Too Soon for Alpha Centauri

Bad news: I have decided to cancel RubyCaribe for 2015. Ticket sales are insufficient to cover the cost of the event. Every person who bought a ticket will receive a full refund. All tickets sales have been refunded.

Barbados is a beautiful island nation with welcoming people, a university that leads in multiple technical areas, and a thriving economy. The RubyCaribe (pronounced ka-REEB) organizers will make the event happen in some form at some point in the future. Just not now.

Alpha Centauri

NASA has launched successful missions to the Moon, Mars, and other bodies in our solar system. NASA would like to visit Alpha Centauri, 4.4 light years away. But they will only launch an Alpha Centauri mission after key prerequisites (maybe the theoretical Alcubierre drive) are in place.

It’s too soon for Alpha Centauri, right now. But one day, humans will get there.

The RubyCaribe team has achieved eight years of success with WindyCityRails, ChicagoRuby, and events focused on NoSQL and mobile technologies. With that track record, I believed that we could make RubyCaribe work in 2015. But reality disagrees with me.

It’s too soon for RubyCaribe, right now. But we will get there.

Upside: LinuxBarbados

While planning RubyCaribe, our team began an amazing relationship with the University of the West Indies at Cave Hill (UWI). We collaborated with UWI to create LinuxBarbados. The monthly LinuxBarbados meetings are an exciting way to grow your open source software and hardware skills. Discussions cover Linux, Parallella, Raspberry Pi, Ruby, Java… and more.

If you’re in Barbados, you can attend in person on the UWI campus. If you’re not in Barbados, you can still participate because every LinuxBarbados meeting includes a live video conference. Sign up at LinuxBarbados.org if you’d like to know more.

Next Steps for RubyCaribe

Moving forward, our team will take an Alpha Centauri approach to RubyCaribe. We will get there. And we invite you to enjoy the journey with us.

Do you have thoughts about RubyCaribe? If so, you’re welcome to share via the contact form.

• What do you like or dislike about RubyCaribe?
• What do you think about the content?
• What do you think about the price?
• What do you think about the location?
• Is there anything else you would like to share?

Anonymous feedback is fine. Just put dummy values in the appropriate fields.

Thanks for listening. We look forward to seeing you at ChicagoRuby and WindyCityRails.