David Hill: 0:00

Shout out to GoRails for sponsoring Ode to RailsConf. If you or your team wants to learn the latest Ruby on Rails features Hotwire Ruby and more check out GoRailscom. Use code ODE2RAILSCONF at checkout to get 10% off. You're listening to the Ode to RailsConf podcast, where we reminisce about our experiences at RailsConf over the years. I'm your host, david Hill, and joining me today is Marty Haught. Marty, thanks for joining me today. Would you mind introducing yourself?

Marty Haught: 0:32

Hi, I'm Marty Haught. I am the interim open source lead at Ruby Central that is leading the RubyGems team currently. I in the past have been a board member of Ruby Central and helped organize RailsConf for many years and have been part of the Ruby community since 2006, where I've been running the Boulder Ruby group since then and have enjoyed my time here immensely.

David Hill: 0:57

So given your long history with RailsConf, you were at the early ones, if not the first one, right? Yes, so I've talked to a couple of people who have brought up those first ones. I'd love to hear your experiences of what that was like, going to those first RailsConf.

Marty Haught: 1:14

It was a wild time for sure. So I guess some context. Prior to that I had been mainly a Java programmer and had not really gone to many conferences. I've been to a few and they're pretty terrible. I just didn't really enjoy them.

Marty Haught: 1:30

I think it was at a no Fluff, just Stuff event in 2005, where I met Dave Thomas Pragmatic Dave and got to see more about Ruby and Rails directly from him. At that. That was like, I think, in November in Denver and from there I pre-sold and started the Boulder Ruby group in January of 2006. Now at this point I was like this is great, I can't wait to engage more. And there was a Rails comp being planned and Chad Fowler, who was one of the organizers and original Ruby Central board members, lived actually in Longmont Colorado with me and so I had met Chad and connected and so I was super excited. So I did go to the first RailsConf 2006 in Chicago and it was really my first Ruby event ever like that. It was bananas, there was so much excitement. A Ruby event ever like that it was bananas, there was so much excitement.

Marty Haught: 2:28

It's important to note that Ruby Central early on was pretty low touch with how much organizing they did with their events. They basically just got the space, they set the program and people showed up and magic happened back then. But it wasn't heavily organized, as we would see later on. That's right, why Lucky Stiff was there and did a performance and I remember talking to the founders of Engine Yard when it was a gleam in their eye like hey, we've got this idea. And there was just so much happening and the conversations in the hallways were amazing and, of course, I was brand new to all of it and it was incredibly inspiring.

David Hill: 3:04

Several people have mentioned why the Lucky Stiffs performance at that first RailsConf. It was apparently extremely memorable and I will forever be sad that I missed it.

Marty Haught: 3:15

Yes, it was. It was like what is happening? What is happening on this stage right now? It's amazing.

David Hill: 3:20

So that's kind of the early days of RailsConf, and then it was 2012 or 13 where you joined the board and started helping organize.

Marty Haught: 3:31

Yeah, let's step back a moment and 2007 o'reilly stepped in and o'reilly started organizing rails conf and took it to the next level, brought a polish to the event and made it much larger as well, which was good because RailsConf they handled all they could and there's no way they could have gone to 1,000 or 1,500 attendees with the team they had and I think the team was very pleased to let O'Reilly handle logistics, because it's a lot, it's very challenging. So for many years, that's until 2011, o'reilly ran it those years and they're great, although maybe the 2009 Vegas year. I did not go that year. I heard it wasn't so good from a lot of folks in my network but the wrong kind of vibe, I think. But in 2012, I joined the board and started help running Ruby Comfort Rails Comp. So 2013 was the first RailsConf that I was involved with. That was in Portland. Ben Schofield actually ran the event as the chair, but I helped quite a lot with it and I think what I would say about 2013 on was O'Reilly was no longer involved and so there were expectations that we would put on a similarly polished conference. But also there was this idea that we also wanted to have the vibe of the community and not feel like a heavily marketed conference that is run by a corporation. And so it's figuring out what does RailsConf and RubyConf look like now, but leveling up our skills. And so I had been running conferences my own conference, rocky Mountain, ruby for that and so I brought some of those different elements from that to RailsConf, while still trying to keep the polished feel.

Marty Haught: 5:18

And we did have extra help, and that was really important. Leah Silber of Tildy helped us immensely with managing sponsors and having a professional sponsor hall, which is really important. Sponsors truly do make these conferences affordable. They pay, depending on how you structure it, about half the cost of the conference, and as these events get larger, it's not linear in cost. And so you start looking at like, wow, food's going to cost us half a million dollars that's a lot of money for food and like, yeah, it gets really rough. So, having sponsors and giving them a good experience, we're also not selling out your attendees, because we still have this view that this is a conference for developers. It's for us first and foremost, and we also want to make it valuable to sponsors, because they want to connect with us, either through hiring our attendees or through showing how their products can make our lives better, that sort of thing.

Marty Haught: 6:15

So it was great to get involved and see the conference at that scale, I think the thing that I was most proud of my time there. There's two things, really, I guess. The first one is I brought over the scholars and guides program from Rocky Mountain Ruby. It was a great experience there and I'm like I think this could work at a higher scale and I really love the purpose of that program and ushering in new folks that normally would not have that experience or wouldn't feel welcome at the conference, that normally would not have that experience or wouldn't feel welcome at the conference.

Marty Haught: 6:51

The other thing was trying to make the conference more sustainable, because it's a lot of work to put that on and oftentimes it would fall to one or two people to do all the work and it basically is almost like a full-time job. It's not quite, but it is 20, 30 hours a week, depending, sometimes more as you get closer to the event, and so finding a sustainable model of how to run the event was really important, and so the program committee was a key to that. The other thing I liked about the program committee was it gave us the opportunity to give folks from the community the opportunity to shape the program and see how the sausage is made behind the scenes and get involved, and so I think it's nice, because then you don't have one or two people picking all the talks, all the content for the program, and instead you're allowing folks that have different experience levels, different perspectives, to offer their voice and have a chance to shape it.

David Hill: 7:37

I like that. One of the things I wanted to circle back to a little bit with the Scholars and Guides program. I've mentioned it multiple times on the podcast because I got to participate once back in 2015 or 16, I think as a guide and I had a phenomenal experience with it, and so I was hoping you would kind of expound a little bit on the origins of that and how that got started, even if it's at Rocky Mountain Ruby and not necessarily with RailsConf, I'd love to hear more about that Back at Rocky Mountain Ruby.

Marty Haught: 8:05

We knew we had a number of folks from boot camps and code schools. They didn't have the connections and we had gotten some feedback just talking to folks at the conference that they were daunted by all these people and they didn't know who to talk to. And I thought about well, if you only had someone who could sort of introduce you or answer your questions because you're not going to ask questions of just someone next to you in the conference, right, you're just not going to feel safe with that. And so I'm like, well, what if we paired folks up? What if we one found people who maybe couldn't afford or couldn't justify buying a ticket, but this experience could be a great life-changing event for them, perhaps, or just eye-opening or open a new door or something like that. So it's like, well, we have plenty of folks in our community who are very generous in giving. So I think our community would be very receptive to being guides. And certainly there are plenty of folks out there who maybe were curious enough but were a little gun shy on buying a ticket and coming to the conference. And so we thought, well, let's give it a shot. What would the simplest thing that possibly could work look like that would put this together, and so we identified that we could take on I think we could take on 20 scholars and then pair up with guides, and we tried it in 2012 at Rocky Mountain Ruby and it worked really well. It worked way better. We wanted them to have an event before the conference started where they could at least get to know each other and get registration done, and that was huge for them because they already had seen some faces, they had a guide, they got their badge, they didn't worry about registration in the morning, and so when they show up that first day, a bunch of anxiety has been has been reduced, because you don't have these things you have to worry about. You're going to meet some people that you know you've already seen and then they can help you guide you through the experience.

Marty Haught: 9:56

Now, at Rocky Mountain Ruby single track conference, you don't have to choose content, but when I thought about, when I brought to RailsConf and RubyConf as well, this is even harder, because not only is there like 3X, 5x the people, there's also all these tracks to choose from. And how do you choose that when you're brand new to Ruby or to Rails or whatever? You don't really know, maybe some things, but you don't really know all this content. So how do you navigate that? And so the guides play a huge role in helping them make that choice of how to navigate the content. And also, maybe don't go to all the talks, maybe don't be overwhelmed, maybe hang out and have conversations in the hallway. It's okay to not feel like you have to go to every talk. So I think that's kind of where it started and it got really good reception early on from both sides from the guides and the scholars and I think it just took on a life of its own at that point.

David Hill: 10:50

Yeah, I was in that camp for a while where I tried to always attend every talk. I wanted to be in there learning something every time, and then it took me years to be like, wait, there's a whole other side to why you come to a conference the hallway track. That I was missing out on, honestly, and I've gotten a little bit more balanced in my approach now.

Marty Haught: 11:12

Yeah, for sure.

David Hill: 11:14

Have you attended at all recently, with the ones that you haven't been involved in, or has your experience with it kind of gone to zero?

Marty Haught: 11:21

I think the COVID years were interesting. No one saw it coming. Yeah, that's one word for it. It essentially canceled 2020.

Marty Haught: 11:33

We were pretty sure there was, I think one of was it maybe I don't remember which conferences one of Leia's conferences, and I want to say it was EmberConf. I'm not sure what it was, but there was one of her conferences that was like in March and there was still like do we still have it, Do we not have it? We were pretty clear that we couldn't have it in March. We were pretty sure, and so the team was pivoting. I was not a conference chair that year. I guess one thing we should talk about with the program committee that we did at Ruby Central was we started rotating to where the chair wasn't always the same person, so essentially you could give someone a conference off, and so that was my conference off at that point, and that helped us not get overwhelmed with all the work. But I think for that we had to go to all online. I think we just put it all online for free. We didn't obviously lose some money, but we didn't lose as much because we shifted our venue date to come back to that date another time in the future, Because the reality is you sign a contract with a venue, usually about two years in advance or 18 months in advance, and so you're on the line for some minimum with them and they don't care if you had the event or not. You still have to pay them. They're all very gracious to allow us to like well, let's just come back in two years or something like that and not be financially on the line for that.

Marty Haught: 13:00

But the COVID years were very challenging because we were trying to figure out well, when do we go back in person? Can we make hybrid work or just fully remote work? And I think we had varying degrees of success with that. The reality was it wasn't the same. Railsconf and RubyConf are all about being in person and, while you can have something collected online, it's not the same and I think we made the best of it.

Marty Haught: 13:21

But it's very challenging, I think, for everyone involved and also financially. We just started losing money with events and that's kind of led Ruby Central to a tough place in the last couple of years, where we had built up reserves but that slowly had been drained down from losing money at the events, and so it's made things hard and that's actually led to the next year being the last one is that unfortunately, people haven't gone back to attending conferences like they had, I think the macroeconomics in this last year and all the layoffs. The companies aren't sponsoring travel anymore. They're not sponsoring conferences as much as anymore. This year looks like it's pretty good, but that's just brutal on us. It's a double whammy if you think about it, because we're losing the sponsorship money and we aren't selling tickets. And if we booked a thousand person venue and only 500 people show up, it's hard to make that financially viable.

David Hill: 14:20

That's reality, yeah, I mean, all of the reasons that I've heard for why this is going to be the last RailsConf makes all kinds of sense in terms of just the financial restrictions around putting on an event like this. Yeah, the COVID years definitely did not help with that. I have a very weirdly vivid memory of the people part of the general public for these events is like all is like wondering are these events going to even happen anymore? Why are they not canceling or whatever? And it's like well, if they cancel, they're still on the line, so they kind of have to wait for some kind of public statement or government or whatever to be like you can't do those things, so that then the venues can't need to make an accommodation. It was definitely a very weird, frustrating time.

Marty Haught: 15:07

Yeah, and I think, getting back to your kind of point, what's it been like to have let go and I've been with Ruby Central a long time now I'm actually back with them. I stepped off the board in December and after being on there for 11 years 11 years is a long time and I wanted to give other people an opportunity to lead, and I think that's kind of with the conferences, the same thing is that, like Evan Phoenix and I did so much work for so many years at the conferences and we enjoyed it, but it was also just a ton of work. But it's great to see other people step in and bring their own sort of take on the conference and make those changes. And I think things are really going well short of, like sponsors and ticket sales not quite where we'd want them to be, but some of the things that they're all doing are really creative and really great. I think it makes for a better experience and I think that's the other thing is we're a scrappy bunch. You make the best with what you got, but then you're thinking outside the box.

Marty Haught: 16:03

What should we be doing with this event? How do we make this experience the best it can be when you bring people together. What does that look like? The introduction of Hack Day at RubyConf is really like gets back to the roots of what RubyConf is about. What does that look like for RailsConf? For the final one, this is the thing that can only happen in person. What does that look like? And to be creative with that. So I think the current team is really thinking well about those sort of things, and it just makes me excited to see what they're.

David Hill: 16:32

In regards to you stepping back from the board to give other people the opportunity to experience and guide things. I wanted to ask a little bit something in the realm of that. Even though RailsConf is coming to an end, rubyconf is still going to be around for, hopefully, a while. Once RailsConf is over, they want to kind of become a resource for the smaller regional conferences to help those get better and have a bit more support. But all of that still kind of heavily relies on people doing the work to create those conferences. So what advice would you give to someone who wants to get involved with an existing conference or if they're really insane and want to create their own regional one?

Marty Haught: 17:18

Yeah, there's a lot I could say. I think that a regional is not as hard as you might think. So if you feel like your local community could benefit from having an event and you're interested in exploring that, there's some very easy ways of getting into that that aren't as intense as something like a RubyConf or a RailsConf Rocky Mountain Ruby, which is coming up the 7th and 8th of October. It's coming up and that was the conference I used to run, but I don't run anymore. I do help them with that. That's an event that is looking to be probably 150, 175 people in terms of size. They have a venue they picked out that's very reasonable in cost and is actually a lovely space that will be fantastic for the event. And so the amount of work it takes to put on an event of that size is not as bad as something as like a 600 to 800 or a thousand person conference and financially isn't quite as risky.

Marty Haught: 18:22

And the other thing I could say is you can do something like a single day, like a half day event. You can find maybe there's a company that has a larger space that they're willing to let you borrow something like that. So it's like more than just a meetup, but it's not quite the same sort of obligation as a multi-day event where you're booking a venue and all that and you could just see if enough people come out. The other thing is you can connect with the community and see if there are maybe three or four other people they're willing to help organize. So, like hey, who's going to handle catering, or who's going to handle the website and design, or maybe t-shirts?

Marty Haught: 18:52

If you want to do that, you don't have to do that. You can have it simply be about coming together and doing something together. Maybe it's talks, maybe it's like unconference, who knows what. There's so many options out there, but I think it's not as scary as you might think. If you want to do that and Ruby Central does have resources available and folks who are willing to talk to you through that process and also the other regional organizers are super helpful they're happy to give you plenty of advice, including, like hey, use this template essentially to run your event, so they can answer all those questions. So if that's, you certainly reach out because there are people who can help you get there.

David Hill: 19:33

Well, thank you so much for joining me today. Marty, Do you have any closing thoughts you'd like to give people as RailsGun comes to a close?

Marty Haught: 19:39

I think it's just that community is key. It's so important, and I would encourage you all to think about how you engage with your local community or with the regional community. Yeah, I think you just get involved and connect with others, because I think that's where the magic happens, as I say, and I think it's great. So I hope to see you all at a future event Awesome.

David Hill: 20:02

Thank you so much, marty. Yeah, thanks, david.