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 this episode is a bit of a departure from the norm for the show. Normally I have a single guest to interview and today we have a whole team of people who went to RailsConf together, so Nate Clark is one of those people. I'm going to throw the microphone over to you, nate, to get the introduction started.

Nate Clark: 0:48

My name is Nate Clark. I'm one of the co-founders of Brand New Box. We're a rail shop centered out of Lawrence Kansas, but we're fully remote. There's eight of us here. Seven of us went to RailsConf this year, but I'll just let everybody go around and introduce themselves, hi.

Jace Bayless: 1:02

I'm Jace. I've been a Rails developer for nearly four years. At this point, I think Something interesting about me is I am in the middle of restoring a 1966 Mustang.

Matt Kirkland: 1:13

My name is Matt Kirkland. I'm a designer and I do a lot of client stuff with Brand New Box. I'm currently working on a conspiracy theory website about pancakes Most exciting side project happening right now.

Ashley Hutton: 1:26

I'm Ashley. I've been at Brand New Box for six years, I think, and I had a baby last year, which is why I was not at RailsConf.

Ted Tash: 1:36

My name is Ted Tash. I'm based out of St Louis, missouri. I've been a Rails developer for about three years now. This was my first ever RailsConf. It was a blast and something interesting. This past year, I did a lot of the work on getting my own house built. I did everything from drywall on myself and I'm currently doing the whole thing over again for the basement, including framing. So so far, no nails in the hands, and that's a good thing.

Vika Scripps: 2:05

My name Vika Scripps. I don't work with Rails at all only through my co-workers, because I'm a UX designer, but I also went to RailsCon this year and it was interesting for me too. The most interesting thing about me right now is that it's 10 pm where I'm at, but I'm happy to be here.

Will Carey: 2:27

Hi, I'm Will Carey. I feel the need to try to make my voice distinctive in some way. Let's see, I've been at Brand New Box for 10 years I think, and this was my second RailsConf this year. Most recently, interesting thing is, I've been trying to wear a Vision Pro for eight hours a day to do my work. So it's been fun, it's been interesting. You almost got me in a Vision Pro today, but you have me in reality.

Nate Clark: 2:51

It's so distracting to see his. What do you call your avatar? My persona, your persona, yeah, my name is Ian Fletcher.

Ian Fletcher: 3:01

I reside in Chicago. I've been a Rails developer for about three years and something interesting about me was I used to do college acapella. If you've ever seen Pitch Perfect, I got to the semifinals of that competition and I'm currently being asked to join a couple of local Chicago acapella groups, so this year might be the year of rejoining acapella.

David Hill: 3:22

So what I just heard was that competition from Pitch Perfect was an actual, real competition that wasn't just made up for the movie.

Ian Fletcher: 3:29

Yeah, that's actually the main kind of surprise that people realize that there's actual people that do that and they are actually doing those things. They actually say aca-awesome, and it's kind of cringe, but it is interesting nonetheless.

David Hill: 3:43

So what I am starting to learn is that I have some work to do in terms of having better hobbies, because it sounds like all of you are doing more interesting things than I am right now. So, yeah, let's talk about RailsConf. So you guys did something that, in my experience at least, is a little bit interesting, that you all went as a team, and I've never experienced anything remotely close to that. So I'm curious to hear your guys' thoughts and experience about RailsConf and going as a team and what you guys experienced and got out of it.

Nate Clark: 4:14

Yeah, I can at least shed some context on why we went as a team, and it's mostly just the fact that we're distributed. There's five of us here in Lawrence, kansas, but we still all work from home and only see ourselves in real life like once a week. So, just from like a cultural standpoint, we've made it a point that we get together in real life somewhere about three times a year and I think in January of last year we went to New Orleans and then we were looking at stuff mid-year and we saw that the RailsConf thing was up in Detroit and it's just like the timing and the intentionality lined up, perfect. So we went up to Detroit. Oh, and then we have a homecoming trip where we come back, everybody comes back to Lawrence and stuff like that. So we just took the opportunity to go and bring everybody, even Vika, who's not a Rails dev and just said like, hey, let's go to Detroit, let's hang out. Our big goals are like spend time together, do activities together, eat together. That's how we all ended up in Detroit.

Will Carey: 5:13

I would agree it was a weird thing. It's the only way I've ever been to RailsConf is with the entire team, so it felt normal in that way. But being there this year with a larger team than we went with last time, it was like, oh, I want to hang out with this team that I came with and that kind of hurt the ability then to like hang out with the other people we were meeting at RailsConf, which was a bummer. I recommend it. But at the same time it's also fun to go to conferences when you don't know anyone and there's like some forced socialization there.

Matt Kirkland: 5:37

It is nice to have a team for the multi-threaded nature of a conference too, because we did a little bit of divide and conquer of, okay, I'm gonna go see this, you'll see that, whatever. Then have my back channel in our company slack of throwing in notes of what we were hearing or saying oh this is terrific, stop what you're doing, come over to this one or something yeah, there's a real divide and conquer when you have eight people at a single conference there were a lot of like hallway meetings, of like is somebody going to be in every single track?

Will Carey: 6:03

Okay, good.

Nate Clark: 6:04

Yeah, but Chase, ian and Ted, this was your guys' first dev conference From your perspective. What do you think I?

Vika Scripps: 6:12

found it quite interesting. I found there's a lot of really good takeaways that I experienced when I was not with the team. I found that because I'm kind of lower on the totem pole in the company, it felt like being able to show my skills and kind of do stuff as part of different teams definitely helped kind of get my own confidence as a coder and kind of knock off some of the imposter syndrome that's just rampant amongst the industry. So it was really nice to kind of knock off the training wheels a little bit and get away from BNB for a second and see that I'm, like actually functioning in other systems as well and see that I'm actually functioning in other systems as well.

Jace Bayless: 6:45

One thing that I really liked about it was not having been to a tech conference before. Just being around people who are in the same industry as you, writing the same language as you, was really nice. It was kind of reassuring because day to day I don't meet Rails developers out in the wild. I've been doing this for years at this point and I've only met maybe one or two people, just naturally, who are Rails devs. So being around people who do that, there's a reassuring factor that I just really enjoyed.

Ted Tash: 7:15

I had gone to another dev conference in 23. For me the big difference between that one and this RailsConf was that you had that time in the afternoon, kind of right in the middle of the day, to actually like pair program Like if you wanted to go, Jason and I worked on the pay gem for a little bit and Jason actually got like a PR in and approved through the pay gem and like that was just a ton of fun. There's only so much learning and sitting still and listening you can take in in a day and then being able to like actually work and do some practical skill building and also meeting peers that you wouldn't otherwise meet, that was really different and really cool.

Nate Clark: 8:22

Yeah, one final takeaway, I also thought was interesting was seeing how many of the issues that other teams were running into were the same issues that we were running into, and that felt really good to be like.

Ashley Hutton: 8:28

Oh, maybe transactions are hard and maybe if you're trying to get stuff, paying and refunding, like there's actually a lot of different complexities that you need to think about. And it felt kind of good to see when you were like, oh, that issue that I conquered that might have taken a little longer than I thought, might have taken another team a little bit longer than they thought, which is kind of nice and comforting, vika, as the designer, in a room full of engineers. What was your take? Well, that was my first ever dev conference. I was surprised to be able to understand a lot, I feel like more than I expected, and it was interesting to see kind of what the dev team does day to day, because I'm not really, because we're all remote, I can't really see what people are doing, so similar to you guys.

Ashley Hutton: 8:53

When you saw that other devs run into issues, I was like, oh, these are the issues you guys deal with. It I don't see day to day. That was interesting. And the conference had a few accessibility talks that were really cool to listen to, because I focus on design accessibility and it was nice to see it from the developer's standpoint and what issues we're faced from that direction with. So, yeah, it was just kind of cool to see the development team in their environment and to be able to relate to what you guys do every day One of my favorite takeaways is like this idea of like your Ruby friend I know somebody who's doing like your first Ruby friend, will, who's doing that, oh, I'm doing.

Will Carey: 9:37

Yeah, the Ruby mentorship, yep, yeah, I think that's.

Nate Clark: 9:40

Andy.

David Hill: 9:40

Andy Kroll's thing, isn't it?

Will Carey: 9:42

Yeah.

Nate Clark: 9:42

Yep, but to walk into a conference with hundreds of people or something like that, and we bumped into Chris Oliver at the St Louis airport and by the time we left home, I mean everybody here, like show of hands. Everybody met at least one Ruby friend right Made a Ruby friend at RailsConf. Yeah, Will, made a lot of friends at RailsConf and that's the one takeaway for me. That's just like such a departure from other conferences or something like that. It's just what an incredible culture there is around people that are friendly and just nice and human beings and maybe it just attracts a certain personality type. But man, everybody there was so great to hang out with. I think we had dinner or lunch or breakfast or coffee with people that we'd never met before and it was such a great time to network and make friends.

Matt Kirkland: 10:31

Yeah, we've got a range of experience in the Rails world here in this team and so a lot of it is our first taste of the what's the acronym, the MinSwan.

David Hill: 10:41

MINASWAN Matz is nice, so we're nice exactly right.

Matt Kirkland: 10:44

As a culture, the people who use this technology are positionally nice. You could plan on that when you go to this conference it's nice.

Will Carey: 10:54

Yeah, I think there was just like also a somewhat of a realization of, as a team, we haven't been to a conference in eight years. It was never like an intentional decision to not go, we just didn't go to conferences. This one worked out and I think like we were absolutely blown away by how much fun it was and how plugged in you could feel to the community. I think there's like a lot of times where, like doing remote work on a team even can feel isolating, but like you go to a conference and there's just like a connection that you feel with everybody else and it's fun to talk about people doing other work that, like you're not talking to every day.

David Hill: 11:32

So it was mentioned before that a couple of people like worked on the paid gem during Hack Day and got a PR in. Did anybody else participate in Hack Day or did you guys go to the workshops? What did you do for day two?

Will Carey: 11:44

I went to the SQLite workshop. Steven Marchheim did that and he did a fantastic job and brought some really interesting ideas like branching with different seed databases using SQLite databases, because there's files on disk. That was a really good workshop that I've here. We are, however, many months later and I'm still thinking about it.

Nate Clark: 12:07

I went to the office hours, I think is what it was called where there was just different folks sitting in the same hackathon area. We've been using Evil Martians stuff I mean honestly 15 years or something like that, as long as they've been publishing gems, we've been using some of their work and there's Arena and a couple of folks from her team just sitting there and you could just go sit down and talk to her and it was so great we're a relatively small team but she's got I think they're like at 300 or something like that over there at Evil Martians or something like that and just being able to say, hey, what's your take on team size and working in this space and stuff like that. So that was an incredible treat for me to sit down and just have a conversation with her.

David Hill: 12:52

She had a great keynote at that conference too. Just talking about some of the work that they as a company have been doing, that's definitely something that I would have loved to have been on the fly on the wall for Anybody else. Have any memories of what you guys did for the hack day?

Matt Kirkland: 13:07

I don't remember what it was called, but I went to the pitch your own project and try and recruit people to your the birds of a feather, yeah, and that was interesting because we're a client services company. I'm very used to hearing someone hey, I want to build this sort of thing, and then trying to just dialogue with them about what's the point of that and how are people going to onboard that and how are you going to tell people about it. So that felt like a rapid-fire version of that kind of work of hearing a bunch of people's ideas and from a real sort of oh. I thought of this as I was walking to the table versus. I've had this idea sitting in my pocket for three years and I've been wanting to throw effort at it.

Vika Scripps: 13:45

On the second day, I believe, Vika and I went to the Visions for Inclusion workshop, which was kind of eye-opening as far as I've never been to a kind of workshop where people were discussing actual issues within the industry as far as like toxic company culture, how to make your company culture better, what type of behaviors are good.

Vika Scripps: 14:01

As far as like reviewing, how do you like interact with your colleagues better, and it was interesting because I don't think there's that many industries that are actually focusing on how to change their culture for the better. And it was kind of cool that there was a full workshop with a bunch of different people from a bunch of different teams all putting in about like how their company culture deals with certain issues and how to kind of ameliorate certain situations that might not be easy in the normal work day. That was kind of very eye-opening and I was probably the biggest takeaway I took from the whole thing was like how I guess you've been saying nice, but it's like very nice it is to think about not only yourself but how you interact with the people around you, and I think that's very important.

Ashley Hutton: 14:43

Yeah, to add to that, I think it was interesting to hear about the issues I would not even have thought about, like just throwing acronyms around like in your paperwork, basically for new people who don't understand what that means. That was a type of way you can isolate someone in the company to which I was like, oh my God, people even think about that, how cool. So, yeah, I like that. Talk a lot as well.

Nate Clark: 15:09

I'm convinced that Vika needs to give a talk in the future because a whole bunch of engineers talking to engineers maybe you'll get incrementally better or something like that. But having someone outside you know in the same way that, maybe that inclusivity talk, it's like bringing someone who's bringing in a skill set that we don't practice day in and day out. Vico were to come in and give a design accessibility talk or a UI UX for here's a design system talk for Rails engineers, or something like that man, everybody, I feel like everybody would come to something like that Because you will learn so much, because, inherently, rails developers maybe don't have that level of in-depth knowledge. I like the kind of diversity of topics that were discussed. How about you, david? What did you do during day two?

David Hill: 15:52

man Well, I initially had intended to sit at Chris Oliver's tables and try to work on one of his projects like the PayGem or something. But Nadia, who gave the keynote on the first day, she had a project that had a table nearby as well and I really wanted to work with nadia. So I went and I sat down at nadia's table and was working on her speaker line project. So speaker lines a project where the so the scholar guide program for rails. She was a guide at one point and her scholar kind of asked if they could see the submissions, the proposal that people submitted to give a talk at RailsConf.

David Hill: 16:36

Because that's kind of a daunting thing if you've never done it before. How do you even put that together? What does that look like? What does a good one look like, let alone just one in general one look like let alone just one in general. And so she kind of latched on to that idea at some point and created this app that's out there in the world where people can put up the proposals that they have made to conferences and whether or not it was accepted and stuff like that, so that newer people entering the fields can kind of go look and try to get a sense of what works and what doesn't work and how people try to put those together is it open source or like how?

Nate Clark: 17:06

how did it work that you?

David Hill: 17:07

That project is completely open source. Yeah, there's a public GitHub repo that there are a table full of us that we just like she had a couple of GitHub issues up there and I think in a couple of minutes I found like a bug on one form on an edit screen and so I was just like, well, I know how to make the PR for that. I can fix that real nice and easy. We to make the PR for that, I can fix that real nice and easy. We just started diving into making contributions to this repo.

Nate Clark: 17:29

That made me think. Do you know this? Guides and Scholars program.

David Hill: 17:43

How long has that been going? That's been going on, I think, since I want to say, 2015 or so, somewhere in that neighborhood.

Nate Clark: 17:46

I had not seen it before and that was amazing. And we met up with Chris and we went out to and that was amazing. And we met up with Chris and we went out to dinner that first night and his caller was Erica McDevitt I'm pretty sure you've spoken to she's. In my mind she's becoming like the poster child of RailsConf or something like that. She's amazing. I think the first RailsConf we went to I felt like I was just kind of standing with my back against the wall, kind of like junior high prom dance or something like that, and not sure how to break through the ice or something like that. Same the thought of having a system like that where it's like, hey, I've got somebody who's going to at least pull me out onto the dance floor a little bit more and give me the confidence to sit at a table with people I don't know and have a meal with people I don't know. Man, I think every industry could benefit from something like that.

David Hill: 18:28

I really love the Scholar Guide program and I have it on pretty good authority that we're recording mid-January. This episode will probably schedule the release in mid-March, but by the end of this month, in January, I expect that the CFP and the application window for scholars and guides for this final Rails conference are going to open. So yeah, if any of you guys on the call or if anyone listening has any inclinations at all to participating in the Scholar Guide program as a guide, 100% would recommend it.

Matt Kirkland: 19:01

Do it yeah.

David Hill: 19:03

Somebody mentioned something along this line before is like, because you kind of came as a group, it became a little bit harder at points to break out of the group and meet other people at the conference because you've got this kind of little group. And I get that perspective at the same time as, like, I'm a little bit jealous of going with a group Again, the kind of wallflower mentality you mentioned. I subscribe to that, not willingly, but I'm a bit of an introvert. I have a hard time sometimes getting out of my shell to go meet people and so having a group to go with to do dinners afterwards or activity afterwards or whatever, I've never experienced that. I'm just kind of curious about that more positive side of it. It's like, what did you guys do afterwards? Did you guys have any kind of group plans after the day of talks was over? What was that like for y'all?

Ted Tash: 19:57

To echo your flip side of Will's coin from earlier, it was kind of nice if you didn't have somebody that you were socializing with to be like, oh there's Matt and Jay's having breakfast, I'm going to go have breakfast with them instead of alone, and nine times out of 10, they were interacting with somebody new. And so then you, by association, got to interact with that somebody new as well, without it being a totally new transaction. You had a buddy that kind of got you in the door. You mentioned what do we do afterwards?

Ted Tash: 20:28

I had the best old-fashioned of my entire life that I think about probably once a month in some hole-in-the-wall hotel bar. That was awesome. That Vika found you should try and find the name of that because it was phenomenal and that was probably the most fun I've had at. Brand New Box period was that night, and then we ended up in the wrong hotel lobby there's a hotel lobby like across the street from our hotel and randomly bumped into Erica in that hotel lobby and it was a whole thing. But anyway, that was kind of what we did. We had fun.

David Hill: 21:04

I believe it was the Pearl Club.

Vika Scripps: 21:06

Ted wants to know where to go to get that old-fashioned again I'm booking a flight to detroit as soon as we get off this call also like on the wallflower thing, I think personally I also subscribe to the wallflower thing sometimes, but basically I feel like I have to put on a hat in order to like get myself out there. And because we had a team, I don't feel like I put that hat on until like halfway through day three or day two and then kind of leading into day three. So I did make friends and make connections later in the process, but it was kind of also easy to not do that when it's like I'll just go have lunch with Jace, I'll just go to this one meeting with Vika, and it ended up being like, oh, I need to actually actively get myself away from the team in order to start making friends, which was a different hat you have to take off and put on.

Nate Clark: 21:52

I enjoyed the freedom. A lot of folks were really interested in certain tracks and I did the hallway track, which was not something I had ever really heard of or was ever comfortable doing before, but it was just like oh hey, there's safety in numbers, everybody else is getting some details about sequel light or whatever, and just got to kind of roam the halls and meet people and that was a really great perk. Another thing that comes with like the group was like travel. Like we all travel kind of up there and back the same time and it's fun doing adventure-y things together and sometimes just the simple act of navigating an airport makes things a little more complex. But I just remember Will and Chris sat down next to each other on the plane and I mean just pretty much talked non-stop from St Louis all the way to Chicago and it's fun getting out in the world and doing things together and it's why we make that a priority around here to hang out in real life.

David Hill: 22:52

Awesome and that feels like a great note to kind of conclude on that. I love the power and the versatility of distributed team, but being able to get together in person and actually have those face-to-face experiences and encounters there's a lot of power in that too, and so that's awesome that you guys have prioritized doing that together as a team.

Nate Clark: 23:14

Yeah, it's a great relational grease when someone's like helping you, you're pairing on something, or someone's reviewing a PR. The words hit different when you like spent the night at the Pearl, whatever it was the night before the week before, and it's just like these are real people. We have real fun together and real challenges together.

David Hill: 23:31

Awesome. Well, thank you all for letting me kind of co-opt your stand up today and record this episode. Thanks for joining me.

Nate Clark: 23:39

Yeah, thanks so much.