Lean Poker (http://leanpoker.org) is a fun and competitive one day event for programmers. The primary goal is to learn how to deliver value in extremely short iterations. It's a great way to practice continuous deployment and finding out how far you can stretch your pragmatism without getting in trouble.
Ruby is suppoted!
This is how it goes: you and a small group of strangers are going to develop a bot in a language of your choice, that plays poker against other bots. All you need to do is write a function that takes a data structure containing cards and bets your bot sees during the game, and return a single number: the amount you are willing to bet at that point.
Now here is the catch: even before you start coding the bots play a sit’n’go in a matter of seconds, and if your bot wins you get points. If it comes second, you get less points. Otherwise you get nothing. The next minute another game plays, and another one, and another one… that goes on all day long, while you and your friends are desperately hacking away on the code, and keep deploying, deploying, and deploying. Don’t worry about the deployment pipeline, that’s already set up for you.
During this pretty intense day you will sometimes be cheering for your bot to take over, you will be deploying desperately to change the course of events when your bot keeps loosing, but even more importantly you will learn how to create as much value as you can in a short period of time, while you are mostly just having fun.
The Berlin event is free and lunch is included. You can register at: https://www.eventbrite.com/myevent?eid=17903649297