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 RailsConf over the years. I'm your host, david Hill, and joining me today is Irina Nazarova. Thanks for joining me today, irina. Would you kind of introduce yourself to our listeners?

Speaker 2: 0:33

Yeah, I'm Irina. I run Evil Martians, which I hope many listeners will recognize from our blog, the Martian Chronicles, and our open source things like TestProf, any Cable Action Policy, just lots of things.

Speaker 1: 0:49

A couple of things out there that people are probably aware of.

Speaker 2: 0:53

Overmind. I just saw it yesterday at our SFRuby, which I've mentioned, I think. And we consult startups, that's our line of work. We build with them, we help them grow by just shipping faster and maybe helping them scale and can resolve some specific problems.

Speaker 1: 1:12

that scaling, especially rails that's why we are exposed to a certain part of the rails ecosystem that is more startup focused in a lot of ways, that kind of feels like it harkens back to the glory days of Rails, where everything in Rails was startup land.

Speaker 2: 1:31

Exactly. Yeah, I didn't realize it, by the way, myself, but we had an SF Ruby meetup in the office of Y Combinator and one of the partners, jared Freeman. He basically shared the story of the first years of YC and the first years of Rails basically happened at the same time and 90% of the batch in the first years of Y Combinator were building those Rails. It's, of course, it's this kind of amazing time when Rails was this default choice like growing as a default choice. An amazing time when Rails was this default choice like growing as a default choice, and startups often jump onto new technology faster than established companies because they can right, they can choose. But also there was the story that Heroku was building a cloud focusing on Ruby on Rails applications and that was the first big exit for YC because Heroku was very quickly acquired by Salesforce and the money they got from this deal from selling Heroku financed YC for many, many years.

Speaker 1: 2:37

Yeah, the thing that always kind of blew me away about things like YC is that not everything they do wins, but when they get a win it's usually so big it like more than makes up for all of the other ones that didn't quite hit.

Speaker 2: 2:51

Yeah, and it's the nature. You know, it's not just YC, right, it's just the venture capital. It's, of course can be viewed differently, but from the perspective of the economy it's about taking risk and Rails helps us be very pragmatic about taking those risks. And I think today what Rails helps startup founders, which I see a lot. To be honest, of course it's not everybody's experience, because I'm based in San Francisco, I run SF Ruby, I'm going to have a bit more exposure to that part of Rails ecosystem and kind of startup ecosystem. But then I meet them a lot and what they say is that Rails helps them focus on the business risk and keep the framework risk, technology risk, under control versus jumping into like a new whatever trpc javascript framework that nobody's again.

Speaker 2: 3:48

People can enjoy, people can like it. That's great, but at the same time we know how to grow on rails. We know how to do this. We know that the ecosystem is going to be evolving because there's so many players, so many big companies, small companies, mid-size, different things that keep it alive and kind of so many people are passionate about it that it might not be the fastest developing right now, but it's a very nice balance between being established, being proven and then also being very active and energetic.

Speaker 1: 4:20

It feels like it's very mature now. Before it was like, yeah, there was a lot of speed to it too, but there was also a certain amount of immaturity to the framework and maybe even to the community around it that we were still figuring a lot of things out. So let's kind of turn our attention to RailsConf a little bit. You gave a pretty awesome and memorable keynote at RailsConf last year, especially the part about, yeah, flexstar, a different company now, but like yeah, that whole story about the company switching over to Rails during RailsConf.

Speaker 2: 4:53

I was hoping that they would have migrated by then.

Speaker 1: 4:57

I mean, and it worked out for them. And apparently Freedom was like. When I talked to him on the podcast he was just kind of like, yeah, I'm going to do that at my next job too.

Speaker 2: 5:06

I got to say I was super worried about them because it's an amazing story for the community that created like the whole suite of Java microservices. Do you remember how many? 30, or just a bunch, a few dozen. And then they migrated them to Rails Monolith A few dozen, and then they migrated them to Rails monolith. And I got to say, as evil Martians, we would take a more kind of cautious approach. I think we would try to look. Okay, they almost did the same. They left something in Java that made sense to keep as a separate microservice. And then, yeah, I would try to find a gradual path, kind of like a path forward, where, yes, we launched this, okay, or we start moving I don't know the new stuff to Rails, or of course it's hard. It's not always possible to find this kind of gradual path without this major migration of it's almost never possible to almost always the business side kind of mandates.

Speaker 1: 6:07

There needs to be a gradual shift because, for all of the business reasons that is, like you know money stops coming in if you break something, and so yeah, I guess part of what made it so memorable was it wasn't just oh, we're moving to, it was removing all of this, all like however many dozens of microservices all into a single Rails monolith today.

Speaker 2: 6:30

And it's scary. You know, I don't think we should be like purists and we should say, hey, this is how you should do it, Like always. You see a Java microservice, move it to Rails, come on. We should be pragmatic. I love the story. I love the passion. I love that story. I love the passion. I love that.

Speaker 2: 6:43

This is really the story of being able to convince the team. This is the biggest part of the story. It's not about technology, it's about okay, are those kind of Java engineers going to be interested in doing that? And they did. That's the biggest success story that the team felt that this is like a pressure, gives them a lot of freedom, gives them a lot of lightness, I guess, in comparison to Java.

Speaker 2: 7:17

Of course, we discussed what's missing, right. We also discussed how debugging in Java is a lot easier. Right, we have LSPs helping. Now we have different parts for, of course, not strictly typed language All of this refactoring, debugging. It's different. It cannot be the same as working in strictly typed language, but at the same time. So this is a balance, right? So, first of all, I think in Ruby we have new tools, new tooling that is really helping us get maybe not exactly the same experience but still better experience. And then you get.

Speaker 2: 7:53

Well, the beauty of monolith is that I mean you create a branch, you have a preview environment and it's not 30 services that have to all kind of think and be staged. You know, like usually in microservices, that folks have like one staging environment. Everything gets to kind of integrate there. You have to coordinate with a bunch of people what they are doing, what they are breaking, et cetera. And again, I'm not saying that it's a one solution for all. I'm saying for companies that are, especially for companies that are building something, obviously B2B, saas, just the normal web applications. And then we have great developer experience. It's cool to see people moving from other frameworks, communities, over to Rails. It's a cool story. I gotta say I'm not a purist. I don't think I'm not a purist. I don't think we should always migrate everything over. Let's be pragmatic.

Speaker 1: 8:50

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 8:54

Let's not hype it up over its pragmatic level. Something can live in those Rust, go and Java and see, it's fine. I mean, something can be written in those super performance-focused languages, which is great, just not the business one, do you think?

Speaker 1: 9:09

Every language has things that it's good at and things that it's not as good at, and that should always kind of play a role in deciding what you're working with. But yeah, so other than your keynote, do you have any memorable stories or experiences at RailsConf you'd be willing to share?

Speaker 2: 9:25

my experience is kind of crazy around RailsConf, if you think of it, because the very first RailsConf I ever attended was RailsConf 2023, the year before my keynote.

Speaker 2: 9:39

Oh, wow, you didn't waste any time at all so the very first RailsConf that they attended was something that I was really looking for. I was actually hoping to attend the RubyConf 2022, and I couldn't because I was waiting for my visa. I was back in Portugal waiting for my American visa and it was taking longer than expected. First of all, before Will Martians, I never even thought about RubyConf. Railsconf I built kind of like two startups on Rails but just wasn't a part of the community. I never thought about it. I was just mostly just reading documentation and tutorials and stuff like that. I was not a part of any group or any community.

Speaker 2: 10:28

And then when I joined Evil Martians of course not as an engineer, right, I joined as account manager, manager working with clients, because I wouldn't be able to pass as a software engineer Okay, bars too high, yeah, and Evil Martians this is where I started just learning about the Ruby community that there's this thing, a community, and we contribute to open source, we talk to people, and it all started kind of making sense to me that we build for people, we build in open source, and then we go to those conferences and basically I was just looking at Vladimir Dementyev, my colleague, who would attend all those conferences and speak at them, and then he would come back and tell everybody about it. And I got to say he would often complain about different conferences because almost as if he would say, oh, but that one before was even greater and whatever. Yeah, you know, like an old person, yeah, so I only heard stories about it. And then finally, yeah, I wanted for him not to be alone.

Speaker 2: 11:35

In some sense, I wanted more people from Aval Martians to be more active and more open to parts of the community, open to public, et cetera. And then I decided, oh, I should just try it out myself, because I always tell people, oh, you should go to conferences, but if I don't go myself, like what's the how? I mean?

Speaker 1: 11:51

Kind of have to set the example.

Speaker 2: 11:53

Right, and then I was like, yeah, I'll try to go. So the very first time I was able to come, that was 2023. Able to come, that was 2023. And I felt as if I was like flying, as if I had like some distance between me and the floor Floating on air. Floating, yeah, and I remember meeting Nate Berkopik.

Speaker 2: 12:20

It was like wow, and he said something about me and it was just incredible to just to see the people that you know, you maybe exchange some messages with. But it wasn't real for me before that, it wasn't real life experiences before that. And then you know what happened Brittany Martin brought me to a podcast session. It was a live podcast. It was Brittany, it was Jason Charnes, I think Andrew Mason I might be confusing something in my head, but it was basically a few podcast hosts on stage. They recorded and then they brought in kind of a few guests and I was one of those guests that they brought in. Can you believe it? So essentially the first time I went to RailsConf, somebody kind of brought me on stage.

Speaker 2: 13:14

That was just incredible and of course, that was thanks to all the work of Evil Martians that we did over so many years and in open source and just content and just a lot of stuff, of course, vladimir's work and also you know what we did then with Vladimir. He was doing a presentation about Rails as a layered cake, a layered Rails as a birthday cake, actually, right, because his book was coming out. We brought a cake, a real cake, to that talk, so I ordered a large, real birthday cake. I was searching Instagrams to find a bakery All this stuff. Wow, it got delivered. Of course, we couldn't really cut through it when we needed to, but basically because it was so large, we had plastic knives oh god doesn't have quite the oomph.

Speaker 1: 14:09

You need to cut through something that thick probably yeah, yeah, basically after the talk.

Speaker 2: 14:14

So the cake was on stage with him during the talk and then after the talk we took it outside and shared it with folks that gathered and talked about this design.

Speaker 1: 14:26

This cake design Exactly.

Speaker 2: 14:29

And then the next real stuff. I wanted to set this example right, that you can speak at conferences for my team. And of course, I thought how can I do this? Because I'm not an engineer. What can I talk about? I thought what would be useful for the audience, what would be inspiring. I kind of thought from the perspective of what I thought the audience would like.

Speaker 2: 14:54

I also noticed that every time I would share something like oh, this Rails company, whatever IPO'd by the way, china's IPOing right now on their own show, so expect announcements in a few days. I think so. Every time I share something like that on social media, people react, people share. And because? Why? Because we miss that. Right, because we're quiet and many companies building with Rails are not as loud about actually building with Rails, building with Ruby, as they were before. Right, because there's certain skepticism. I noticed, first of all, every time I share something like that, people react and you know it all kind of connected in my head that I don't need to know everything in advance. Right, I can just apply with this proposal and if it gets selected, then I will go and do this research because I'll talk to 30 startup founders on Rails.

Speaker 1: 15:47

You also knew how to find more if you needed, and also that would be the argument.

Speaker 2: 15:53

By the way, at least one of the founders found me on the Rails schedule. So when this talk was selected, everybody got messages that, oh, your talk got selected. I got messages that, oh, your talk got selected. I got one. And then I got a message from Andy Kroll and he says Pena, I need to talk to you. And I'm like are you going to tell me you sent the approval notice, but, you know, by mistake? But then he said, look, we want to turn it into a keynote.

Speaker 2: 16:23

I think we had at least five Zoom calls, wow, and we had a full script written out, because it was difficult to communicate in such a way.

Speaker 2: 16:35

You know, we wanted to inspire people to kind of build open source, build tooling, build the whole kind of ecosystem, yeah, but also there was a balance to find between how we talk about this and what the core team is doing.

Speaker 2: 16:50

And I was just trying to say, look, yeah, there's also all the other use cases that Rails is so great at giving us all the keys, giving us this kind of adapterization principle that allows us to build sub-frameworks and parts of the ecosystem, parts of the framework, like I don't know, like the recent example, is Active Agent. It's also like a sub-framework, but that Justin is building to make it as native for Rails as possible, make the experience feel native, and this is the difference that you don't have to throw Rails away to build it. In the AI agent. What we do is we take Rails and we extend it and then there's a competition between sort of natural, the best competition that can be. This as an open source, where we build so that others would get inspired by our ideas, by our approach, and so that anybody can kind of take all the ideas and find a better one right? So that's what we want to see.

Speaker 1: 17:56

It almost sounds like iterative development.

Speaker 2: 17:58

Exactly. But that's like well, there's framework and then there's all this work that is super crucial for the applicability of the framework. But that is happening where all of us play a role, not the course, and the course team sort of provides the basics.

Speaker 1: 18:15

That's how I see it very much the foundation layer, but there's always more work that can be done that they can't do everything.

Speaker 2: 18:22

Yeah, yeah. So basically the second RailsConf I attended was the one where I was-.

Speaker 1: 18:26

With the keynote. From the amount of time you spent on Zoom with Andy Kroll, it sounds like they were pretty committed to making sure you had everything you needed to make this work, so that's awesome. So, outside of RailsConf, there were two other things I wanted to ask about before we close. You mentioned it earlier that you also run the San Francisco Ruby meetup, yep, and so with this being the last RailsConf and these last few episodes, I'm kind of trying to take a little bit of a looking to the future perspective and trying to get back to more local meetups and regional conferences and things like that. And so you've got the SF Ruby meetup and you also recently announced the San Francisco Ruby conference is coming back or is new. Could you tell us a bit about both of those and if you have any advice to people maybe trying to create a local meetup or things like that?

Speaker 2: 19:15

First of all, the meetups are super important. I think the meetups in some sense can play even a bigger role because, first of all, there are over 900 Ruby meetups that happened in the past 12 months around the world. Can you believe it Like 900 Ruby meetups?

Speaker 1: 19:33

Wow.

Speaker 2: 19:34

Crazy. It's crazy. So the reason I think meetups are so important because once you have the experience of seeing each other consistently right and knowing that it's going to be there we're going to meet next month, or if I miss the next one, I'll see the one that goes after that I think we have just much better chance of doing something together Once we became kind of familiar, seeing each other, seeing how we interact, what we learn from each other. So it's important to not just meet once a year or once in a lifetime. It's important to meet consistently, maybe every month, because that's when you start doing something together. Maybe somebody will hire you and lots of people would say that hey, hey, a local meetup helped me find a job right, a great team that I work for, or maybe inspired me to learn more, to learn some of the new stuff that I just wasn't exposed to on my line of work, or and then it helped me get into something that truly is interesting to me and stuff. So, ruby, of course it's very special because we're kind of privileged, because there's so many Ruby companies in San Francisco that have grown successful. It's not the case everywhere, by the way. There's so many Ruby companies in Dublin, ireland. We worked with some of them. We worked for Tynes. We just became this kind of super successful startup. Anyway, new York, san Francisco, chicago or in San Francisco, it's just easier, but at the same time, it's important that you connect to those companies. So this is my advice.

Speaker 2: 21:13

Actually, I have something on our YouTube, a video, where I list my advice for meetup organizers. The main part is actually how can you learn about companies using Ruby that have offices in your area? You might think there are none of them, or they don't have offices, or they all whatever disappeared, but there's more to it. There's more to find out. Andy Kroll has a website it's called Using Rails, and you can search. There is a search and you can search by your city and you will find. Of course, it's not all the information, but it's a good list. It's a very good list. I'm still checking this list for San Francisco Just to make sure that I reached out to folks of those companies, and I reached out on LinkedIn because it's the only social network that has search capabilities.

Speaker 2: 22:12

So I would say look for companies because they can host, and it's also important to have companies that are hiring, even if they don't host, even if they just come and say, look, we're hiring, this is important, right? This is what the pragmatic side of it, the pragmatic value of the meetup. And then, yeah, connect with those authors of open source that are in your area, because authors of open source will, in my mind, deliver the best talks, because they deal with problems very deeply and then just invite people that have. I just searched on LinkedIn something like Ruby or Rails, and select by your city or area. And then I still do it.

Speaker 2: 22:54

I invite people personally, I just send them like spam messages, but I invite them to a local Ruby meetup and mostly people say, oh, I missed it, how can I find the next one? Or they say, amazing, I didn't know it existed, I will come. And many folks say, oh, I want my company to host it. So, for example, the next meetup is going to be at Figma, and people know that Figma has a Ruby, vacant Ruby and Sinatra.

Speaker 1: 23:23

Huh.

Speaker 2: 23:23

I did not know that, even though they have a technical blog and they share about it, the focus is not on Ruby. The focus is something like infrastructure.

Speaker 1: 23:33

Sure.

Speaker 2: 23:34

They talk about Sinatra Active Record, but I'd say it's super important that we connect the businesses together using Rails and the authors of open source and then Rubyists, because so many people are kind of like me in the old days, not connected, and if we get connected we get inspired, we learn more, we find also, of course it's like job prospects etc. But also we kind of help each other. It's something unique about Ruby community that just doesn't exist in many other programming languages. Take Gore even it's different. I would say there are some communities, but they're not usually around the language. So the most important part is that the San Francisco Ruby Conference it's happening in November 19th and 20th already this year and it was my dream, I was actually thinking of running it next year, but then suddenly boom, and I thought, geez, I just want to have something to look forward to. So, especially at this final RailsConf. I want people to look forward to, so, especially at this final RailsConf. I want people to look at this as a graduation for the community and to see it as look, now it's up to us to run the events that make sense, that we think need to happen, and with the help of the sponsors, the companies, companies. So chime immediately supported us and then this is our first sponsor. We have boltnew as our second sponsor. Nice it's like amazingly fast growing vibe coding application that has a ruby on rails backend and they're super committed to rails as well. Nice so they're customers of evil martians, so very good friends for a long time. And then gastro is our third sponsor. Now we also, like a few more sponsors, started reached out after the announcement. So of course we need more and more, and of course it's going to be our first conference. I never organized the conference. Of course it's going to take a lot of effort from evil Martians, but I think we definitely need more sponsors because, imagine, we need to build the stage and all that stuff.

Speaker 2: 25:53

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is it's going to be an amazing conference. We have Obi Fernandez, carmine Paulino, vladimir Dementyev, marco Roth already confirmed as speakers. So the topics of the conference are the new tooling, the new open source, including AI and scaling Ruby. So Ruby at scale and Rails at scale. Those are the two topics. We will also have demos of Ruby startups and we'll have CTO roundtable. So it's going to be an amazing experience for all of us and it's going to be in San Francisco, in Fort Mason.

Speaker 2: 26:29

It's not a typical conference venue in downtown. It's a very kind of beautiful historic venue overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge, next to the marina. This is where I want my friends to be, to hang out, here in a very beautiful part of the city, and I cannot promise a perfect conference, don't get me wrong. I mean I cannot promise that we'll be switching between the talks smoothly and beautifully and with no interruptions, and I think it comes with experience. But I'm trying to keep it affordable.

Speaker 2: 27:03

So our early bird tickets they're going to go on sale in about a month. They're going to be $300 per ticket, so we're trying to keep it affordable. So our early bird tickets they're going to go on sale in the bottom of. They're going to be $300 per ticket, so we're trying to keep it affordable. The reason we're not selling them now is that we just signed the venue. I'm getting a better sense of the budget we're going to need to build at the venue. So this will affect kind of how many early bird tickets we can release. So we'll actually release early bird and supporter tickets. So it's going to be something like the more supported tickets we sell, the more also we can add early bird. Yeah, we'll see. So if you buy supporter ticket, you kind of finance the early bird for somebody.

Speaker 1: 27:41

Yeah, and the cfp for the conference is open now. Right.

Speaker 2: 27:46

Yes, we just opened the CFP Wednesday at the meetup. Just opened it. It's open. Please submit. And I hope I'll have a chance to convince more people to submit CFPs at the RailsConf because we close basically on Sunday after RailsConf I'll be advertising the CFP Right. So the CFP.

Speaker 1: 28:06

Right, so the CFP is open through July 13th. So if you're listening, maybe go take a look. It's sfrubycom for the conference. Yep, I'm looking at this now trying to think of if there's something I can submit here. So I would love to go visit San Francisco again.

Speaker 2: 28:23

Yeah, and it's going to be great. By the way, if you're coming, definitely plan for 19th, 20th and 21st, because the 21st, friday is going to be the day of unofficial hikes and stuff that we're going to do together. Everybody, come to San Francisco. It's not as scary as people say. It's actually super beautiful. It's one of the most beautiful cities in the world. The conference is in the most beautiful area. There's such beautiful hikes and parks and just the water, the bay. It's crazy, seriously, and in November the weather is going to be either perfect or less perfect, but still much better than everywhere else.

Speaker 1: 29:00

Yeah, california has always had ridiculously good weather. So, yeah, thank you so much for joining me today. Irina, I've loved chatting with you about RailsConf. Thank you so much for joining me. Yeah, thanks so much.

Speaker 2: 29:12

David.