"Your talk is about joining ongoing Rails projects, which may be difficult sometimes. If someone is just beginning with Ruby, can you explain what some of the requirements are to understand what you're going to talk about?"
Caike: This talk is for anyone who has jumped into existing Rails project, either at a new job or contributing to open source. If you've ever joined a Rails project started by someone else, it's likely that you've run into issues with setting up your environment, getting the app to run properly on your machine, deploying it to production for the first time and other blockers that got in the way of writing new features or fixing bugs.
My goal is to show some techniques that can help reduce the overhead of joining an existing Rails project.
"Many developers would love to become as experienced and fluent in Ruby as you are. What have been some of the pitfalls you had to overcome in order to become a great developer? Any good tips for a Ruby beginner?"
Caike: The tip I have is to never stop learning new things, but at the same time to learn how to be comfortable with the unknown. There are times out there that you will have to take a leap of faith and just assume things work the way they do. Some people have a hard time accepting that, but the sooner you realize that it's ok to not know about absolutely everything, the easier it will be to actually get things done.
Also, the best way to write good code is to read good code. There are many open source projects out there and amazingly talented developers behind them, so use the source! :)
"There are so many new technologies, best practices and so on being released all the time. In your personal opinion, and maybe related to your current field of work, what are some of the trends in technology that you think we should be paying attention for the near future?"
Caike: Definitely ed tech (educational technology) is a big thing that's revolutionizing the education field and I feel we are about to see even greater things in the near future. It's great to see new ways of using technology to facilitate learning and not only enabling people to get jobs, but more importantly, enabling them to discover new passions.