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 ODETORAILSCONF 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 Fable. Fable, would you introduce yourself to our listeners?

Fable Tales: 0:31

Yeah, absolutely so. Hi everyone, my name is Fable Tales. I use she her pronouns. I am a former RSpec maintainer, former Ruby Central director, former RailsConf speaker, slash attendee, and hoping to be once again this year for the last RailsConf ever. I realized that I have been going to RailsConf longer than I've had anything that resembling a real job, and so I learned Rails when it was still. Rails 2 was our major version, ruby 1.8.7 was all the rage. I was-.

David Hill: 1:13

That brings back some memories.

Fable Tales: 1:15

I was still in college, right the thing about that wherever I've gone in my career, I've ended up kind of being like the Ruby person. In my career, I've ended up kind of being like the Ruby person. So I took a stint at Google working as a developer advocate for Google, specifically on the Ruby library for the Google Ads API, because it turns out they have some massive customers who are Ruby shops buying Google Ads automatically. It was really interesting to have your entire job at Google be advocating on behalf of Ruby and Rails users to the Google behemoth, because everyone at Google hears Ruby and thinks that's a bad programming language and you kind of have to explain to them. Yeah, but literally millions of dollars of revenue over here because of this programming language, yeah. So I've been around for a while.

Fable Tales: 2:11

My first ever RailsConf was 2014, which was in Phoenix, and I spoke about RSpec stuff and that was kind of a theme when I was speaking at RailsConf. It was because I was an aspect maintainer and so I ended up going to every single RailsConf, apart from one due to a terrifying healthcare issue, and actually that year it was Kansas City. It was two days out to the conference when I was told I wasn't allowed to travel. I had to stay in hospital, oh dear. So I called Justin Searlles and I went justin, do you want to do my talk?

Fable Tales: 2:49

he said yes and then he ended up doing the main line of my talk in about 10 minutes and then he went off on a rant on whatever he wanted to talk about, which was something, something like cfp, critical thinking and programming something, something for like the remaining 30. It was just very funny because I was there by the point he was actually speaking. I had been discharged and I was at home and sarah may, who was one of the ruby central time, skypes me in. I'm at the back of the room and he goes you know that meme, that's like I made this and then he hands it to the other person and it's like I made this. Justin shows that picture and is like this is my talk, and then he goes.

Fable Tales: 3:37

If Fable's in the room I think maybe she's at the back there on Skype. Sarah, if we could hang up now I'm going to like go on a rant. It was very funny. There was another I think it was a RailsConf. It was either a RailsConf or a RubyConf where I was one of the track directors and I had Justin speaking in my track and he was texting me like a month in advance. Writing this talk is my full-time job now, justin, you don't have to do that. He was like no, I need to spend 200 hours on this talk or it won't be good enough.

David Hill: 4:11

Wow.

Fable Tales: 4:13

Yeah, I have enjoyed RailsConf tremendously throughout the years. It always used to feel like a big party to me.

David Hill: 4:21

I got to that point eventually. To me I got to that point eventually. My first few years attending RailsConf I was very dedicated to actually attending a talk every session. I was very in that mode and I was in a very introverted state where I had a really hard time trying to just meet people and socialize. So I was there for the tech stuff. That has shifted significantly in more recent years where now it's like I would like to attend a few talks but I really want to see my old friends.

Fable Tales: 4:53

Right, exactly, and I think this is the thing as well. There was that period in like 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015,. You could basically live your life at Ruby conferences if you wanted to. You could basically live your life at Ruby conferences if you wanted to. I think I spoke at something like 15 to 20 conferences a year range back then and I was living in London. Yeah, oh yeah, because we used to have all these little regional Ruby conferences. There was one in Helsinki. There was a much bigger Ruby room at FOSDEM In America. There was the Ruby Nation was the name of the Ruby conference in DC. There was Rocky Mountain Ruby. There was Ruby on Ales was an amazing Ruby conference. That used to exist, and doesn't it? I could probably go on, and I was living in London at the time. So it was a lot of transatlantic travel. I think I did 26 total crossings of the Atlantic in 2014, which is like a lot, right. Basically, every other week, I was flying to America to speak at a Ruby or a Ruby on Rails conference.

David Hill: 6:05

You're saying that, and the thing that's going through my head is how did your body ever acclimate to one sleep schedule, Holy cow.

Fable Tales: 6:12

Well, I was 25 at the time, right? It just bounces off you when you're 25. Now, that doesn't happen, right? We only have a handful of Ruby on Rails conferences total four or five total in the US each year. Now it's a very different environment. So I was director of Ruby Central. I actually became a director of Ruby Central in November of 2019, right after that Ruby Conf. Wow, just as the world is shutting down, it was after Ruby Conf. So the next conference oh, you're a director of Ruby Central, you're responsible for organizing the conference. It's in April of 2020, right, and so we're just well. Shit, what are we doing? And, as much as anything else, this is maybe too behind the scenes. Ruby Central puts down these very large deposits two or three years in advance with these big convention centers, because that's how far out you need to book, right, and so we had this whole pipeline, I think in 2020, the pipeline was terminating in 2022 or 2023. Eh, 23 seems too far out to my recollection. Now we have to go like, call these venues and, hey, the world's shut down, we're not coming. How do you want to negotiate that?

Fable Tales: 7:32

It was a tough time to be running an organization whose entire revenue model is we run conferences right? Yep, we're in a sense, very lucky, but I would be doing a disservice to the other directors at the time to say like we didn't all work very hard to stop the organization from failing. I think that that was the default outcome and it required skilled work on behalf of everyone who was working in the organization at the time. I was heavily involved in a couple of the remote Rails comps, which running a remote conference is something we didn't know how to do. I will give a little behind the scenes here. I don't know if you've had Evan Phoenix on. I did have Evan on a little while ago. Yeah, have Evan on a little while ago? Yeah, he basically hero coded a multiplayer video watch party system in a rails app for the remote rails carves. You could watch a talk with multiple people remotely and it would stay in sync. He basically solo coded a whole rails app to run the remote Rails conference that we did and there was some terrifying last minute shenanigans where, like stuff wasn't working. It turns out that the skillset required for being a director of a multi-million dollar 501c3 is very different to that of being a programmer. $1,000,000,000 501c3 is very different to that of being a programmer and ideally you don't smush those together at the highest stress points. For both it ended up working, goodness gracious.

Fable Tales: 9:14

This is a thing that's very special to me about RailsConf in particular is I kind of have all these snapshot point special memories. I don't hear so much people talking about their other programming conferences. It's a very good and special conference. I remember in the sort of like mid teens this feeling of I'm so excited to go to RailsConf, I'm so excited to see all my. It's almost like summer camp. It's that kind of feeling. I haven't seen these people in six months because the last time I saw them was RubyConf. We used to run two conferences a year and that was always incredible.

Fable Tales: 9:53

When I started attending RailsConf I really had not spent that much time in the US, these amazing-seeming destinations. I remember one year we had I think it was RailsConf, it might have been RubyConf. They were very similar in Affect before the pandemic and the Affect definitely changed, but it was at the San Antonio Riverwalk. You're in this mega hotel, right, a hotel the size of like a town, basically and then you like go down these escalators, you go straight out onto this fully pedestrianized waterway with restaurants and bars and shops, lining it all the way down is just beautiful. Wow, and that made for great social times. Yeah, bad. It was a wonderful, wonderful conference. I can't remember exactly who was there, but Mats and some of the Japanese folks. Oh, this would have been RubyConf, probably RubyConf then, yeah, that would have been RubyConf, because Mats was there, comes and sits with us and joins us and we just end up kind of like talking about Ruby stuff. It was great. I have these just like little fragments of fun memory that I can kind of stitch together from all these conferences. Right, it's kind of been really beautiful, cause I've been attending RailsConf longer than I've ever had any individual job, also actually longer than I've been a professional software engineer.

Fable Tales: 11:21

I started going to RailsConf right before I graduated college, cause I became an RSpec core team member before I graduated from college. It was really interesting to be interviewing for software engineering positions at Rails shops and going in with like yeah, I'm an Aspect core team member, also, I'm a new grad, and then being like we don't know what to do with you. How does that happen? I remember so profoundly when I was doing interviewing between final exams and formally graduating, I went to one of these Rails shops in London. The interview was like working on a problem where they'd sort of set up a harness test suite in RSpec. I started poking holes in their test suite before actually getting on to the problem. I was like I don't mean to be an asshole, but like I have some questions about how you set up these tests. Do you like mind if we have a conversation about them? And the guy's eyes lit up. He was like oh my God, yes, let's do that. And they offered me the job. It was very funny.

Fable Tales: 12:29

It's been this kind of fixture. I haven't been to the last couple, just travel health reasons. Hasn't quite worked out. Yeah, good times, good memories.

David Hill: 12:41

I want to try and narrow down a little bit. You mentioned before you served as one of the directors for Ruby Central for a little while. Could you talk a little bit more about, in addition to the high level stuff in terms of attempting to run RailsConf during the pandemic? What did your work as a director on Ruby Central entail from more of a day-to-day standpoint?

Fable Tales: 13:02

It changed throughout the time being there, right? So Evan and Marty were the only two members of the board of directors at the time. I want to say we were in Minneapolis-St Paul and it was RailsConf. They tapped a bunch of folks on the shoulder and were basically like, are you interested in becoming a director? If so, like, let's talk after the conference and it was myself, alison McMillan, max Tew and someone else whose name is escaping me right now Was it Jonan? It might've been Jonan All joined the board and the initial pitch was sort of we want to expand the pool of people who are chairing the conferences, right, and the chair role is sort of what, both working with the staff of Ruby Central, who are like event organizing professionals and very, very good at what they do, marketing, like a bunch of those sort of very importantly not tech people.

Fable Tales: 14:08

Right, they are people whose job it is to organize the conference Running the program, deciding on the keynotes, working out the structure, the schedule, running the CFP. So the conference chairs are responsible for selecting the people who propose the tracks and then review the CFP submissions. And originally that was most of the work, with some sort of administrivia, because Ruby Central is a 501, which means you need to have board meetings, you need to pay your taxes, you need to have a treasurer, you need to have a secretary. There are certain things a 501c3 can't do by nature of its tax-exempt status. And, as we kind of got settled, it was sort of like this perfect crossover, right, because you had new directors coming in looking at stuff and starting to ask questions. Then you have the pandemic happen and it's well, just inevitably. This means there was no way the organization was going to come out of the pandemic in the same shape that it entered it kind of forced a hard reset.

Fable Tales: 15:13

Right. And so thinking about, what do we want Ruby central to be? What do we want Ruby Central to be? What do we want Ruby Central to do? And at the time, andre Arco was running Ruby Together, which was a 501c6, which it may seem like these designations don't matter, except they totally do for sort of like what is this organization, what can it and can't it do, who can and can't donate to it, etc.

Fable Tales: 15:38

Right, yep it almost doesn't matter until you get down to where money comes into play, and then it's like, oh, this matters a lot, and it turns out we can't have these beautiful, lovely conferences and, perhaps more importantly, ruby gems and bundler without some harmony. And so one of the things that happened while I was on the board of Ruby Central is Ruby Together and Ruby Central merged. At the time Ruby Together was founded. It was an interesting experiment. Can we find a way to more easily move money into the hands of software maintainers? And that's something I think Ruby Central didn't see as part of its mission then.

Fable Tales: 16:19

Now it's very obvious to me at least Ruby Central kind of you can sort of think of it like the Python Software Foundation or the Linux Software Foundation is the place that we should jump off to be able to access and represent the Ruby community, right?

Fable Tales: 16:35

For example, the Ruby Central, I think, is now funded by the German government for some decent slice of money, because Germany wants to fund security in software supply chain for software users, and they use Ruby like many governments do. Actually, similar 18F, which is the US digital service wing, and GDS, which is in the UK, all just make incredibly heavy usage of Ruby as a programming language, right? And so how do you ensure the longevity of those if you're an organization that is a thousand years older approximately than the Ruby programming language. That merger was very helpful and you know Ruby Central now is paying for not just running these conferences and not just hosting rubygemsorg. Which kind of was its Like? If you go to say RubyConf in Miami in 2013,? That's what you hear about, right, but if you go to RailsConf in I was going to say Pittsburgh, but don't go to Pittsburgh because it's in.

David Hill: 17:42

Philadelphia.

Fable Tales: 17:44

It's in Philadelphia this year. It was in Pittsburgh once, by the way, and that was an amazing little conference. It snowed and half the people there who were from the West Coast were like what the fuck is going on. But the mission, I think, is broader and comes more clearly now right, comes more clearly, now right, and we run these two major events every year. As much more secondary to like Ruby Central is the place you go to support and ensure the longevity of Ruby open source.

David Hill: 18:15

Part of the reason, as I understood it, for why RailsConf is coming to an end is so that Ruby Central can put more time and energy and resources into supporting Bundler and RubyGems and the whole supply chain thing. That makes our job possible.

Fable Tales: 18:30

I think also right. It would be naive to not also acknowledge that the Rails Foundation exists now. It didn't.

Fable Tales: 18:38

There's also that yes, for 15 years or however long we've been running this conference, for they run what from I've heard, is just an absolutely amazing conference that's heavily focused on Rails, and so I think in a sense it makes sense to have, similar to how we have, the distinguishing line of Ruby ecosystem and Rails, that we have, like Ruby Central and the Rails Foundation, sort of as that dividing line. And you know, if you're an organization who wants to support Rails specifically, there's a place you can go, and if you care more about the entire Ruby ecosystem as a whole, there's a place you can go right.

David Hill: 19:17

Yeah, I love Ruby and I love Rails. I'm so glad that we have these organizations whose entire purpose is to kind of ensure the longevity of these systems.

Fable Tales: 19:26

Yeah, when you say that, the thing that comes up in my head is so. I currently work at Stripe. Stripe has the largest Ruby code base in the world. We have 35 million sourced lines of Ruby in our Ruby monorepo. We have heard from our friends at various other large Ruby shops. They all pale in comparison to us. I shan't name names but feel free to take guesses.

Fable Tales: 19:50

My specific role at the moment is I kind of am Stripe's Ruby virtual machine expert. I have originated patches that we use in the C code of the VM to do Stripe specific things, Proposed upstreaming some of them to the VM, sent patches I have commits in Ruby itself. Right, I know for a fact I could not do that if I had not attended all the conferences, because a lot of that knowledge was gained by listening to folks like Aaron and Eileen and Mats and Koichi kind of telling the story. I can explain to you what a generational incremental garbage collector is because I attended the conferences and I would not be able to do that if I had not. It's nice to say like I go to this and I, like woohoo, have a fun time with my friends, but also I can see patch one of the world's largest and most complex financial systems. If I need to, because of that, which is fun, yeah, absolutely.

David Hill: 20:53

I've spent a lot of episodes of this podcast talking about and kind of emphasizing the more social community aspect of why I love RailsConf so much. But I think I may have done a disservice a little bit to the technical learning side a bit, where it's just, yeah, exactly what you're talking about. There's been so much information that I've been able to learn and grow from. That was the more technical side of things to get me where I am in my career now.

Fable Tales: 21:20

I spoke at I think it was literally every RailsConf from 2014 to 2019, apart from the one where I was sick, which I think was 2016. And a number of them were on how to use RSpec effectively with Rails, because I was an RSpec main hero at the time and I've had people come to me years later and say because you said that thing at that conference, I was able to do this thing in my job that I like otherwise, wouldn't have known how to do. Right, that's a fantastic feeling.

Fable Tales: 21:58

Yeah, and so there's just incredible value to being able to go and hear the stuff. And a take I have I have no scientific basis for whatsoever, but I believe in my heart of hearts is you learn more by attending the talk in person than you do by watching the video. Even if you just sit there and passively absorb it in person, I'm pretty sure you're going to learn more than if you watch a video on YouTube. I think it's well worth going, but you also don't have to attend every talk. The last RailsConf I went to, I think I attended two talks total. I spent most of my time in the hallway and it was great. I had a great time.

David Hill: 22:39

The hallway track is a real thing. That also has a certain kind of value to it and, uh, it took me a while to come around to it. I actually do enjoy the hallway track now. Yeah Well, Fable, it has been a pleasure to have you on the podcast. Are there any parting words or thoughts you'd like to offer on RailsConf before we wrap up?

Fable Tales: 23:01

RailsConf is great. I will sorely miss it. I'm looking forward to going one last time. Yep, and then you just play the Fast and Furious outro, like it's been a long day right there, and then we just fade off into the sunset.

David Hill: 23:19

Fade off into the sunset.

Fable Tales: 23:23

Thanks for joining me today, fable. Of course, I had a great time.