David Hill: 0:00

Shout out to GoRails for sponsoring Ode to RailsConf. If you or your team wants to learn the latest Ruby on Rails features Hotwire Ruby and more check out GoRailscom. Use code ODE2RAILSCONF at checkout to get 10% off. You're listening to the Ode to RailsConf podcast, where we reminisce about our experiences at RailsConf over the years. I'm your host, david Hill, and joining me today is Marco Roth. Welcome to the podcast, marco. Would you introduce yourself to our listeners, hey?

Marco Roth: 0:33

thanks, david. Thanks for having me. I'm Marco Roth. I've been doing a lot of Ruby and Rails in full stack development over the past few years and I've been doing rails for about 10 years now. I've been doing a lot of open source lately and have been focusing a lot on developer tooling and open source in the greater hotwire ecosystem.

David Hill: 0:58

I'm a big fan of everything that you started doing in the hotwire ecosystem. I love hotwire and the more support and tooling we can get around that, the better.

Marco Roth: 1:04

Thank you. Yeah, it's just a small step from what we have been doing now, but I feel like now, with the recent developments that I have been working on the HTML ERP parser, we can unlock a lot more possibilities to make it even better, which is cool.

David Hill: 1:18

Absolutely. That's exciting. So talk a little about RailsConf here. So let's start with that. I'm confident that's going to kind of segue into other conversations. How many versions of RailsConf have you attended over the years?

Marco Roth: 1:35

So my first RailsConf was in 2022 in Portland. That was the first one I attended, but I've been going to conferences from 2018 on. So Brighton Ruby 2018 was my first one and I've done a few conferences in Europe in between that 2018, brighton Ruby and 2020 through RailsConf.

David Hill: 1:56

You've been in like heavy conference season recently too. You've just been going all over the place.

Marco Roth: 2:02

Yeah, I have been trying to get more out there, trying to share what I've been working in open source and that's why I wanted to give talks, which also motivated me to attend more conferences, because I want to share what I have been working on. I want to talk to people, I want to hear what other people are doing, and conferences are really great medium to exchange and keep in touch with the community at large.

David Hill: 2:27

Absolutely. It's. One of my favorite reasons to go into the conferences is building that community and that ecosystem around it.

Marco Roth: 2:34

Absolutely.

David Hill: 2:35

You've given a lot of talks. When was the first talk that you gave at RailsConf?

Marco Roth: 2:40

Actually last year, 2024, was my first RailsConf talk and this year is going to be the second one, so I haven't done too many RailsConf talks, but I have been doing a lot of talks in the past few years.

David Hill: 2:52

I've been really just impressed at just how not just like the amount of travel that you do, but the amount of speaking and presenting you do at different conferences on a pretty wide variety of topics.

Marco Roth: 3:06

Yeah, to be fair, there have been a few talks that have been repeated, so they aren't all original, to be fair, but there have still been a few new talks and obviously they're all related, so on the same realm of the Ruby and Rails ecosystems, but it's still, I think, six talks now that I've given.

David Hill: 3:27

That's cool, I've given one. It's one of those things I look at and it's kind of like oh yeah, I could do a lot more. I could do better and try to be like Marco.

Marco Roth: 3:36

Yeah, talks are a lot of work but to be honest, I think it's super rewarding and it's been pushing me as a person to grow kind of to get out of my comfort zone and kind of do things I wouldn't do normally. So if you would have asked me a few years ago if I would ever stand on a stage at something like RailsConf, I would have said no, that it will never happen. But it's awesome to see that you can change and that you want to change, and that's kind of what drives me to just get out there, kind of try to be more active and try to share what I've been working on, which is exciting.

David Hill: 4:10

Preston Pyshke Speaking of. Let's talk a little bit about what you've been working on lately, because you've made a couple of one in particular, kind of big announcement of this new thing that you recently launched. Tell us about that.

Marco Roth: 4:23

It's a project called Herb recently launched. Tell us about that.

David Hill: 4:22

It's a project called Herb.

Marco Roth: 4:25

It's a HTML-aware ERP parser which is mostly designed to work for developer tooling, which means that you get editor support, that you get linters, that you get formatters and if you have been doing any Hotwire or Vue work in the Rails scene the last 10 years, you know that there's not a lot of tooling.

Marco Roth: 4:48

It's one aspect that was obviously dear to my heart and I wanted to improve. And now, seeing what Prism, the Ruby parser, can enable to bring that tooling to the Ruby world, I wanted to see what we can do now with Prism to bring the same level of care to the view layer. And out of that work, it's also what's going to be what I'm going to be talking about at RailsConf this year, which is what this parser could enable for a future view layer in Rails, what we could kind of build with this, what we could improve, how we could improve things and those kind of questions. It's not going to be something usable. I might have a few prototypes here and there to kind of show what could be possible, but there's nothing usable that we can kind of just plug into our app after REST Conf or after REST Conf.

David Hill: 5:39

Right, this is very kind of looking to the future of what could be Sharing division kind of.

Marco Roth: 5:45

Yes, yeah, that's awesome.

David Hill: 5:48

I'm excited about that.

Marco Roth: 5:49

I haven't pulled Herb down yet, but I want to give that a look and see what that'll do for me, Sure please do Any kind of errors that we can spot early, we can improve the parser and make it better for everyone else.

David Hill: 6:01

Nice.

Marco Roth: 6:02

The other thing that we haven't talked about, which you can kind of bring back to RailsConf again, is Ruby events. That's the other kind of aspect. Oh yeah, absolutely.

David Hill: 6:11

Let's talk about that. I keep looking to try to find more Ruby events that are local to me, because I don't have very many that are easy travel distances, but I've seen a lot of people refer to Ruby events, so, yeah, please tell us about that too.

Marco Roth: 6:25

Yeah, ruby events is this platform that we have been building. It's formerly known as Ruby video to death, but we now kind of merge efforts with rubyconferencesorg to bring rubyeventsorg, and that platform is designed to have everything related to Ruby events, be it the recordings from old events, the talks for upcoming events, the speakers, all the kind of information that you need to attend or look back at a Ruby event. And now, with RailsConf kind of going away, I think it's more important to kind of document and keep track of what happened in the past and past editions. And that's kind of why I think it's a good idea to index these talks kind of show all the recordings, all the talks, all the workshops, all the materials, slides, recordings, all that's been out there, including also artwork, because a lot of at least from attending events, a lot of the artwork kind of gives some vibe to an event.

Marco Roth: 7:31

And if you've seen the Railscom's websites, they have been really cool, they have really cool designs, but then every year the old version of the website goes offline so you can't see it anymore. I think in the recent editions they kind of have an old subdomain where they kind of still have it online, but for the previous ones, you don't really see it anymore. And that's also another thing that I wanted to kind of make sure that we get that same vibe is to preserve the artwork show. The artwork kind of show these events in the design they were originally kind of shown off to the people and that kind of transmits or kind of conveys the same vibe to people looking at these recordings.

David Hill: 8:13

Yeah, the artwork really contributes a lot to kind of creating the identity for that conference for that year. Right and so for like RailsConf. At least it looks like you can go to like 2024.railsconforg to see last year's site, but I don't know how far back that goes.

David Hill: 8:31

I think it's only like the last two years or three years. It's only been a few years since, I think flagrant has been involved with doing the rails conf site, and so I think that was one of the things they did was make it so that they keep the previous versions around. Sounds about right. Yes, I need to go through this and just like see all these Ruby events that are happening all over the world. Cause man, there are so many of them.

Marco Roth: 8:57

Yeah, it's somehow hard to keep track. But then also people don't really realize events are happening. I have been meeting people at these events and are like have you seen the event that's happening near you? Because I told me where they are from and I'm like have you seen your events? You mean that that's happening next week in your city and I'm like no. So I've been going around and just trying to make sure that people know what events are happening around them, because they are saying nothing is happening but then they don't realize an event is happening literally in their city.

David Hill: 9:28

It's difficult sometimes.

Marco Roth: 9:30

You've got to be in the right channels in slack or discord, or in the right social group to hear about things sometimes, oh, oh, yeah, it's easy to miss, and now, with the fragmentation on social media, it's even harder to keep track where events are announced, where meetups are being announced and sets. So it's, yeah, one of the ideas here is just to have a location for Ruby events, and if you know about a Ruby event, it's going to be there for Ruby events.

David Hill: 9:56

And if you know about a Ruby event, it's going to be there. Awesome, I'm planning, slash, hoping to start a Ruby meetup here where I'm living in Florida now, with the goal of eventually doing a regional conference here. So, fingers crossed, it'll be at least a year out because I'm not going to be able to do that quickly, but I'm going to definitely have Ruby events on my radar to do that quickly. But I'm going to definitely have Ruby events on my radar to be like, okay, I'm going to post things up there and try to help get people to be aware of this to hopefully come and see things.

Marco Roth: 10:27

Just one thing that I want to mention here is that for these events, you don't always have to have a speaker. That's the other thing that I noticed, that people are like I cannot organize an event because I cannot find speakers, and I think there are other ways how you can still make a meetup nice and interactive and valuable to attendees, which doesn't involve to always have speakers. I mean, it's nice to have speakers, but it doesn't have to be a requirement to always have speakers on board.

David Hill: 10:55

So what other things would you suggest, what other activities have you seen for meetups and those types of groups that aren't just speaker-led?

Marco Roth: 11:06

Yeah. So there's a few things you can do. One of them is just to have a social. Just say we are going to meet at this bar, at this restaurant, at this and this time, at this and this date, and then you just hang out and have a good conversation with all the Ruby people. In the end, you're there to talk about Ruby and you're there to exchange ideas and experiences.

Marco Roth: 11:26

So it doesn't always have to have a speaker. But if you don't want to do just social, you can also do something like watching a previous recording from a big event that happened recently, like a keynote from RailsConf, a keynote from RubyConf, that kind of thing. And the other thing that always just works too is to say let's work on open source, let's kind of pair on some things, let's do A pairing session on some project, or maybe you have a project you're working on yourself that you want to have help with. Those kinds of situations I think are really valuable to learn and kind of share knowledge, which is also more interactive than just having a speaker there that speaks for 40 minutes and then it's done that's always been one of the fears of.

David Hill: 12:18

I've seen other meetup groups kind of peer out and die because the organizer had difficulty finding someone to come and present and speak at the next meeting and so exactly, it doesn't always have to be that, it can be these other things and that opens up a lot of relieves, a lot of pressure to always have a speaker. If you can have other activities you can fall back on.

Marco Roth: 12:38

For sure yeah.

David Hill: 12:39

So you're going to be in Philly this year for RailsConf. You're speaking. One of the questions I've been asking people a lot lately is looking to the future beyond RailsConf. What do you see? What do you envision for the Ruby community? For you, given like all of the conferences and all the travel you've done, I imagine that it involves a lot of continuing to kind of do that community outreach and community building. But I'd love to hear if you have any other thoughts on kind of the future of Ruby and Rails beyond RailsConf.

Marco Roth: 13:09

Looking at last year, I think last year was kind of an outlier in terms of conferences that have happened. I think it was a total of 38 conferences last year, wow, which is like more than two a month on average yeah, or even more. So there is some shortage of events that are happening, at least the bigger ones. But it's still sad to see that you have this bigger event go away. But if that means that we kind of get more small, local, regional conferences where people can go and exchange ideas and have more in-depth conversation about Ruby and Rails topics, I think that's still valuable. One of the good examples that I have is from an event here in Europe, in FriendlyRB, which happens in Romania, usually in September. It's an event of around 140 people, so it's not a lot.

David Hill: 14:01

Small, it's very easy to interact with everyone there, almost.

Marco Roth: 14:06

Just having an intimate experience at these small events where you can talk to pretty much everybody at the event if you really want to. It's also kind of nice and with these bigger events like RailsConf, you're almost like searching for people. Where are they? They are huge venues and sometimes you don't even find the people you're looking for. And it's still kind of cool to have everybody there in the same city, the same place. But it's also very draining and overwhelming just having that many people in one place Absolutely For a long time.

David Hill: 14:41

I found RailsConf just like that experience of it and all the people very overwhelming. It took a while to kind of get used to it and adapt, move around in the situations differently, just so that I didn't overload myself Right.

Marco Roth: 14:56

But that's the other thing I kind of appreciate now with RailsConf or with this Ruby Central events, with the second day being the hack day, is that you kind of have this more intimate experience again, where you kind of can sit down and work on something together and where you don't have to just listen to talks the whole day but you have exchange with other people, with open source contributors, with people you might know or with people you don't really interact with otherwise. So I think this also creates a lot of opportunities to grow and get started contributing to open source.

David Hill: 15:30

Absolutely. I had a tremendous experience at Hack Day last year and contributing to open source is one of those things that's like a constant goal I have is like I need to do more of this, I need to try and get more involved, and I always get sidetracked with other things. The whole reason I feel positive and optimistic about it now is because of that Hack Day last year where I was like, oh, I actually can get involved and can do something. It's just getting started is sometimes difficult.

Marco Roth: 16:01

Right, and I think that really helps here, because you can sit down with the maintainer, you can set up the whole environment that you need to get started with contributing and then you can just talk to them and see if you understand the problem, if you understand the issues and then work on it. And if you have a question you can just kind of walk over or glance over and people are there to help you, and I think that's really helpful to get started.

David Hill: 16:26

Absolutely. For me, a big part of it was being able to sit at the same table with the maintainer and ask questions about the intent for how they would like a feature to be built. Rails is opinionated and a lot of times the developers using Rails are also opinionated.

Marco Roth: 16:47

It's really nice to be able to have the face-to-face question and answer sessions of like figuring out the direction they would like to go, so that you can actually go that direction, instead of sailing off and being like oh, this isn't what you wanted and that's the thing that's usually kind of awkward in open source is if you have an idea for something, for a project, but it's not just I have to do it, I have to talk about it, I have to think about it, I have to talk or think about architecture.

Marco Roth: 17:16

That's not something you can easily discuss in GitHub issues I'm sure you can, but you kind of joining a project having no idea what's going on, it's very hard to ask this question, open this issue, trying to seek guidance on how I should approach this problem, right, but having somebody there you can talk to in person to kind of walk you through the problem or you describe the problem you are having, the hurdle is less than to just get started and kind of talk about it. And it's also instant, right, you are there, you get an answer right away, or at least some direction on where to go, and that really should help, or should help more to get started with contributing, absolutely yeah, should help, or should have more to get started with contributing?

David Hill: 17:56

Absolutely, yeah, I've been enjoying working remote for a number of years now, but in-person interaction, collaboration, communication it is the best way of having those types of conversations, and so having them there at the table is so awesome. So, yeah, I'm really looking forward to Hack Day this year. Are you one of the Hack Day maintainers?

Marco Roth: 18:20

That's right. Yeah, I'm joining this year with rubyeventsorg, so if you want to help out with adding any new features or content or videos to rubyeventsorg, please come join us at the Hack Table and we can see where you can help out with.

David Hill: 18:37

Fantastic. So before we wrap up, do you have any final thoughts you'd like to offer about RailsConf and about it coming to a close and what we can look forward to?

Marco Roth: 18:48

Yeah, I'm looking really forward to be back in the US for RailsConf this year. It's always been highlights in my conference calendar. Just because everybody is there, you get to see all the people and every time I leave these events I feel energized and kind of ready to get back to work and kind of do even more cool things, and it's just an energy that I get from these events that really keep me going and that's what I want to encourage people to. If you can join, please do. You won't kind of regret it and I think if you are there and just come say hi and then we can see if you want to help out with any open source that they can help you out with.

David Hill: 19:30

I'm looking forward to seeing you again at RailsConf this year and hopefully I'll be able to have a little bit of experience with Herb by then and I can find ways to contribute, because I want to get more involved in the Hotwire tooling and development stuff. So that's good, all right. Thank you for joining me today, marco, and.

Marco Roth: 19:49

I'll see you in Philly, yep.

David Hill: 19:50

See you in Philly.

Marco Roth: 19:51

Bye-bye.