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 final episode of the Ode to RailsConf podcast. This episode is going to be a little different than what I've typically done. All of the other episodes I had at least one guest on to talk about their experiences with RailsConf, and this time, since this is the final episode and I realized I don't think at any point I really expressed how this podcast was going to end with RailsConf, I wanted to talk about some of the reasons why and the decisions that went into that, and some of this came up with my last guest, joe Leo, after we were done recording. He asked why would I end a podcast? After all this work and putting it together and trying to find and build an audience, why would I end it like this? That was the moment I realized I don't think I'd really expressed it beyond very one-on-one personal conversations with people. So, for starters, railsconf is over. Now I'm recording this the Saturday after RailsConf concluded. Railsconf is over and as much as I loved it and enjoyed it, especially this last one, which we'll get to that in a minute.

David Hill: 1:33

It felt I'm not sure this is quite the right word, but it felt morbid to continue talking about it and harping on how great it was. Continue talking about it and harping on how great it was when it's an event that is now over and theoretically this podcast could remain up online on the internet for an arbitrary and unknown amount of time. To still be publishing new episodes months or years later talking about, oh, we miss RailsConf so much. That was never the intent of this podcast. I wanted this to be a celebration of RailsConf and I didn't want it to ever turn into bemoaning the loss of it. So that was a big part of it. But on top of that was a slightly deeper and more personal issue for me, something that I've heard a lot of other developers in the community talk about, especially in more recent years, that I'm so grateful that more people are talking about this. It's one of those things that when you feel it, you feel like you're alone until other people also tell you no, they do that too. Imposter syndrome is real and it's rough and it can be hard to deal with when you think you're the only one feeling it.

David Hill: 2:48

I had never done a podcast before. I had never done a podcast of my own before. I don't remember what year it was. I want to say it was 2017, but I could be wrong.

David Hill: 3:00

I had appeared as a guest on a single podcast that was the Ruby on Rails podcast back when Brittany Martin was still the host and she was so kind and so gracious and wonderful in giving me time to ask her questions. I was interested and curious about podcasting, but I almost didn't even know what questions to ask. But I almost didn't even know what questions to ask. She was so kind and gracious to give me time in her platform to try and figure. Or years of time of the effort and tasks involved are going to be fairly different. The only thing that's the same is you recorded a podcast episode at one point, but there's a lot more that goes into it when you're hosting it. So that was my only experience with podcasting at one point, but there's a lot more that goes into it when you're hosting it. So that was my only experience with podcasting.

David Hill: 4:10

At that point, I didn't know if I was going to hate all of the other parts of working on this. I didn't know if I was going to suck at trying to have conversations with people many of whom I've never met in real life, never had more than very casual passing interactions with. And on top of the imposter syndrome part, I felt like I was a very introverted person that had difficulty carrying on a conversation with a person beyond a certain point, with a person beyond a certain point. And on top of all of that, I wanted to have some kind of a podcast where I wanted to have it to have an identity or an angle to it that was identifiable. I didn't want it to be just yet another Ruby podcast. I wanted it to have something kind of specific to it to separate it from the rest of the podcasts out there in our space in this community.

David Hill: 5:12

And thankfully, that particular problem of wanting to have a specific identity or angle to it, that was solved by this idea of doing a podcast dedicated to Rails Conference, celebrating why I and other people loved this conference. And thankfully it also solved some of my other problems indirectly, like all of those fears and insecurities about oh, what if I hate it? What if I suck at this the moment? I had an end date. I'm only going to do it until RailsConf is over gave my brain kind of an escape hatch where it's like, okay, this doesn't have to be a forever podcast, I'm not going to do this forever. I can do this project for a year and if I ended up hating it, if I decide I was terrible at this, I can do it for a short period of time and then, once it's over, I can move on and be happy that I completed this project and thankfully for me, I have not hated doing this.

David Hill: 6:15

I think that I have gotten steadily better and more comfortable doing this. Whether or not I suck at it is up to other people in terms of how they feel about it as listeners. But I feel like I've improved and gotten better at this and have enjoyed it to the point that I don't care if I suck at it anymore. But all of that still leads to I felt like I needed to honor the decision to still end the podcast when I said I would to myself just to kind of keep that promise to myself that even though all of those reasons were kind of very internal reasons my own insecurities and fears kind of just creeping in I kind of feel like keeping that promise to myself is the way of maintaining that ability to promise things to myself and knowing that I'm going to be able to follow through that if I ever try something like this again which I hope to. I want my brain and my insecurities to be able to trust myself when I say I have an escape hatch. If this goes poorly we can bail, and not to have to deal with the rebuttal of except. You know, I didn't do that last time. I kept going and kept pushing way beyond the point where I said it was going to be over. There are some coping mechanisms involved that I want to keep those intact. So for all of those reasons kind of added up, I felt like I needed to kind of honor that promise to myself of concluding the podcast shortly after RailsConf.

David Hill: 7:52

Speaking of RailsConf, let's talk about RailsConf for a bit. I don't know if I can say this was the best RailsConf. This one's always going to have that kind of bittersweet note that it was also the last one, but for me this RailsConf was so amazing. I got to sit in on a number of presentations that were really interesting, some of them very technical, some of them more social, about the history of the conference and things like that. But even more than that, having the opportunity to be on the program committee for the conference this year was such an honor and so much fun.

David Hill: 8:37

Getting to review the proposals from the CFP was a huge eye-opening learning experience to be able to get a sense for what goes into a successful CFP proposal and what doesn't. Seeing a lot of things like oh, doing it this way is probably not going to work the way I had always thought of CFP proposals before. As much as I wanted to speak at a conference before, I rarely had an idea for a talk to give at a conference, or anywhere else for that matter, and so I was always just trying to come up with an idea on the fly, and so they were very vague and skeletal because I hadn't put work into really fleshing them out before. And seeing the really good proposals come in, it's like, oh, these are very detailed and very thought out. Some of these have been given as talks in other conferences or at meetups or whatever. Okay, this is a great learning, eye-opening experience to see and understand better this is what goes into a successful CSP proposal.

David Hill: 9:53

My voice sounds a little bit shredded to me. I'm not sure if that's going to come through on the podcast recording. At RubyConf last year I had my very first ever karaoke experience and I loved it so much that when Michelle Yuen, previous guest of the show thank you so much, Michelle, for spearheading scheduling the karaoke night at RailsConf Thursday night. I had a great time at karaoke Thursday night and I'm still feeling that and hearing that in my voice a little bit, so that was a super fun time Getting to see so many of my Ruby friends there at RailsConf. Of my Ruby friends there at RailsConf, both old friends and new friends that I've made through the course of this podcast, through the course of people interacting with me online about the podcast.

David Hill: 10:47

It was a bit of a new, strange experience. Be just kind of walking around the conference and trying to take care of tasks here and there and occasionally have someone come up to me and be like hi, I recognize your voice. That was a bit of a surreal, mind-blowing experience. But I was so grateful for people being willing to come up to me and talk to me about the podcast and about things that they've enjoyed from it, to me about the podcast and about things that they've enjoyed from it. And speaking of that, speaking of gratitude, I knew I wanted to have an episode, a moment here, where I express my gratitude to the people that I felt like this podcast wouldn't have happened without their help and their support and their influence.

David Hill: 11:36

So I've got a few people here that I need to call out Chris Oliver, for encouraging me from the beginning and then immediately offering to sponsor this podcast. I don't know that I would have gotten around to trying to find and be able to afford an editor on my own, so having that load off of me made doing this podcast so much easier. Thank you so much, chris, for doing that, for sponsoring this podcast. Thanks to Paul Barr, my editor, for taking that work and making it so easy for me to make this podcast. Every now and then, when I hit certain milestones of improvement in my ability to have these conversations with people and to ask questions that were gradually, incrementally getting better, paul has been so supportive and so encouraging. I would be fist pumping the air every time I got an email back from him where he would be telling me he can tell I'm getting better and I'm getting more comfortable at this. So thank you so much, paul, for your encouragement and for taking a lot of that editing work off of my plate, thanks to Colin Gilbert. Colin was the very first person I approached at RailsConf 2024 the day after I had this idea and I was like, please tell me if this is dumb. And if this is dumb I won't waste time on it. So he was the very first person that was supportive and encouraged me to go after this idea and to see what I could do with it.

David Hill: 13:09

Nadia Oduayo I name dropped her multiple times last week in the Ruby podcast panel, so her coming into this thank you section should come as no surprise to anybody. She's such a great friend, great person. It was funny after recording the Ruby podcast panel at RailsConf and name dropping her three times during the panel, I had a pair programming session scheduled with her at RailsConf to work through some open PRs on her open source project speaker line. We're sitting there and we're kind of chatting and working through a couple of things and she actually turned to me and asked if I thought I would be where I am now if I hadn't had this random hallway conversation with her at RailsConf 2024. Hadn't had this random hallway conversation with her at RailsConf 2024.

David Hill: 14:02

I had surveyed a bunch of people at RailsConf 2024 about this idea for the podcast. I started with Colin but I talked with Chris, I talked with Adarsh from Ruby Central, I talked with Stephanie Min, I talked with Drew Bragg, who we'll get to in a minute. I talked with a bunch of different people. But during this one part of the conference I was walking through the hallway and saw Nadia kind of sitting by herself. I was, like you know, nadia is hard to catch when she's having a moment alone where it's easy to have a conversation with her. She's often got other people surrounding her or she disappears in the conference somewhere so that it's hard to catch a moment with her. I saw her kind of sitting there alone and thankfully my nerves of oh, maybe she wants to be alone didn't take charge over. Oh, she's one of these people that I would love to get their opinion on this podcast idea. So we chatted for a bit and she was again extremely encouraging and supportive and agreed to come on the podcast idea. So we chatted for a bit and she was again extremely encouraging and supportive and agreed to come on the show sometime.

David Hill: 15:02

Circling back to the question of if I thought I would be where I was now if I hadn't had that conversation with her. I had spoken to enough other people that were so encouraging that I felt like I would have done the podcast anyways, would have done the podcast anyways, but my interactions with her through Hack Day in 2024, working on SpeakerLine, through her encouragement during that process, during that conversation, her coming onto the podcast and being so great she connected me to Chad Fowler so that I could have an episode with him talking about the origins and the beginnings of Ruby Central and RailsConf. So, yeah, I told her. I wasn't sure if I would be here or not, but I knew that she had an outsized impact on me and on my life and on the person that I am now because of the podcast. So, yes, thank you, nadia, for your help and your encouragement and your friendship as I'm talking it through. I definitely wouldn't be where I am now without having done this podcast and you were a huge part of encouragement in that.

David Hill: 16:11

And, as promised, thank you, drew Bragg. You've been a great friend. Thank you for years ago. You've been a great friend. Thank you for years ago, chatting with me at the bar in Portland and telling me that one of the reasons you started a podcast was so that you would have a legitimate excuse to go up to interesting people and talk with them about what they're working on and then showing me that you meant it by, like 10 minutes later, going up to Aaron Patterson and asking him to be a guest on your podcast. I know that that guest spot hasn't quite happened yet and we joked about that at RailsConf. I'm glad that it's finally getting scheduled and I look forward to listening to it.

David Hill: 16:51

Thank you to everyone at Ruby Central. I was afraid sometimes that I was pestering them incessantly about anything and everything. Ali Vogel, aaron Chapman, rhiannon Payne, shan Curitan, marty Haught, ben Greenberg, freedom Dumlao and Kinsey Durham Grace all, at one point or another, came on the show and talked to me about what they're working on, about RailsCon, about Ruby Central. I was so grateful for each and every one of them coming on the show. So yeah, railsconf is over in the morning.

David Hill: 17:44

Thankfully, I've got a new podcast that I'll be co-hosting with Marty Hott, who's the open source director at Ruby Central, and this podcast is brought to you by Ruby Central. It's an official Ruby Central podcast called the Ruby Gems Podcast. The intent and structure behind this podcast is, I think, very similar, very in line with what I've been doing here on the Ode to RailsConf podcast, where we're talking with developers and leaders and maintainers in the Ruby and Rails community, trying to get stories and experiences kind of behind the tech and behind the code, talking to interesting people who have done things that have made an impact in our community. Episode one is out already. We talked with Chad Fowler about the beginnings of Ruby Central and the beginnings of RailsConf. It covers some similar ground to what I talked with him about here on this podcast, but there's also new stories that I wasn't able to pull from at the time, so there's still something new in there. If you've already listened to the Ode to RailsConf episode with Chad Fowler in there, if you've already listened to the Ode to RailsConf episode with Chad Fowler and episode two will be recording next week that episode will be with Evan Phoenix talking about Evan's era in leading Ruby Central and putting RailsConf on. We've got a big list of additional other names to have on the podcast, so I'm looking forward to being able to continue podcasting, since I have really grown to love doing this. That podcast, at least as currently planned, is only planned to be a monthly release cycle, so it'll be a bit of a slower podcast release cycle, but yeah, that's what I've got coming up next in terms of podcasting. Thank you so much to everyone who's out there, who's listened, who has invited my voice and my really annoying questions to all of these people about how they interacted with this conference. All of these people about how they interacted with this conference.

David Hill: 20:02

I alluded to this before. Maybe I didn't describe it quite clearly enough, maybe I don't know. I don't remember if I've mentioned this directly on the podcast before or not, so I'm going to take a minute to do that. I mentioned earlier I'm a bit of an introvert. I feel like I also tend to be shy in certain situations. For a long time I just described myself as shy. I didn't have the vocabulary for introversion versus extroversion. Yet I have a little bit of social anxiety. I'm so nervous trying to approach a new person that I haven't met, especially if I haven't any kind of awareness of their status within the community, and for a long time that made it very difficult for me to get out of my own way to go and meet people, to try and make friends with people that I admired from a distance.

David Hill: 20:54

Doing this podcast has helped me so much Over the years I think I've attended. If I counted right, I've attended nine different Rails confs, but only one Ruby conf. My only Ruby conf thus far was last year in 2024. So I've got a pretty good data sample in terms of how my social and emotional batteries typically feel during the course of a conference with all these people around. Most of the time I'm able to eke out one good day where I feel like I've got a lot of energy and I feel like I can go and I can socialize a little bit, but then the rest of the conference I feel just drained and not interested or capable of really interacting with people in a more social setting beyond just going in and sitting down at a talk and listening to the talk.

David Hill: 21:56

After doing this podcast for a few months and going to RubyConf last year, I felt such a huge difference in how I was perceiving things and how I was able to interact with things and with people at that conference. And, if anything, I felt that change was even more significant here at RailsConf and I'm sure a part of that was that I had a more visible role than just going as an attendee, as being part of the program committee. All of the speakers knew my names. I was put into multiple email chains where it's like if you have anything that needs to be addressed, please contact David Hill. I was getting up on the stage for multiple speakers. I was the person introducing them. I know I had a much more visible role which made it easier for there to be opportunities where someone needed to talk to me. I'm sure that was a factor, but I think so much more of it was.

David Hill: 23:03

Just I had given myself and my brain and all of my insecurities so many opportunities to practice in this low stakes, low risk environment of doing a podcast and teaching myself and learning that having these conversations was not as terrifying as I thought it was. Doing this podcast has been such a huge blessing for me. I'm happier with the person I am now than I was with the person I was a year ago. I hope that for everybody. I hope that we're always growing and learning and are happier with who we are now versus who we were then. These were aspects of who I perceived myself to be that had been solidifying in my mind since my early childhood. I'm just so glad that I took this risk.

David Hill: 24:03

Ultimately, this podcast was for me. I hope that there are other people out there who listened to it, who appreciated RailsConf, who enjoyed those experiences, who enjoy hearing other people's experiences about it, but I feel like, in the end, this podcast was ultimately for me. It was a project to help me learn to get out of my own way and to get out there and meet and talk to other people. For the longest time, when I was a younger developer, all I wanted to do was code. That was my job. My job was about code and writing the next feature, fixing the next bug, and the longer I've been in this industry, the more I felt like that's not what this job is about. This job is about people and solving problems and code happens to be the tool that we often use to solve those problems but being able to communicate and to listen to other people to be able to understand the different perspectives and experiences that they're coming from. I have found these opportunities to talk with my guests on the podcast so valuable in practicing that skill and in trying to get better at it.

David Hill: 25:15

I'm so grateful for the opportunity to have done this podcast, for everyone who has helped make it happen, for everyone who is willing to be a guest on this podcast and come talk to me about attending conferences and about Ruby Central and about the ecosystem and community that's grown up around it. Thank you so much for listening. If you are interested in continuing to hear my voice listening, if you are interested in continuing to hear my voice, we've got the Ruby Gems podcast. Episode one is already out. I have a couple of other ideas that I'm bandying around and hopefully I will continue doing this for the foreseeable future. Thank you so much for listening. I appreciate it so much and I hope that you will push forward and continue listening and supporting members of this Ruby and Rails community. I love this community. It's been so great to be a part of it and to really feel like I've found my people. Thank you so much again. This concludes the ODerealsConf podcast.