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 RailsConf over the years. I'm your host, david Hill, and joining me today is my first returning guest, chris oliver.

Chris Oliver: 0:28

thanks for joining me, yeah, anytime, although I think today we're not reminiscing, this time are we that's right.

David Hill: 0:37

Today is less about reminiscing since, at least at the time of recording, we're two months out from rails I've got my terminal display here with the countdown of days.

Chris Oliver: 0:49

I think it was like 68 days, something like that. 67, maybe that was the number from yesterday almost two months away at this point yeah, two. Months which in a blink of an eye will be one month, and then we'll be flying out to Philly.

David Hill: 1:06

So when I initially had you on the podcast back at the very beginning, I don't remember if it had been announced yet that you were co-chairing the conference or not at that point.

Chris Oliver: 1:16

I don't remember when did we record that? I was back in August, I think in August, I think Then probably not, because I wasn't roped into co-chairing until I don't even know when I need to look. I know Drew Bragg texted me and he was like hey, have you talked to Ufuk? And I was like no, what's that about that? I think wasn't that long ago, january, so no.

David Hill: 1:46

Definitely did not talk about that the last time you were on the podcast, no, so let's start there. What has it been like co-chairing a conference?

Chris Oliver: 1:53

It's been good. I mean I had no idea what it was like to organize anything. I've been on the sidelines helping Jason charns with his Southeast Ruby a bit the first time. Like I remember running to Costco to grab a whole ton of drinks and stuff for people and whatever, but like I hadn't gone through picking talks, organizing anything, then use none of that stuff at all and I don't feel like an expert in this at all because I feel like the ruby central team plus ufuk's done this a few times. I'm sort of helping, guide and answer questions that I can help with.

Chris Oliver: 2:34

But the whole process like they've got kind of down because this is not their first rodeo. The process has been pretty fun. I mean we kind of started out just generally talking about like ufuk and I were like do you want to do this? Do we see the vision for the last rails conf? Kind of the same. Do you want to do it? Do you have time? And I remember listening to andy kroll talk about how much time it took to co-chair last time and I was like, hmm, but when you get asked to do that for the very last RailsConf ever, you got to say yes.

David Hill: 3:14

That's a hard thing to turn down.

Chris Oliver: 3:15

Right, I was opinionated about what I wanted to see as well, like I've wanted more technical talks, modern, what's coming up, what's new, because that's what gets me the most excited at conferences. So I felt like I at least have a unique take on what I want to see there and could at least contribute something you know, opinionated, like that, or whatever to help out and stuff. That's where it started. And then I guess we took the steps of like who's the program committee? I would say that at least for my role as co-chair, that's the majority of things. Like we need to figure out who is on the program committee, whose talks we pick. What's the schedule? Like Did we change the name yet? Hack Day is not Hack.

David Hill: 4:08

Day. This year we're calling it Community Day. Now Community Day. I thought, that was the Officially settled on that finally.

Chris Oliver: 4:15

Okay, yeah, and that's some of the stuff we decided on too. It's like this year we had some really good panels that came up and it gives. Instead of the second day of the conference just being about hacking on open source or going to workshops, now we'll also have panels you can attend, so that felt like maybe a little rebranding. There made sense to call it community day, and I think we have. Is it open source spaces?

David Hill: 4:42

or something on On the schedule. It calls them hack spaces, but yeah, hack spaces yeah.

Chris Oliver: 4:47

That's sort of staying. Different name changes to try and make it fit better or whatever. We went and saw the venue. You know, one of the things that would be cool but it has to be done so early, like a year or more in advance, is picking the venue. So we didn't have any say in that, necessarily, or at least I didn't, but that stuff is like all right, that's what ruby central is doing. They're preparing for ruby conf and the next year and whatever way ahead of time. So as the co-chair, we are like okay, this is what we've got, this is our constraints. We're in Philly. We didn't pick the city or whatever. Ufu may have been involved in that or whatever.

Chris Oliver: 5:29

But a big thing that we did that was kind of just the Ruby Central team and the co-chairs was going and doing the site visit, which was going to the hotel, staying there, eating there, walking around there, going and walking with the hotel's manager or whatever, and showing us the spaces that we have for the keynotes, for the breakout rooms and talks, for lunch, the vendor areas, the hotel, bar, hotel, restaurant, hotel. They've got like a vip lounge thing too and they have a rooftop room. I remember if it's settled, not or not, but like potentially that could be used for game night or whatever. And there was some cool stuff that we got to do there, just like walk around and see all the places, what's going to be happening, looking at the spaces and saying we have our sponsor booths and they're like 10 by 10 or 20 by 10 or whatever. How are they going to fit in the hallway, here or there or wherever? Where's registration going to be? So we had a good time doing that.

Chris Oliver: 6:35

That was in between my travel to tropical on rails and then went to philly for the site visit and then went to Philly for the site visit and then I went to Vegas for Sin City. Ruby Squeezed that in between and that was a long week of travel Week and a half of traveling. But it was good because it was also kind of back to back in between those. So I got the experience of this is what tropical felt like. Tropical was in a room or rooms that were connected to the hotel, which is great.

Chris Oliver: 7:05

Then, same thing with this, it's a sheraton in philly, so it's got a gym and your hotel room, the bar, the main floor, the restaurant there and then two floors above it will be where the conference takes place. So there's escalators in the main area, like lots of chances for you to bump into people that you're looking for or may want to talk to and stuff. So the site visit was really good to get an idea of what's it going to look like, how's it going to feel. I'd love to one day be part of the shopping around of like what are the options in various cities or whatever. What are the options in various cities or whatever? It's tough to find venues for whatever thousand people or something. There's definitely unique venues you could find, but they're probably going to be expensive for a thousand people.

Chris Oliver: 7:57

But having it in a hotel adds that benefit of you run into people in the lobby. You can stay up later and hang out in the hotel bar, run into people there, you can run upstairs. If you've got to give a talk, you can bring your backpack down, give your talk and then run upstairs real quick and drop your backpack off. You don't have to take a bus anywhere or carry your bag around. I've really appreciated that. So that's nice. The other thing is the location of it is awesome. The city blocks on the map of Philly look a little deceiving if you've looked at other cities because it looks like it's a long walk to Reading Terminal Market. But it's actually really close 10-minute walk or something. It's not far to get to. But you look at the map and you're like, oh, that's a long walk, like 30 minutes or something. It's not so I think that'll be cool. And then one of the things that changes this year that is going to be awesome is having gone to Sin City. It was in the MGM, and in Sa paulo for tropical it was in this hotel. So the only times I went out and actually saw anywhere in brazil was like I walked a block to like a restaurant and walked back to the hotel. I didn't get to experience a ton, but that gave me a little bit at least I could go to you know a local restaurant and try the food and whatever in the mgm. You're like in this massive casino that doesn't really want you to leave. So there's all the restaurants there but no windows, you don't know what time of day it is and it'll be cool because that typical experience where we have at a RailsConf where lunch is catered, you go to the big room, you get in line and then you sit down and eat with everybody. It's like the food's never that great, you don't really get choices or options or whatever. So this year is going to be different.

Chris Oliver: 9:58

Where you're going to be able to go, walk outside in Philly, try some food at Reading Terminal Market. I will recommend going there and getting the whatever the cookie place is in there they have a blueberry muffin cookie. It's kind of like the top of the blueberry muffin with the bourbonato sugar or whatever on top in the cookie form and they're kind of warm. Oh my God, I could eat four of those warm and they're kind of warm. Oh my god, I could eat four of those and cheese steaks there. Actually, the day I got there I was like I'm gonna go get a cheese steak.

Chris Oliver: 10:31

So at the sheraton I'm looking at like where's the nearby cheese steak places? Shay's steaks is literally like you take an alley around from the front door of the Sheraton to like the backside and it's right there. They have a Wagyu cheese steak for like 50 bucks. It looks awesome. Whoa, I didn't order that, I just ordered the regular one and it was phenomenal, like one of the best cheese steaks I've ever had. And that's like super, duper close. You don't even cross the street to get there. So we're stoked to go back there. But food everywhere we went around there. It's fantastic, so I'm looking forward to it. It's a great location.

David Hill: 11:15

Philly gets overlooked, I think, for whatever reason, but it's a cool place with a ton of history, so super excited, yeah a couple of other people I've talked to for the podcast have mentioned how the plan is to basically unleash a bunch of Ruby nerds on the city for lunch every day. I am really excited to kind of get an opportunity to taste the kind of the flavor of the city for the first time ever going to one of these conferences.

Chris Oliver: 11:42

Tastes like cheesesteaks. Right. I flew in like Monday and left Tuesday afternoon. I told Brooke I had four meals in Philly and I had four cheesesteaks. I had a breakfast cheesesteak that had vegan stuff on it. It was awesome. So I think that's a big thing is understanding the location and its uniqueness and making it interesting. I liked that a lot. Getting to go to a studio that I haven't been to or spent much time in, that's always super fun. So, like my favorite cause, we get to go to Atlanta, minneapolis, portland, San Diego, philly, chicago, yada yada. Going to Ruby copy rails comp is always fun. Fun because we get to go explore stuff.

David Hill: 12:31

I want to back up a little bit. We kind of skipped over the whole CFP part of this process.

Chris Oliver: 12:36

Yeah, yeah.

Chris Oliver: 12:38

This is my first experience being on this side of the CFP and it's the same for you as your first experience doing this side of things yeah, maybe we step back even a little further and talk about picking the program committee, because the program committee's responsibility is basically helping us go through the 250 submissions, ranking all of those, then picking the 29 slots. So 1 in 10 was basically what got chosen, which is really tough. So that was step one was kind of like when Ufuk and I said let's go do this, he had a list of some people. I had some people. You were on the list.

Chris Oliver: 13:23

Drew Bragg from Ufuk's experience in the past was like you don't want that go to the conference. What kind of talks would you want to see? Because if you're on the program committee, you're the ones picking the talks that get selected. So you know it's helpful to have as many people as we could on there to share the responsibility of picking what is the core people will be experiencing at the conference. But we wanted the team to be diverse enough and not all the same kind of thinkers or whatever, and so that I think our group of what was it like?

David Hill: 14:18

eight people six I guess including us including the coaches, brings it to eight.

Chris Oliver: 14:24

Yeah, yeah good enough size but not unmanageable. And yeah, that was kind of step one and messaging all of you and seeing if you were in or not. I think everybody was especially hard to turn that one down. When it's the last rails comp as well, I don't remember if there was much going on. I get pulled into the regular meetings for talking about what sponsorships we still need to sell. Who's in limbo? Do I know anybody that we could ask and reach out to about sponsoring the conference? That type of stuff.

Chris Oliver: 15:00

I know that there are some things about how many rooms do we have available, making sure that we communicate to all of the people booking tickets to also remind them that booking hotel rooms affects the conference Definitely should book a room at the hotel because it is something that part of us. Booking the hotel for the conference means we have to pay for a certain number of rooms and if you don't pay for the room, it comes out of Ruby Central's pocket even though nobody used it, which sucks. So those are things that are really important to communicate and we made sure that we're like that are really important to communicate and we made sure that we were like let's emphasize that Get your ticket but also get a room at the Sheraton in Philly, because I've done that in the past where I didn't know and I was like, well, I could save 20 bucks a night somewhere close by and all I have to do is walk two blocks. But the downsides are that costs the conference money. I didn't know about that. I would have paid the extra 20 bucks a night happily to benefit Ruby central. But also I didn't at the time realize that being at the conference hotel is where you run into people the most and that have the conversations and stuff that you wouldn't otherwise. That reminds me of Minneapolis or Portland or whatever.

Chris Oliver: 16:18

But we were sitting in the lobby and then it was like 1030 or 11 or something and we were all sitting there like man, maybe we should go to bed and the elevator doors open and it's Raphael and Ufuk and Stephanie, I think, and they were like so what's going on? Where's the party at? They're like ready to start their night and we're all like we were just about to go to bed, but you don't have the opportunity to go hang out with them that often. So we're like let's just stay up for as long as they want to hang out. So we had such a good time chatting in the hotel lobby bar area and I was like that seals the deal for me forever, like I will always stay at the conference hotel because those are the things that happen that I would have been in a different hotel lobby or something and I never would have run into them and then never had that experience or whatever.

Chris Oliver: 17:13

So I think that kind of stuff we're able to give our input on you are too, anybody is really. But now, because we're in these, give our input on you are too, anybody is really. But now because we're in these, more specific meetings on things, we're gonna weigh in on that some more. But moving on to the cfp process, that was all kind of set up by, I think ally and ruby central handled all getting the sessionized stuff going and then collected all of the submissions and then that's when we all had to rank every single talk against every other talk. Basically the process went in sessionized so that basically you had the exact rankings for everything. You were the first done right.

David Hill: 17:59

I was yes, and it took you like four hours or something. Yeah, it was about four hours. It was kind of funny, just because my wife tends to stay up late and go to bed late. I'm the opposite. I go to bed early so I can get up early, and if I've gotten more than four hours of sleep in a block I have a really, really hard time falling back asleep again. It just so happened that the CFP closed on Friday at midnight. Saturday morning my wife she's coming to bed at 3 am and I went to bed at 10 and she wakes me up. It's like well, I can't go back to sleep, I might as well get started.

Chris Oliver: 18:35

Yeah, yeah, I remember Ufuk said something about expect this to take at least a week of your time to go through all these or whatever. And I was like, oh geez, and it's kind of open-ended on whenever the whole committee can squeeze time in to rank all these. But yeah, I started sitting down and it was like an hour in. I was like this is is gonna take a long time and you kind of went through and you basically had three talks and you would choose first, second, third and just kept doing that until basically everything had been ranked against each other. And there were things where I was like I know the speaker here, so I'm gonna not vote this one and we can talk about it afterwards, because I don't want to be biased towards them or whatever. I remember getting two hours in and I was like if I put this down now, I'll never get this done. We've talked about this many, many times ourselves internally, but it was like all of the AI talks were written, and probably is the case. The people used AI to write their submissions.

David Hill: 19:41

To generate the submission.

Chris Oliver: 19:43

And so they all became extremely vague and didn't really have specifics, and that was really hard to remember, like this one's different than that one, and they all became kind of a blur and it was like, well, if they didn't even take the effort to explain how this talk fits into the theme of the conference, then how can we expect you to actually fit into the theme of the conference? You didn't put it in your submission, so we can't just like gamble and say I hope this person puts together a relevant talk. And so that made it tough for us to choose various types of talks. But that was probably the biggest learning I took away from that was like if they ask you and tell you these are the themes we're looking for, call it out in your submission, explain who it's for, where it fits into the conference, why you're giving this, why it's important for this year, this audience, this theme or whatever.

Chris Oliver: 20:45

And there were some that were incredibly obvious, like hell, yeses. And then there were so many that were like I want to talk about such and such, and it was like, okay, but that doesn't really fit our theme at all. And it's like I know you might want to talk about that, but that's not what we're aiming for and it was interesting to see the people who submitted because it was such a broad there's 250 submissions. That's a ton of various experience levels giving talks, just experience levels as a developer in general, or whatever and so it gave me a really good appreciation of this is what I need to submit next time around when I go to a cfp for ruby or whatever.

David Hill: 21:30

But that ranking process was hard because I didn't amount four hours to I was worried for a little while, like maybe I rushed through this too fast. If everybody else takes 10 hours to do this, I clearly did something wrong. But everybody was within a pretty good margin of a roughly three to four I think maybe five hours was the max that somebody spent to go through it. It's like I felt so much better about myself.

Chris Oliver: 21:55

Yeah, that's exactly right. It was like I know, if you came back to it, you put it down, you did like an hour a day. It would probably take a little extra time just to remember like, oh, there's this talk, there's that talk. Because some of them were so good too, you could pull them out and say that sounds like a keynote. I'm going to like really put my weight into this one because I really like that one. So Sessionize had some cool tools to make that process.

David Hill: 22:22

Let us go both ways. With that, we could say this was really good. Don't even bother giving me this to rank anymore, because I want this one and it also gave us. This does not fit at all. Don't show it to me again.

Chris Oliver: 22:38

Yeah, because there were ones that might have had just a single sentence for the description and it's like if you're going to put in no effort into your submission, I assume that you're going to put in no effort into your talk. So we do not want to waste our time on those types of things.

David Hill: 22:50

The times where I've tried to submit to a CFP in the past, I think my mentality behind it was just kind of like yeah, I want to and I've got an idea, and this is the rough idea. And just going through this experience has taught me is like, oh, the more fleshed out that I can have the talk already now at the cfp stage, the better the chances are.

Chris Oliver: 23:11

And so, like that's a piece of advice for anyone who was thinking about submitting to a conference the more you have of it done now, the better yeah, that's a really good piece of advice because I felt the same way where in the past I will have an idea for a talk and I'll submit it but it comes across half-assed because I haven't thought about the exact outline of what I was going to talk about. But if you submit a talk and you have an exact outline, it's so much easier for us to pick that because we can tell if it fits into the theme or not. And you're going to say these are the takeaways that you're going to learn in this 30 minute talk or whatever. And you're going to say this is for beginners or intermediate folks or whatever. And you just have so much more detail you can give, because the ones that I've submitted in the past are like maybe I'd talk about that. They haven't really fleshed out any of the outline. Those come across as very vague and very generic and I know that I would never have picked my own submissions now based on that.

Chris Oliver: 24:15

That is the hard thing. There's 250 of them and you have to get rid of nine out of every 10, basically Roughly one out of 10. That's going to stand out because that person's actually thought through a whole lot about their talk and you can tell those people are either experienced or they've actually planned the talk out. That's what we're trying to filter for. It can be tough. That is a lot of extra work to do ahead of time. You're not going to be paid to give a talk. You're doing this out of your own goodwill to come to the conference. You do get free hotel and ticket to the conference, so you get paid in that bartering way but it is important to have that.

Chris Oliver: 25:00

It does mean that you need to come prepared. I've definitely not been prepared in the past when I've submitted stuff and it makes a lot more sense to me now. So you did a lot of the work on the. We've got 29 talks, we've got tracks, we have three rooms, three rooms, yep, for talks simultaneously and we have basically two days for those, then putting those into tracks or just assigning them rooms.

Chris Oliver: 25:32

Someone took responsibility and was like here's my proposed schedule based upon the talks we selected, because that was kind of the next step in the process of here's my proposed schedule based upon the talks we selected, because that was kind of the next step in the process. So here's all the people. We've talked about the theme of past, present and future Rails, but that can be broken down into all kinds of various things. Like you can have a track for beginners or a track for front-end or back-end or performance or whatever, and in the past past I think there's been like what five tracks going on at the same time or something, and when you have that many talks and speakers you can probably get themes out of the rooms or whatever a bit easier.

David Hill: 26:15

But I don't think we really landed on themes for the yeah, we don't really have tracks this time around, which I'm OK with. It, just didn't work out with the we had.

Chris Oliver: 26:27

It doesn't really matter, because I think people don't matter what. Even if you had a room on performance, you're probably not going to be sitting there for every single performance talk the whole right days. You'll probably still jump around anyways. So yeah, we didn't feel like that was terribly important. It's kind of maybe nice to have things work out that way, but how did we go through that choosing where people are? I feel like we kind of were like our own personal opinions of, well, I want to go see so-and-so's talk and this one, so maybe we don't put those at the same time. Let's not have those compete. Yeah, yeah, and it was our own kind of interest in them. I think that in a sense, we just kind of need to randomly throw you all in slots and then we can go back and tweak them and say like I don't want to miss these two in person. So let's maybe swap these so we can attend both or whatever.

Chris Oliver: 27:23

There was definitely a little bit of that going on and it was always impossible because there was always going to be two given at the same time that you were going to miss one of them. But they'll be recorded which you can always watch later, but still much more fun to be in person. But we've got the schedule nailed down.

David Hill: 27:41

We've got the schedule nailed down. We just this past weekend, the first of our keynotes got announced. Oh yeah, obviously, slater's giving one of the keynotes, which will be cool.

Chris Oliver: 27:51

That was one that, while we were going through and reading the proposals, that immediately for me stood out as yep done. I want to see that I'm all in because that submission was so perfect. Yeah, that one just was a fantastic one that you, you read and you're like there's something special about this and that was an easy win, I think yeah, well for me that one.

David Hill: 28:17

I think I rated that one fairly mid-level just because, like I was looking at is like this could be cool, but I think it heavily relied on who the presenter was and since, at that stage of things when we're rating them. It's all anonymized. I don't know who this is. I don't know if this is going to go well, then as soon as the rating process was done and we could see who it was like. Oh, it's Aji. Yeah, that'll probably be fine.

Chris Oliver: 28:43

Yeah, that's something we should talk about. And it's like the first run through of comparing all the talks to each other is all anonymized, so you don't know who the speaker is. So if you submit something and you're like, well, my name is Chris Oliver, they're going to know who this talk is, so I don't need to put as much effort into the description.

Chris Oliver: 29:05

That's not going to help you ranked and then you could go through the lower ranked ones or the ones where people said I know the speaker, I don't want to be biased, so I'm gonna not vote on this one. That helps a lot so you can go choose and refine it now that we know who is giving what talks, or whatever that helped us do the fine tuning for the last portion of the selection process, because that does matter a whole ton. It's nice because it gives people the opportunity to be a brand new speaker and submit something, and then you get a highly ranked one and we don't know who you are, and that's amazing. Then we don't have bias towards people we know.

Chris Oliver: 29:55

Yeah, that person always gives a good talk. We'll pick them over somebody else that we don't know. That works out better, I think. But that is important at the same time, to know who's giving the talk, because you're like I don't know If it's some random person, it could be great, could be bad, I don't know. And that was probably the toughest part, trying to be as fair as we can, but also need to know as much as possible about the submitters too.

David Hill: 30:25

Yeah, before we wrap up, I have one new question that I wanted to ask people. During this last block of episodes, I had somebody reach out to me that I met for the first time at RubyConf in November. She was asking how I got more comfortable talking to people at conferences and meeting people, given that she's kind of shy and introverted, like I think a lot of us tend to be. What advice would you give someone attending a conference for the first time of how to go about getting outside of their comfort zone and meeting people at these events, since, like you said, meeting people at these events is like one of the best coolest parts about this experience?

Chris Oliver: 31:02

Yeah, my cheat for that is make screencasts on the internet for 11 years and then people come to you and you don't have to be the awkward person. But I was that awkward person, like go sit down, go to lunch with people you don't know. That was like the first place where I started to make friends, because you sit down at lunch, then you see them in a talk or something or in the hallway afterwards. What talk were you just at? Was it good? Were you going to the next one Doing anything for dinner? And you make your friends that way. You got to be awkward. Go say hi to the person that you want to, even if they're talking with other people. Go join the circle. Every time somebody kind of awkwardly walks up to the circle, open it up, bring them in, be that person that makes it welcoming and don't keep them awkwardly outside of the circle and stuff. But yeah, I've just had to go be the awkward person and go say hi and whatever. And or you go follow somebody around.

Chris Oliver: 32:07

I followed Jason Charns around and he knew everyone Mike Perham and he went up and I followed him up to go ask DHH if he'd be on our podcast way back in the day and I was just too shy to do that, didn't want to bother people or whatever. And the thing is we're all here because we love ruby and rails and that is the shared thing we all have while we're there. So, like everybody's already your friend, you just might not have met them yet. You know, that was what I was kind of telling erica mcdevitt when she was my scholar and was like you know, know, all these people are here not because they're networking for their company or trying to get a job or whatever. Like, we're all friends. This is all fun for us. Yes, it happens to be work related, but we're here because it doesn't really ever feel like work. You know, it's just a community of really good people. So, I don't know, that's probably what I would say. That's not a great answer, don't be afraid of being the awkward person, but it's okay.

David Hill: 33:15

I think it actually is a pretty good answer. Honestly, so much of the anxiety of trying to meet new people is that fear of what if they don't like me, what if I say something stupid. But if you're able to go into that scenario with that kind of mindset of we're already friends, we just haven't met yet, because we have these common loves of Ruby and Rails and what we're doing here, I think that's a helpful mindset to try and adopt.

Chris Oliver: 33:42

You know, when I meet somebody new, like what are you working on? What are some of the cool stuff you're building? Those always tend to lead into something you already have the common thread of Ruby and Rails, so they're using Rails in some cool way that you've never heard of, or in some interesting problem space or whatever. Find somebody to go to lunch with and get a group together. And if it's all strangers, then that's fantastic, because then you get all these new people that you meet and hopefully you end up they're all friends and you guys keep in touch afterwards and you've got the Ruby Central Slack community to keep in touch and the lunch and evening events or meals or whatever.

Chris Oliver: 34:29

Go to game night. Those types of things are good places to come to game night, make friends. Any of the after party things go to those. Go meet people all day there. It's great. You just walk up to a group of people and if you overhear him talking about something interesting, just go walk up to him, hang out, say hi, hopefully you join in the conversation. It's not as awkward as you thought it was going to be.

David Hill: 34:54

It's weird for me now because you have a certain amount of celebrity associated.

Chris Oliver: 34:58

Yeah, it's strange. So I can just be there and show up and there's all these people saying hi and stuff, and I don't have to go do that anymore. Like people will be afraid to come say hi to me sometimes. So I'm like just do it. Like I'll probably be in a conversation with somebody else, so don't feel bad interrupting. Come up say hi, you don't have to interrupt. You can walk up and wait till the other person's done talking or whatever, but I'll make sure that I'm there and say hi and that's how I met you the first time was the restaurant rooftop and I think it was portland I only had like 30 people show up yeah or something eventually, but no one had shown up yet.

David Hill: 35:42

You were just kind of by yourself.

Chris Oliver: 35:43

And even then with you by yourself, it took me like five laps around the bar before I was like, okay, let's just do it just go say hi, introduce yourself, and now look at us and now on the programming committee together and that's something I think that you can speak to as well. It's like you were vocal about I want to be on the program committee. If you need help, I want to, oh, whatever, like I want to contribute. And you were like very vocal with everybody that you could be and that was like why you were gonna get picked. You know, like everybody knew that you wanted to be involved and that's important because if you kind of mention it off handed and you didn't follow through with it, then somebody's gonna forget or whatever. And if you want to get involved, go talk to people and say like you know anybody urbi central that I can talk to and see how I can help out and volunteer, whatever, and that was those are also good conversations was that moment when I was being very outspoken about wanting to be more involved.

David Hill: 36:44

I used the word shameless. I was completely shameless and expressing how much I wanted to participate and to be involved with putting together this final RailsConf. A lot of that also came to that. I was volunteering at RubyConf and so I was already doing something to help. I had already started to establish relationships with the people in Ruby Central and, granted, I'm not them, so I might be putting words in their mouth at this point, but like they could see that I wasn't just going to show up and screw around and not participate and not do the things that they were asking me to do, like I was showing up and doing the work yeah, same like we just talked about with your CFP submission.

Chris Oliver: 37:25

It's like if you do the work ahead of time to prepare for it and you write a really good CFP because you've thought through everything, same thing if you want to get involved, you can volunteer, but you can show that yes, I'm here, I'm doing the work, I am asking for more responsibility because I want to be more involved and they'll see that. But if you're applying to be a volunteer or a guide or something and you're not maybe very responsive or it seems like you're kind of just trying to get a free ticket or whatever without doing a lot of work, then right guess what?

Chris Oliver: 37:59

you're not going to get picked. Show that you are going to do and help out as needed and you're like I I'll do whatever you need. I will clean up trash or whatever. That's what's needed. I'll hand out badges or swag or whatever. I don't care.

David Hill: 38:16

I probably would have been perfectly happy volunteering again for RailsConf this time around, but I'm way happier getting to be more of a participant and putting it together on the program committee and you're volunteering in a more involved way, right. Exactly, it's awesome.

Chris Oliver: 38:31

I'm really looking forward to the last RailsConf. It's sad it's going to be the last one but having been on the other side of the table, I appreciate all the work that gets put into it, cause you can't imagine all the amount of people actually going to the venue and talking to them and catering and whatever else like enormous amounts of things. Design work the team at Flagrant's been killing it putting together T-shirts and logos and all kinds of design things for the conference. That's a ton of work and they do a great job on it. It's like I don't know. Usually I show up and somebody's printed all these cool banners and I'm like those are cool banners and I don't have any idea how many hours and weeks and months are put into design and refining it and coming up with the right idea for the right location and whatever that's. It's ridiculous.

David Hill: 39:26

it's a lot yeah, I'm sure there's still pieces of it that you and I don't have visibility to of us.

Chris Oliver: 39:34

It's even deeper than even we think it is yeah, like I haven't even remotely been involved in choosing venues or finances or whatever, and I'm sure that that is complicated and scary to gamble, that we're going to have to commit to however many hundreds of thousands of dollars for RubyConf next year and we haven't even begun to think about what are the tickets cost Like? When do they get on sale? This year we're comping tickets for people who have been very involved in Rails over the years, who might have left or whatever. Very involved in rails over the years, who might have left or whatever. So I know that there's a budget put towards that to make sure those people have a chance to come back and celebrate. You know the past, present and future of rails with us and haven't even touched any of that stuff.

Chris Oliver: 40:19

That's what ruby central is all all over and taken care of selling sponsorships, all the conversations between the companies and Ruby Central to negotiate, like what kind of booth do you want? Do you want to do the coffee cart? Who's paying for lanyards, and there's so much stuff that we haven't even touched at all. And that's kind of the thing that they've gotten down over the years and their process for that. And people know their responsibilities and what typically their process for that. People know their responsibilities and what typically is needed for that. But it's a lot, too, that we haven't even begun to think about.

Chris Oliver: 40:56

So it's quite a big thing to orchestrate and especially a big gamble financially. So the best thing we can do is support Ruby Central to make sure that this RubyConf at least can continue going on and it can continue supporting, like the smaller meetups and other things. Years of being a Rubyist, I didn't really know how critical Ruby Central was in the ecosystem and I was like I hear this name of Ruby Central but I don't exactly know what they do. And now I'm on the other side and I'm like man, ruby Central is awesome. So as much as we can do to support them, they're doing bundler Ruby gems but conferences and then going to the conferences and realizing wait a minute, this is like a lot of their responsibility. But like what I really need is I can't ever have ruby gemsorg go down. It's fascinating to now have a good understanding of all that like they do a lot, a ridiculous amount of stuff for us and what you just said about how, like you didn't know what ruby central did.

David Hill: 42:12

At a certain point just this past november, when I was volunteering and manning the t-shirt booth in the vendor room, somebody came up and asked me what ruby central does. I'm just kind of like I thought all of us understood at this point what ruby central does, but it still is like there are people new to the field, new to what we do, that don't quite understand all the ins and outs of how important ruby gems is, and so it's like let me share with you a little bit about what ruby central does yeah, it's fascinating because you I mean running the bundle command is just kind of it's a built-in feature of ruby.

Chris Oliver: 42:47

You know, I don't really know. Yeah, it's just this is who makes that possible. But you run the command and it's not like it goes to rubycentralorg, it goes to rubygemsorg and it's like oh, I've seen that logo at the bottom of the RubyGems homepage. Oh, I understand now. So that, I think, is probably a never-ending battle of like they're non-profit, they have limited resources, but they're putting on conferences for us and then also supporting every single day of Ruby development that you do day-to-day. Every single day you're going to interact with something that Ruby Central builds and maintains, and so they are critical to the community success. So I'm glad to just be able to volunteer as co-chair this year and help out and hopefully make this a very successful conference and hopefully that keeps the RubyConf stuff continuing down the road for many, many years to come.

David Hill: 43:49

But fingers crossed, we want that one to keep going.

Chris Oliver: 43:52

Yeah, and I know they've talked a bit about the conferences kind of were like, yeah, it's a big, cool thing to do, and then they became massive and then also COVID happened and it's like, well, interestingly, as a nonprofit our original goals were to build, maintain Rubyems and Bundler and the conferences kind of blew up into a thing. But now they're a risky thing to throw events or whatever, and at this size they are very risky. Keep those successful or pare them down so that it can be successful in the way they can run without being as risky to the future RubyGems or Bundler or whatever. So it's definitely a tricky thing to manage and I have huge respect to everybody on the board, and the teams at Ruby Central change often, so there's fairly often new people in and out and that doesn't make it easy to transfer knowledge and all that.

Chris Oliver: 44:54

This is my first year. There's so many things that Ufuk knows about the process of putting RailsConf together that I have no idea about, and so it's been interesting to get his perspective and to see all those extra details along the way. But we're just honored to have been involved this last go around. I think it's going to kill it. So buy your tickets. Please Buy your hotel room and come hang out with us for a three-day party in Philly.

David Hill: 45:21

We're just going to be partying. We're not going to be actually going to any talks or anything.

Chris Oliver: 45:24

Did you see that Formula One experience that somebody linked to Of?

David Hill: 45:27

course, I saw that yes, yeah, yeah. So it may be just a party, I don't know you can just imagine this like whole bank of ruby developers.

Chris Oliver: 45:37

F1 racing I saw there was like what, 80 simulators or something, so I hope they're all like linked up together so we could all be racing together. That would be hilarious, super fun.

David Hill: 45:49

I don't know well, we'll have to go check it out so I mean this is an experience people can't miss that's definitely something I want to check out while we're there yeah, all right, it's been good chatting.

Chris Oliver: 46:00

And oh there, it is 67 days left until railsConf 2025. So see you in just over two months. Counting down, it's coming fast, all right, peace, peace.