Speaker 1: 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 Sarah May. Sarah, would you introduce yourself to our listeners?

Speaker 2: 0:31

Hello, my name is Sarah. I am the Senior Director of Engineering at Backerkit and my first RailsConf was in 2006, chicago. My most recent RailsConf was last year, 2024.

Speaker 1: 0:45

You were there in Detroit.

Speaker 2: 0:47

I was there in Detroit, yes.

Speaker 1: 0:48

I saw you and I talked to you, so I know your most recent one wasn't the most recent one.

Speaker 2: 0:53

I didn't go to all of them in between, but those are my end posts.

Speaker 1: 0:56

You are one of my favorite people because I worked with you briefly back in the day, the late 2000s, which feels so long ago now.

Speaker 2: 1:06

It is. It is long ago, it's 20 years ago.

Speaker 1: 1:10

So RailsConf is always one of those things where I was like, oh, I get to go to RailsConf this year, oh, and I might get to see Sarah. I've always just had such a fun time every time I got to see you and have a chat with you. So a lot of my positive RailsConf memories kind of feature you in the background or in the foreground in some way. So I'm happy to have you on the podcast.

Speaker 2: 1:30

Finally, A lot of my memories, my positive memories of RailsConf are about meeting people that I only saw there, that I wouldn't see other times of the year, or we didn't live in the same place, or maybe they didn't go to RubyConf, so I would only see them at RailsConf, and that was always my favorite thing about any of those conferences.

Speaker 1: 1:48

Yeah, absolutely 100% agree. Let's talk about your experiences at RailsConf over the years. So you've given several talks, I believe.

Speaker 2: 1:56

Yes, I've given three talks. Okay, sounds like a low number, it's not when.

Speaker 2: 2:01

I was looking through it and I realized a lot of the talks that I did at Ruby central conferences over the years were at RubyConf. So I've done three for RailsConf. One was 2009. I was on a panel with Desi McAdam and Laurie McDonald on women's experiences in Rails. This was the most awkward talk of all of the ones I've done over my career. The most awkward one of all of the ones I've done over my career. The most awkward one of all, really, yeah, yeah. So to give you a little bit of background, in 2006, we had the first RailsCon and there were 400 people there and there were 19 women out of that group.

Speaker 1: 2:38

Okay.

Speaker 2: 2:39

And the ratio was a bit uncomfortable there maybe.

Speaker 2: 2:43

Yeah, it's better now, for sure, but at that time we all went out to dinner one night and there were about 19 20 of us and I remember sandy metz was there, trina owen was there and there's a bunch of other people. And I have a request. Actually, I would love if you're listening to this podcast and you were at that dinner I want to hear from you, I would love to get the band back together for a minute and maybe just have a chat with all of us that were there and see all the different directions we went, either in the Ruby community or out of it, or out of tech completely in some cases, I'm sure. So contact me if you were there.

Speaker 1: 3:19

Hopefully some people will reach out to you.

Speaker 2: 3:22

Well anyway. So we did this dinner and it went late, so we missed part of DHH's talk, which was David Hedemeyer Hansen, the creator of Rails. And so we walked in in the middle of the talk and 400 Ben's faces swiveled Look at the back of the room as we all came in and sat down. It was awkward, but it was fun. That was the highlight of my first RailsConf was that dinner?

Speaker 1: 3:48

Those would be some pretty memorable moments there, I guess.

Speaker 2: 3:51

Yeah, so in 2009, I had already signed up to this panel when something happened I don't even remember what it was there was some incident having to do with gender related issues in the Rails community. It happened just a week or two before RailsConf, and so, all of a sudden, what seemed like a sideline talk that most people wouldn't be interested in became something that a lot more people were interested in, and David even came to that talk. When David walks around RailsConf, he's like a comet. He has a cluster of people around him and a tail of people coming after him.

Speaker 2: 4:33

So, wherever he goes, this comet of people goes with him, and so he came to this talk and sat in the front row and listened, and so that was great. It's always awkward to give a talk like this where you're like well, let me tell you about my experiences that are so different from yours and maybe hard to understand from where you're coming from, it'd be hard to reconcile with your own viewpointed experiences of life.

Speaker 2: 4:59

Right. A lot of people at that point in time still viewed tech as a meritocracy where the people that got to the top of it were actually like the best people, the people who are best at it, and we know now that that's not the case. People have some advantages, whether it's with race or gender or religion or country of origin, where they can get to the top much more easily than someone with these other characteristics can, and so, without sort of broad recognition of that fact, it was just awkward. It was not a great start. It's on YouTube this talk. I could not watch it.

Speaker 1: 5:35

Oh no.

Speaker 2: 5:36

I'm not sure I recommend anyone else watch it either, but it's there.

Speaker 1: 5:41

I'm not sure gender norms is the right phrase to use here, but the gender balance in the community was definitely different at that point than it is now.

Speaker 2: 5:52

Very different, very different. I think we've made a lot of progress. Yeah, not as much as we need to, but a lot of progress.

Speaker 1: 5:58

There's always room for improvement, but it feels like the Ruby community, at least as a whole, is moving in the right direction.

Speaker 2: 6:07

Yeah, and especially back in 2009,. I think that those of us that were involved in the gender equality sort of movement within tech weren't really versed in other types sort of overlapping issues, so issues of race. For example, most of the people including me and the folks that I worked with on that panel were all white and also including things like country of origin. So these days, I feel like the new generation that's sort of taking this movement and taking it forward has a totally different approach, which I think is right for the time. I think we kind of did the best we could at the time and people now are doing better and it's so awesome to see.

Speaker 1: 6:44

It almost sounds like an open source movement. You did the best you could at the beginning and then people are taking that foundation and building on it.

Speaker 2: 6:51

Yeah, I hadn't thought of it that way. Anyway, so that was the first talk I did at RailsConf and then, in 2012, I did a talk on Backbonejs with Rails.

Speaker 1: 7:01

Remember.

Speaker 2: 7:02

Backbone JS.

Speaker 1: 7:03

I remember that one. I remember the library, but I also remember the talk. I think I was sitting on the front row for it.

Speaker 2: 7:11

Yeah, it's very dated in terms of its technical content, for sure. Funny, fun fact, though, the code base I'm working in now still has some Backbone, because it was around in those days, wow. And every time we go into it I have to help people understand what are the patterns we're looking at and why is it set up this way? Because it's so different to modern JavaScript.

Speaker 1: 7:31

Oh boy, how is it different from the way we do things now?

Speaker 2: 7:35

And then the last talk I did was in Pittsburgh in 2018.

Speaker 2: 7:41

And this is the one that I remember most clearly and sharply out of the three, and at that point I was on the board of Ruby Central, so I was helping to run these conferences, and so we had put together a slate of keynote speakers and we had David Hattemeyer Hansen the first day and we had Aaron Patterson the last day, and then we had one in the middle, in the middle day, and we were having a lot of logistical issues, like, first, the speaker couldn't make it to Pittsburgh because of flight cancellations and a bunch of other stuff going on.

Speaker 2: 8:16

So eventually they just got a hotel room in whatever city they were trapped in and we set it up so that they could do a virtual talk on the big screen over Skype I think was what we used in those days and we had talked it over with them and the talk was going to start at 9 am. It was the morning keynote of the second day, and so at 8.30, I go behind the curtain of the keynote stage to meet up with Evan and Marty, who were the other two directors at the time, and Evan says we haven't been able to get ahold of them.

Speaker 1: 8:53

Oh no.

Speaker 2: 8:54

That's not good.

Speaker 1: 8:55

No.

Speaker 2: 8:56

The talk is in half an hour. And so we started thinking, okay, it's probably just network issues, we'll hang on and we'll try and get ahold of them. So now it's 845 and we still have not been able to get ahold of them. We've tried text, we've tried phone, we've tried Skype. We've tried text, we've tried phone, we've tried Skype, we've tried everything. We know how to do no contact.

Speaker 2: 9:17

And we started thinking about what else could we do with this time. So we thought, oh, maybe Aaron Patterson could move his keynote. He could do his keynote this morning in 15 minutes instead of tomorrow at the end of the conference. And it turned out that was a non-starter, because Aaron was, of course, not ready to do the talk, and certainly not in the next 15 minutes. So then we thought, okay, well, maybe we can send people down to the sponsor area. Sponsors would like that, right?

Speaker 2: 9:46

Well, it turns out sponsors did not like that idea, because this was their time to set up. People were supposed to go to the sponsor area after the keynote, and so they were setting up and they weren't ready to actually welcome and talk to people, right? And so now it's 8, 55 and I go and I look out. I peek out behind the curtain and I can see it's the second day of the conference. People Sometimes tend to go hard on the first night of the conference, so this, the first talk on the second day of the conference, is usually not as heavily attended as our other keynotes, but there's still a substantial amount of people there who have filed in and sat down expecting there to be a keynote at nine o'clock and it was 855 and we had no idea what to do.

Speaker 1: 10:33

Oh no.

Speaker 2: 10:34

And so I said, well, I've got to talk on my laptop, I could do.

Speaker 1: 10:40

So you got promoted to keynote speaker.

Speaker 2: 10:42

And I had done this talk at a smaller conference, I think, maybe for my local user group, but I had not done it on a big stage. Also, I was not necessarily prepared. Usually, if I'm going to do a talk, I've got the days before to go over it many times and really figure out what I'm trying to say, what I'm going to say. And of course this was like oh, I haven't looked at this in two months. Okay, no problem. So at nine o'clock I went out there which I would have done anyway to introduce the keynote speaker and I told everyone about the housekeeping things, reminded them of what the wifi is and all that stuff. And then I was like and now, special surprise, I'm going to do a talk. And so I did my livable code talk and I was so nervous is not even the right word. I was so nervous is not even the right word, I was terrified.

Speaker 1: 11:37

Right.

Speaker 2: 11:37

I was shaking the entire time. It doesn't look like it's visible. I looked at the video recently and it doesn't look like it's super visible because I stay behind the podium mostly. But you can see, I'm sort of fastened to the podium, I am not moving, I am clutching it for dear life. And I did the talk and then I don't remember the rest of the day.

Speaker 2: 11:56

To be totally honest, everything blurred into nothingness for the rest of the day yeah that said, I think it went well from an outside perspective looking in, but for me that was definitely the one I remember the most.

Speaker 1: 12:11

I I could see why. Yeah, that seems like it would be an extremely memorable experience, followed by no memory at all. That's got to be a first right If someone were getting promoted to a keynote speaker slot within.

Speaker 2: 12:27

I'm not aware of that having ever happened at any other time. I was not even scheduled to do that talk at that conference, so it's not even a promotion.

Speaker 1: 12:40

It's like an insertion into the program. I thought you said you had that talk prepared for later in the conference, but that was just a talk from a different event that you just kind of still had. Yeah, oh, good for you for stepping up and pulling that off, holy cow.

Speaker 2: 12:53

I mean, the alternative was to tell people to go to Starbucks for an hour before they went to the sponsor area.

Speaker 1: 13:00

Oh gosh, that does sound like it would be mind-numbing. After the fact, though, yeah.

Speaker 2: 13:06

I like that talk. I think it went well, but that was not how I envisioned it being done.

Speaker 1: 13:13

That was not how you were planning on spending your day. Nope, you mentioned this aspect of your involvement in RailsConf a little bit before, but for a while you were on the Ruby Central board.

Speaker 2: 13:24

That's right. Ruby Central is the organization that does RubyConf and RailsConf and also supports some open source work in the Ruby community and some other initiatives.

Speaker 1: 13:34

Yeah, also supports some open source work in the Ruby community and some other initiatives. Yeah, so when I have the opportunity to talk to people who have served on the board, I kind of like to see if they'll give us a little bit of a peek behind the curtain in terms of like what it was that you did, not necessarily for RailsConf, but even in the day-to-day of what was it like, what would you do for your work on the board?

Speaker 2: 13:55

Yeah, so I was on the board from 2014 to 2018. So that's because of the time of year. That's actually five rails cops and also Ruby comps that year. So we would spend the six months before rails comp working on that and we would spend the six months before RailsConf working on that and we had spent the six months before RailsConf working on that Right.

Speaker 2: 14:17

And so we would meet for an hour every week and just talk about how it's going.

Speaker 2: 14:23

We had staff who would search down and check out different locations for us to choose from to do the conference at. We would get together a program committee and shepherd the process through soliciting talks, then going through them and rating them and then figuring out how to make a program out of the talks that were submitted. So it was really when we were doing the program that was the busiest time of year. The rest of the time we mostly dealt with administrative stuff and sort of longer range planning, but then I would say maybe the two to three months before a conference was the busiest time and it was just reviewing talks, working with the program committee members.

Speaker 2: 15:12

I had been involved with Ruby Central in some capacity since 2010.

Speaker 2: 15:16

So I'd been on program committees, I had run workshops or I had sort of run special events, sometimes at various Rails comps.

Speaker 2: 15:23

So I knew the people and it was at that time it was just me and Evan Phoenix and Marty Haught on the board, and then we had a couple of staff people who did a lot of the kind of logistics of the conference.

Speaker 2: 15:38

However, when it got to the conference itself, marty and Evan and I were always down there at 7 o it and making sure that keynoter is there and present and ready to go and has done their AV check, and then during the day I actually didn't see any of the talks when I was on the board, I feel like, because I was often trying to chase down problems that were coming up, like oh, this breakout room is getting too hot, or we have run out of t-shirts, or we have a speaker who has had to pull out at the last minute Various things that come up during the running of a conference.

Speaker 2: 16:24

And so at that time that was kind of our job to do, and especially to sort of work with the speakers and make sure that they were comfortable and had what they needed of work with the speakers and make sure that they were comfortable and had what they needed. When I went to RailsConf this year, I was really, really impressed because they now work with a team of people whose job it is to run events. So rather than three senior developers being in charge of logistics and running down problems, they've got a staff and that is their whole job and they love doing it and the event was so much smoother than anything I was ever involved with when I was on the board, so I was very impressed by that.

Speaker 1: 17:05

I was volunteering at this past RailsConf so I got to interact with those people quite a bit. A they're just amazing, lovely people, but B with that experience running these events and everything it really did feel like, oh, I think this is running a whole lot smoother than previous events that I've seen that didn't have these people involved. So, yeah, having them around was really nice.

Speaker 2: 17:28

Yeah, and they're continuing to work with even though we have the last RailsConf coming up. Continue to work with Ruby Central on RubyConf.

Speaker 1: 17:37

That'll be really exciting and I'm glad that, even though RailsConf is going away, that RubyConf will continue for a little while at least. Hopefully it doesn't go anywhere I don't know things, so maybe it could but I'm glad that for now at least it's going to continue to be there. So, even though you were not on the board anymore, you were on the program committee for this past RailsConf, weren't you?

Speaker 2: 18:00

Yeah, this is the first time that I've really been involved in any capacity since 2018.

Speaker 1: 18:04

Okay.

Speaker 2: 18:05

Kind of had you know, along with the pandemic and other things going on in my life and this, and that I really had stepped away from it completely for a while. So this was my first toe back into the pool, if you will.

Speaker 1: 18:17

Right. So what's the program committee like? What does it do? What's serving on it? Like?

Speaker 2: 18:23

It's really interesting. Actually, I really enjoyed being on the program committee way before I was on the board because it meant that I could look at all of the talk submissions coming in and read them all and rate them. Now, generally speaking, you've got 500, 600 people sending in talk possibilities for the conference and you are not expected to read each one of them. However, there was one year where I literally read all of them. Wow, and what it did was it gave me a great overview of what are people interested in. Like, oh, we got 13 talks about this particular topic and only two about this other topic. It was interesting to see, even if we only wanted one of the two and one of the 13,. It was just interesting to see where people were putting their energy in terms of what they wanted to get out into the world.

Speaker 1: 19:18

Yeah, I could see that being pretty interesting, just kind of being able to notice the trends of what people are thinking about and working on.

Speaker 2: 19:26

Yeah, I haven't done that. This was probably I don't know 2011 or 2014 maybe, so I haven't done it since then. So these days, being on the program committee, the experience that I had was extremely positive. Kinsey, durham Grace was the one who was running and Jim Remsick were the ones who were running this RailsConf that we just had in Detroit, and we had a meeting once a week ish, but it didn't always happen because we didn't always have stuff to talk about, where we would just get together and talk about things like what tracks do we think we need for the conference? What are you as a program committee member? What are you excited about? What do you want to make a track for?

Speaker 2: 20:06

Of course, kinsey and Jim set the overall tone. They said, okay, we want a more technical program this time, but then, within that, I think each program committee member worked on at least one track, and then our goal was to review everything that came in specifically under that track and sort of pick out stuff for our track. And then we would sort of see like, oh, this track has a lot of interesting talks in it that don't overlap, so maybe it should be longer, it should be a whole day, whereas this track. We only got 10 submissions. Three of them look pretty good, so it should be a half day.

Speaker 1: 20:43

Right.

Speaker 2: 20:43

So a lot of it has to do with what kind of conference proposals, talk proposals, we get in.

Speaker 1: 20:49

The whole talk proposal process. The backside of that, the side that no one gets to see if you're not on the program committee, has always kind of really fascinated me. How does that work exactly?

Speaker 2: 20:59

I think they were using some new software this year, or maybe they had used it just in the past year. But it was really neat because instead of reading each one and giving it like a star rating, it would show me two talk proposals and it would have me pick which one I liked better. And they were blind, of course, so we didn't know who was doing the talk proposal at that stage. So every time a talk came up, people liked it more than the other one. That's a pretty strong signal, right. So that was a really interesting. I had never done something like that before Before. It was always just read the talk proposal. It was blind, so I didn't know who had submitted it, but it was just read the talk proposal and give it one to five stars.

Speaker 1: 21:37

Right Doing the comparison against another talk in the proposal pile. That feels like it would be easier to determine which ones are, overall, the ones you probably want to include, whereas if you're just grading them all in isolation, after I've read 30 of them, I feel like my brain might start to not be as focused on the next one that I'm looking at.

Speaker 2: 22:01

Also, your rating scale may change over time. You have an idea as you're going in and you're reading the first 10, but then when you get to number 30, like you're saying, or number 50, okay, I've read so many of these that I know what I like now, and so I'm going to rate these probably a little bit differently than I did the first 30. Right yeah, I like the idea of that of doing the comparative rating instead of an isolated rating. That sounds like a good idea.

Speaker 1: 22:28

Yeah, I'm glad somebody did it. We're glad somebody came up with it. Yeah, are there any other?

Speaker 2: 22:38

kind of experiences or stories that you would like to share from RailsConf. Railsconf, for me, has been such a backbone of my involvement in the community. When I was more heavily involved, you know sort of in the late aughts through the 2010s, railsconf was really my chance because it was so much larger than RubyConf and drew so many more people because it it was business oriented. It was my chance to connect with people that I wouldn't see anywhere else, and I'm one of these people that's super shy about talking to new people. I'm excited to talk to people I already know, but sometimes I get really shy to talk to someone I don't know yeah and so building up that community over time meant that after a while going to RailsConf felt like coming home.

Speaker 2: 23:24

I had so many people that I knew there and people I wanted to see and catch up with, and it's really hard to overstate how pivotal RailsConf has been in the development of my community involvement.

Speaker 1: 23:36

I feel the same way. I feel like it took me a lot longer than I liked to start to get out of my shell and meet people at the conferences. Once I was able to start that process, I never regretted it. I never regretted getting out and meeting a new person and having a conversation with someone I didn't know before, almost universally just oh, I'm so glad I met that person. That's so cool. We had a great conversation about whatever the topic was, whether it was Ruby related or not.

Speaker 2: 24:06

When I was new to the community, when I was first going to conferences, my goal for each conference I went to was to have a substantive conversation with at least one person. That went beyond like hey, how are you, where do you work? And actually got into something a little deeper, a little maybe more personal or maybe just in-depth into some of the technical topics of the day, and I felt like if I really made one connection with one other person, then I had succeeded in my goal of going to that conference and turns out, one person each conference builds up over time, so that is, then, one of the best investments that I made.

Speaker 1: 24:45

Especially if you're doing RubyConf and RailsConf each year. That's two people. If that's your minimum, that's two people a year, Yep.

Speaker 2: 24:53

Awesome.

Speaker 1: 24:54

Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today, Sarah. It's been awesome getting to chat and see you again for a little bit.

Speaker 2: 25:01

Yeah, this has been great. It's been fun. It was fun for me to go back and look at, oh, what are the talks that I did and what were the places that we were at, and surfacing some of those memories again has been really fun. So thank you for the opportunity.

Speaker 1: 25:13

Awesome, I'll see you later.