sydney is
pretty low