Double Entry Accounting with Ruby (and more!)

Note: We're at Xing after all!

We have two talks this week (in any order):

Accountancy

*intro

Accountancy is about accounting for all the things you have, owe, have made, or have lost. If you're not careful, it's easy to lose track of what or why you have the things you have, and who you owe what (that's a tongue-twister).

At my company, we were finding it difficult to keep track of our rapidly evolving financial strategies. We built a system based on double-entry accounting that makes it easy to track the movements of money, giving us superpowers like

• replaying things that have happened to examine why they happened

• simulating things that could happen

• testing scenarios, over any stretch of time, without touching a database

• intelligently correcting mistakes (rewriting history, more or less)

• generating pretty [citation needed] graphs

Then we stripped down this system and gave it to you guys as a gem (I'm wrapping that up this weekend :D).

In this talk I'll give you a lightning tour of the principles of double-entry accounting (designed for programmers, not accountants), and show off some of the abilities of the gem.

• approx. length of the talk

30 minutes

• about me

Technical lead at Novicap, previously analyst at PA ConsultingI've been working with ruby for 2 years, with mixed results.https://github.com/parry-my (new! haha)

• about my company

Novicap is a Barcelona-based London-born fintech startup bringing invoice discounting into the 21st century. We're hiring!

• intended audience

People who need to keep track of numbers, rubyists, functional programmers, and anyone interested in the design of ruby gems (so they can tell me where I went wrong).

Decidim

Decidim (https://decidim.org/) is an open-source platform written in Ruby that aims to provide "Free Open-Source participatory democracy for cities and organizations". The project was started in Barcelona and will run a 3-day conference 26-28 October. A project member will visit us and give us an overview of the project, the conference and the opportunity to work on open source with a noble goal!

Note that due to a scheduling conflict we do not have a new venue but we will be at Xing as usual. It also means that Xing will sponsor the beer and SeQura will sponsor pizza as usual.

Note: same venue as last month!