Code and the Coding Coders who Code it
We talk about Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, and everything in between. From tiny tips to bigger challenges we take on 3 questions a show; What are you working on? What's blocking you? What's something cool you want to share?
Code and the Coding Coders who Code it
Episode 32 - Andy Croll
Imagine stepping into the control room of a major tech conference with us as we chat with Andy Croll, CTO of Coverage Book and freshly minted co-chair of RailsConf. This episode peels back the curtain on the meticulous craft of conference planning – from the adrenaline rush of putting together a tech event to the nitty-gritty of ensuring that every attendee leaves with more than they came for. Andy's vision for RailsConf marries the camaraderie of small engineering teams with the prowess of industry titans, striving for a lineup that reflects the global community's rich tapestry.
With Andy at the helm, we travel the path from Brighton Ruby's intimate gatherings to the sprawling expanse of RailsConf, painting a vivid picture of the care poured into speaker preparation and the quest for the Holy Grail of event organization – flawless Wi-Fi. You can almost hear the cogs turning as we delve into the logistics of venue scouting and the art of crafting a compelling call for papers. Whether you're a conference going enthusiast or simply fascinated by the orchestration behind the scenes, Andy's insights offer a unique lens into the world of tech events.
Wrapping up the discussion, the podcast takes a lighthearted detour through personal anecdotes and the shared excitement for both the upcoming RailsConf and the cherished Brighton Ruby conference. The warmth of reconnection and the buzz of collective anticipation for future engagements leave us with a sense of renewed community spirit. Join us on this engaging journey through the ins and outs of bringing a beloved industry gathering to life.
Links
- @andycroll on Twitter
- @brightonruby on Twitter
- @railsconf on Twitter
- @andycroll@ruby.social on Mastodon
- RailsConf 2024 CFP
- railsconf.org
- andycroll.com
- brightonruby.com
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Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Code and the Code Encoders. Who code it? I'm your host, Drew Bragg, and I'm joined today by Andy Krull. Andy, for those of the listeners who might not be familiar with you, could you please give a brief introduction?
Speaker 2:My name is Andy. I work on the south coast of the UK in a town called Brighton for a company called Coverage Book where I am the CTO, but that sounds incredibly grand given that the entire company is 12 people. We are a Rails app, have been for like eight or nine years. I have run also for more than that time. Ten years of Brighton Ruby is coming up, which is the UK's premier Ruby event at which I've invited Drew to speak next year, which I don't think I've told anyone but Drew's going to come and do his delightful game show I've let a few people know and they got very excited.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we have a tradition of game shows of Brighton Ruby. There's a radio foreshow called Just a Minute in the UK that's been running for like decades and that's got a similarly bulletproof format to who Wants to Be a Millionaire. That also works. So we ran that for a few years and it's delightful to have something fun to finish the day with Brighton Ruby. I'm excited You've got the shiniest jacket so you win.
Speaker 1:I do have a very shiny jacket for this. I'm very excited to give it outside of the United States too, because I've given it a few times. It's always been in the US, so excited for the opportunity. So I appreciate that. For anyone who's not familiar with the show, the way this is going to work is I'm going to ask Andy three questions. I'm going to ask him what he's working on, what kind of blockers he has. If he doesn't actually have a blocker right now, he can just talk about a recent blocker he had and the strategies he used to get around it. And then the last question, my personal favorite what's something cool, new or interesting that you've learned, discovered or working on? And given your newly announced involvement with Ruby Central, I imagine you have some very cool things to talk about. So, andy, what are you working on?
Speaker 2:So I took a phone call from Ufuk. He runs the Ruby infrastructure team at Shopify and has recently joined the board of Ruby Central. He called so can I pick your brains about RailsConf? And the thing he wanted to pick my brains about was can you help me co-chair? And I had made a new year's resolution and said out loud to my wife I'm not going to do any talks this year. If I'm going to go to a conference, I'm just going to attend and enjoy it. I'll just do Brighton Ruby, I said, which, of course, is a number of weeks of effort to make that happen. And so the eye roll when I asked my wife do you think it'd be okay if I did? This was audible, I think, across the Atlantic.
Speaker 2:Yes, so I have agreed to co-chair RailsConf with Ufuk, which is on May the 7th to 9th in Detroit, where I have never been the same. So I'm looking forward to it. So we launched the CFP, as we record yesterday. Awesome, I'm posting about things on the internet. I am working on getting people excited. We're pulling together the program committee right now, as you speak, we're pulling together Keynote folks which we haven't confirmed yet, but we are really getting there. Ufuk and I have had things that we wanted to change about the big Ruby and Rails events, things that we think will help make it different, make it better. I think Some of that stuff is filtered through already in the RubyConf they had in San Diego last year.
Speaker 1:Yep, that was awesome. I enjoyed a lot of the changes on that one and Ufuk's involvement in that kind of shown through the community day and the hack day, which hands down my favorite part of that conference.
Speaker 2:Which is good news, because we're doing one at RailsConf.
Speaker 2:Thank goodness for that. So one of the things that I've always found when I've been to RailsConf is the workshops are really well attended, but they often compete against talks. So what we're going to do this year is day one is going to be Keynote talks. We're probably slightly slimmed down the number of tracks, so there are going to be slightly fewer talks, but we really want to focus the event on building with Rails. So it's about both finding content underneath the big tent of Rails. So there will be sort of alternative ways to do things. So this is how you might use React with Rails. I don't personally use React with Rails, but I know people do and people want that sort of intermediate advanced content as well as there being some beginner stuff as well. But it's going to be much more focused on Rails as a tool or set of tools and learning from each other, learning how other small, medium teams do this stuff. So, like I would encourage folks who are in those teams you don't normally hear from.
Speaker 2:I'm not saying there aren't going to be any speakers from Shopify because, let's face it, they probably are. That would be difficult Because they did such great work for our community, right? So, equally, there are teams, like the team I work with the coverage book. Right, there are five, six engineers at coverage book. We got stuff to say. We have the front end guy who invented Lookbook, which I know a bunch of people are using. I love Lookbook, and Podia is similar size right. It would be great to hear talks from teams of that size who you don't normally hear from. I'm obviously not really here for me because I do like to get on a stage and talk to people, but where are all these other teams?
Speaker 2:Why are we leaving it to the Shopify folks to talk about these things? We are all doing interesting stuff. We are all using interesting gems. We are using things in different ways. We are maybe taking an ancient app and moving it forward into the current way of doing things. So, for example, when we first started building the current version of our app, active storage wasn't quite there for us in terms of the functionality provided. Now it is. So now how are we going to go about moving? How do we move from our weird, our own rolled version of active storage-ish things and then move the whole thing towards active storage? So there's all sorts of things of that ilk where you're doing an interesting thing. You may not think it's interesting, but actually it is, because other people are having the same challenges as you. That's our focus in the talks and in the workshops. That's the vibe of the whole conference. It's like building with Rails and the builders who build it. Building and the builders who build it, something like that.
Speaker 2:Something to that effect yeah, so on the second day we're going to do workshops and we're going to do Hackday Okay, awesome. What exactly that looks like, we will work out as we go in the next few months and then on the third day we'll get back to talks. So the workshops will be in the middle of the conference so you can go to a workshop and then you can maybe do the workshop in the morning and take that stuff and then work through your own app in the afternoon. Or if you want to build an app, you have a brilliant idea or a community-based Rails app that you really want to get people to work on, you can do it at that Hackday. Or if you want to work on the framework itself, various members of Rails core will be there. Various people who own Rails-related gems will be there people to work on stuff.
Speaker 2:So I know at RubyConf there was like triaging the issues, the bugs and issues list on Ruby core. That was a RubyConf event At Rails. I don't know exactly who's going to be there from Rails core, but there will be people there who will happily take help from the community. So it's much more focused on getting involved, learning things from each other and hopefully being then inspired to take that stuff back to your team and do better work at the end. I always say that conferences aren't training, but there is an element of having those days to get your head up and think right, what things should we be doing to make our lives easier or to lean on the framework better? Or it's not just about the new shiny introduction to X, it's going to be. Here's some real tools that you can take back to your job and use. We want to make it practical, we want to make it code focused, we want to make it about Rails and we want to keep that celebration that it always is, but that's where we're aiming at.
Speaker 1:I like that. I like the move for the Hackday workshop bit to be in the middle. I've really enjoyed doing it at RubyConf, but I do think that having it on the first day through some people off where they're like, oh, I'm not attending a workshop, so I don't need to go to this or what have you, and they came in and then when they were hearing how awesome the community a Hackday was, they're like, hey, that would have been awesome to attend and I feel like having it in the middle kind of helps. Indirectly heard people to. Well, it's the middle of the conference, so of course I'm going to go and attend.
Speaker 2:We'll stick a keynote on the front of it to get everyone out of bed, there you go, yeah, yeah, yeah, stick a keynote on the front of it. You'll all get in the room and we've got the first day then to plan that stuff right, we've got the first day to like. In the intro we'll talk about what the second day is and then how we're going to administer it, and there'll be folks on the program committee who will help organize that stuff Right.
Speaker 1:You mentioned that on hack days it's great for maintainers and core team members to have the extra help to triage issues, the extra help to start parsing bugs, but I also think on the flip side, one of the awesome things for the hack day was you have these code owners and these maintainers and these people who are very well versed with these libraries and tools and whatnot. They're to help you get your development environment set up, which can a lot of times be the biggest blocker to get in going with anything. And Julie J and Kevin Murphy and I worked on the Ruby LSP and it was clutch having Vinny there just pop over real quick and be like, oh, if you set it up like this, it'll make development easier because you can actually use the tool while you're building it. It was great, it was awesome. I probably would not have figured that out if I just went on, grabbed an issue, started working on on my own, so it also helps having those folks there.
Speaker 2:They've set up someone else's laptop that's a bit more funky than theirs. They can then put that in the read me right yeah, you can turn that stuff into documentation. That actually spills wider than RailsConf, right yeah, spills wider than being in the room at the day.
Speaker 1:It's a hugely awesome addition. I'm excited to see it come for RailsConf. What other kind of goodies do you guys have in the works? Or is it all so secretive right now that you can't spill the beans?
Speaker 2:You could say secretive, or you could say still working on it. I only took that phone call from Weefook 10 days ago. Okay, so early January.
Speaker 1:No, mid January. Oh yeah, it is later in.
Speaker 2:January now. So yeah, it was very much a case of sure. Ok, let's do all of the things right now.
Speaker 1:Well, that's what you get for doing such a wonderful job, helping with many, is that now, naturally, you're the go to guy for helping run an awesome conference.
Speaker 2:I think I am the first non board member of Ruby Central to run one of the mainline conferences, I think. There you go, moving up in the world. Yeah, moving somewhere in the world. Honestly, it's a little bit frightening.
Speaker 1:Sure Going to be a little bit bigger than many, yeah it will be, hopefully Otherwise, a mini was mini in certainly comparisons this.
Speaker 2:I really want this to have the feel of some of what I bring to Brighton Ruby, bring it to the bigger event and just try and bring a bit more of that celebration to one of these they can feel quite intimidating the RailsConf. There's a lot of people there and I think I really want to spend some time making sure that the speakers have a good time, making sure the speakers are well prepped and ready to go and supported through the whole process, which I think can be an issue when there are loads and loads and loads of speakers. It's one thing I pride myself for Brighton Ruby. I'll often run through a talk with a speaker at Brighton Ruby three or four times in advance of them giving it in the room. I've given a bunch of talks myself so I do have an ability to edit and triage bits of a talk that aren't working or restructuring a talk.
Speaker 2:For example, for Brighton last year I helped Tim Reilly with his talk the singing talk that Tim Reilly did last year about Hanami. It was so funny so he pitched the idea of living in La Vida, hanami and said you know, I'm probably thinking about this. Then he sent me this really polite email. He goes I don't know if it's Brighton Ruby's vibe, but I was wondering if maybe I might sing a little bit in it and change the words, and I wanted to include a bit of some of the video, but it's a Ricky Martin video from 20 years ago, so a little bit of a risk.
Speaker 2:There's people getting rained on in the rain and dancing the salsa and I was like mate open with the song. If you're going to do it, go big, and I was delighted that he did. But yeah, it's that kind of thing. If you're a nervous first time speaker, absolutely submit a talk to RailsConf, because we are going to have the personnel there on the program committee and me personally who can help you turn that talk into something awesome. I just want everything to feel a bit more prepared for those speakers, because I personally want to make sure the Wi-Fi works for the workshop people as well, which I know has been an issue in previous years.
Speaker 1:Good luck. I think that outside of like the small regionals where it was just like, hey, we don't have enough people to put a heavy load on Wi-Fi. I don't think I've been to a major conference where the Wi-Fi worked consistently throughout the day and didn't at least work one Workshop. So good luck. I love that goal. That is a huge goal. I have no idea how you're gonna achieve that goal, but I'm excited for you to achieve that goal. That actually rolls great. Until the next question, even though I feel like we're not done on the, what are you working on? But when you start planning a conference, whether it's bright or just helping out with something I know you help with blue ridge and you help with many and you help what pretty much every conference out there, I feel like, or now at the scale of rails conflict. What are the differences between the prep work that goes into the two, the different scales and what's the same?
Speaker 2:So brian ruby has built up over time and I know exactly what it is. It's single track, which helps. It's a great venue that provides me with a load of personnel support as part of the venue and the venue for the after party is there as well. And it's really scalable as a venue for me as well. And I started out the first brian ruby was like a hundred and twenty people in a small room at the same venue and then it was two hundred people and then it was two, fifty and then it was three hundred and it was three hundred for a bunch of years and then it was covered. Then I had to move it because the post covered one.
Speaker 2:I didn't know how many people gonna come, so I booked a different venue equally as helpful, but that was smaller, again one hundred and fifty, and then last year is five hundred and I run that basically on my own. So if I didn't know exactly what the venue was and what I was doing and having trusted providers and stuff, I wouldn't be able to do that. So brian ruby very much doesn't run on autopilot, but I do know exactly the things I have to do and I do it over time. I do off the side of my desk so it is feasible to do that because I've done it so much. I took a couple of phone calls from jeremy for blue Ridge in the early days and just like said do this, don't do this, do this. I recommend you don't do this. Help him figure out what he wanted from his event other than helping. That's all the help I gave. Us opinions like this which is very easy.
Speaker 1:A lot of help, though, having folks like you who have run a conference and have opinions and have thoughts that help so much. I didn't think of that bit, or that's a really good idea, or see your point of view all bail on this idea. I think that's usually helpful.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he canvass loads of people, wasn't just me, it was andrew from rail sass and it was various other folks that he spoke to Jason from code with Jason and the sensitive ruby, like he spoke to all the folks who run stuff in recent years. Now many was a weird amalgam of a bright and ruby and ruby central event which we ran once and it's had the three days, had the multi tracks. Equally, I was working with jemera and emily, who are two of the most awesome people and incredibly organized, and again, I was mostly the guy having ideas. I wasn't local but I did put myself there and we put together on site for those three days and it was a hundred and something people like it wasn't huge.
Speaker 1:It was a good size. I enjoy it was a good size, yeah it was great.
Speaker 2:This thing is a different scale entirely and thankfully ruby central in the last time for ruby kolf have started to use an external events company, so they have a team of paid consulting team who do events right. So I think people don't sort of realize that the ruby central events grew completely organically. Ruby central as an organization grew completely organically from a will to get together and then oh wait a minute this is now a conference and now we are using the conference to financially support the infrastructure that we all depend on day to day.
Speaker 1:I think that's something that a lot of people don't realize is that when they put on ruby kolf and rails come like, yes, it's a great opportunity for all of us to get together and it's this wonderful thing, but the big portion of that is the money they raise with those events support bundler and ruby gems and all those things that we, as ruby, rely on every day and take probably for granted. Those things are not cheap.
Speaker 2:Yeah, right, both in terms of infrastructure and in terms of the human being supporting that structure. Now, obviously there is real mix of people who work on those infrastructural projects for us, and some of them are working Shopify and some of the work other places. Some of them just people doing bits and pieces off the side of their desk. But ruby central now have a hired engineer who works on ruby gems and bundler. And then they have the Alternative methods of funding as well. Like you know, they raise the money from Shopify directly as an endowment. They've got some money, I think, from some German open source funding thing. They've also got what used to be ruby together but sort of wound into ruby central, like the membership stuff. So people in companies funding in that way, similar to how the rails foundation Raises money from companies, yeah, so, yeah, they have that as well. But yeah, for the longest time the conferences were the way that money got allocated to those projects, and so for me it's a real mixture of trying to make sure that this thing makes some money whilst also like trying to keep the costs down, because attending a long event is an expensive undertaking. They have a different challenge. So think David rails will lost couple hundred thousand dollars, because that was the plan. It's a different kind of event, it's a marketing event. Where is the idea for rails come, for ruby come is that At the very least breaks even and hopefully raises some money to support the infrastructure that we care about.
Speaker 2:And there are also this other challenges with a big event, so these big conference center events, it's very difficult to find a venue. First of all, there isn't a conference center for a thousand people and to move cities every time is not easy. And To do that you also need to have a hotel block, so there is an option to stay in the hotel with a bunch of the attendees and then you need hotel rooms for speakers and for the staff running the event. This is an economics of the US conference that I did not understand because I don't do this for Brian Ruby, right? So the economics are if you are buying ticket to rails come, it really helps the conference if you buy hotel room in the block, because if you don't sell all your hotel rooms in the block, ruby central on the hook for the money for that, it's all of these things factor in when you get to that certain size of conference.
Speaker 2:And then the food, because it's a three day conference, multi track. It's a big conference hall kind of thing. Food gets provided. Food is a huge proportion of the cost of one of these, are sure, which is why I don't do food for Brian Ruby. I'm just like everybody. Go into the city of Brian. It's got amazing restaurants. The challenges on this one are very different to the challenges of the Brian Ruby. Obviously I'm much better supported and there's a program committee and there's staff at Ruby central. There is this events team, but it's just a different scale of challenge. Again off and I still have a day job as well. Like this is not a day job.
Speaker 1:This isn't full time, andy.
Speaker 2:This is like a weird work adjacent side hobby I can't quite control.
Speaker 1:You have a lot of side hobbies. You have the podcast, you have first Ruby friends. You have every once in a while newsletter. I've got an over commitment issue basically yeah, yeah, like do you see your wife at all, or is she just kind of like? Every time you're like, hey, I'm going to do a thing, she's like good, go away.
Speaker 2:It's a little bit of that. It's like that plus an I roll. The podcast been easier, so invited. He had a kid last year, which is why we haven't done one for a year, 18 months. She's not quite ready to come back. And then the newsletter is. As I get round to it, I'm about to send an email out to that list going sorry, you're probably not going to get one for six months, whilst I do all of this stuff.
Speaker 1:Well, you're a little busy, as we're finding out.
Speaker 2:The one Ruby thing that I'm doing is RailsConf.
Speaker 1:One Ruby thing come to RailsConf. It's like a big thing and you might not be the right person to ask, but I'm going to ask it anyway. How do the cities get chosen? I have no idea. Okay, cool, you should find out and let me know, because I want a RubyConf or RailsConf in Philadelphia and I don't know when the last time there was one, and I don't want to put one on myself because of everything you have already said about putting on conferences. Yeah, I don't have those kinds of organizational skills and I can't talk Ernesto into it, but I want something in Philly. So I got to get someone at Ruby Central to go. You know, it'd be great. Let's do one in Philly.
Speaker 2:My understanding is they pick a big city that is easy to travel to. It sounds like Philly would be a good option. I mean, yeah it sounds like Philly's great.
Speaker 1:We've got an international airport. Yeah, Got tons of hotels. We've got Reading Terminal Market Fine. I feel like that's probably on the list right, maybe I don't know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it feels like those sorts of decisions again are made like two or three years out Right, because you have to secure the dates in the places. That's one of the big issues that Ruby Central I know have had from chatting to the folks who are there over the last few years. One of the big issues they've had is that they had venues they booked five years ago because of COVID. They had to roll them over, otherwise they'd have lost all of their money on those venues, so there were decisions taken before any of the folks who are currently on the board were there. These decisions are made so far in advance that, even though I land 10 days ago and we have a kick off meeting a week ago, suddenly you're like, oh yeah, the venue is there and the website is already there. You're like, okay, cool, cool, cool, cool. It feels a little bit cut before the horse, but that's just how these things have been organized for the last, however long.
Speaker 1:So what is the number one blocker for you right now in regards to the planning stages that you're in? Is it just figuring everything out, getting your bearings, or is there like, yeah, this is the problem I'm trying to solve?
Speaker 2:There's two.
Speaker 2:The first one I'm solving on Monday next week, in that I am flying to Detroit to see the venue because for me, that's super important.
Speaker 2:I think being able to adapt a conference to the venue I think is super important in terms of being able to spot done enough of these now and I've been to enough of them that I can go.
Speaker 2:Okay, well, people are going to get stuck physically here, or we need these rooms to be two rooms, or if we're going to do three tracks this day, then we'll use these rooms and then we'll change it up or change it up, or we need to put branding stuff here, or it's a bit weird that the food is way over here, or whatever those things are. I feel like we should go and see the venue and, of course, like the two chairs of the conference in Detroit, one of us lives in Brighton in the UK and one of us lives in Turkey, which is literally the other side of the world. So I was closest and there's one flight a day from Heathrow, so I am taking it on Monday and doing a two day stop with the events team and some Ruby Central folks to walk the halls and work out how we can make it work and find whoever the Wi-Fi contractor is and grab them by the neck and shake them until they tell me that the Wi-Fi will work.
Speaker 1:It's 2024, you'd think we would have at least semi-stable Wi-Fi by now.
Speaker 2:They just think that we're normal people who are rocking up to a conference. Right, everybody at this conference has at least three devices that will connect to Wi-Fi at the same time and then try and download stuff from places. So let's plan for that. Plan for three times the number of people. Let's get some aerials up you can put me on a wire if you need, and people can plug in. We'll do that. So that's my first blocker, which I will hopefully unblock next week, and the other blocker is we don't have any talks yet.
Speaker 2:Well, you just opened the CFP, so Seriously submit talks because even if we haven't heard from you before, I am keen not to have all new talks. There'll be some people that people love to hear from over and over or they're working on really interesting Rails-related stuff. But I really want folks to consider that maybe they are doing stuff interesting work that other people would benefit from. Hearing my most recent talk about how we rebuilt coverage book inside coverage book, we sort of rebuilt a Rails app inside a Rails app, and it wasn't just a technical talk. There was some personal stuff in there as well and some personnel stuff in there as well. So I think that talk would have been a great fit for this year's RailsConf.
Speaker 2:I'm not going to give it again because I already feel like I'm busy. Also like doing the same talk in the same conference tiers and roads. That's a bit cheap, isn't it? I really want people to submit, even if they're not quite sure. When you're giving those CFP things, when you're writing a CFP, the most important thing is to include everything that you want to say in the talk, even if it's not brilliantly structured, and prove that it's you who should be giving it.
Speaker 1:So the CFP submission is not the talk you are going to give. It is the idea and the reason why you should be the one to present the same idea and the content of it as well.
Speaker 2:right, have a bit of a think about the structure, but the structure can absolutely change. It's about. This is the level of talk that we're giving. I think sometimes you can too easily have too many introduction to talks and I want to avoid having too many. There will be some, obviously.
Speaker 2:We have to cater to beginners and experts, but equally, I sort of scribbled a load of talk ideas into a document and titles of talks that I would like to see. The database performance beyond N plus one. Everybody knows that N plus ones are bad, but, like what's the steps? Tell me the steps. What's the next steps? What are the alternatives to action text? Real life caching strategies, because nobody is good at caching, that's true.
Speaker 2:Comparing job frameworks, delegated types Is anyone, apart from 37 signals, actually using them? If they are, tell me how. Where are the foot guns? How do you go from adopting a Rails core technology? Like, how do you move from react to hot wire or the opposite direction? Where should you be putting your Rails apps? Is Heroku still the best choice? What about fly? What about render? What about Kamal? Has your company saved an enormous amount of money by doing something clever? Have you made massive changes to how your app works? What's the front end story on Rails? All of these things? I am sure there are hundreds and thousands of teams doing this kind of work and they could dead easily share it back, and I want to hear from those people whether it's a workshop or there is a talk. I want to hear those stories.
Speaker 1:Tell me, tell me, yeah yeah, there's a lot to Rails now too. It's still a very simple convention over configuration so it's easy to get running and there's been strides more recently to make it less dependencies outside of Rails itself. But it's a full stack, pretty big framework to get deployed. Okay, so cool. I spun up an app one button maybe. Heroku is still that way, but the moment you're no longer the Iran Rails new and now I'm deploying three controllers. There's a lot of options and I don't know which one's the best, and I would love to hear from the people who are using render or fly or still using Heroku or doing their own thing on DigitalOcean or AWS and get a bunch of those people in the room and put them on a panel and I would listen to that, just because that's a big component of our job that I know very little about. I do whatever my company says and the decision maker per se, but if I wanted to be, I have a lot of research to do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you get a lot of talks that are like here's your first steps, installing active job, or here's how you might translate a simple component from yeah be to how more you are be to flex or you are be to view component, whatever. It is just like what are the growing pains at different scales? Because we also hear a lot from the other side. Right, we hear a lot from the really big teams, obviously here from the shop of fire is in the github, to hear like really big stuff, like that middle bit, which is where the vast majority of us live and work. What are the different scales?
Speaker 2:When do you change your architecture? What's a good change that has worked for your team as you went from 10 people to 20 people or from 100 users to a thousand users? It's the context. Show me the foot guns, stop me doing it myself. That information isn't out there as much. There's lots of information about doing it for the first time or installing something in a brand new rails out, but it's like you have an eight year old hairy rails out, so what next?
Speaker 1:Yeah, those are all great talk ideas. Those would be the types of talks that would definitely get me into talk rooms when I am attending conferences recently, though, unless it's a regional with that single track and I don't have to make the decision. I do a lot of hallway track. Is there anything that you guys are working on new or different, or that you're trying to tweak to make the hallway track a little bit more Robust or more interesting, or putting more time between talks to allow for more hallway tracking? Or is it just kind of like the whole way track works? We don't need to worry about that, it kind of figures itself out.
Speaker 2:I think the second day kind of is hallway track. The second day is leave space for that right. My idea is is that I do like to go to talks pretty quickly. I always track some of it but I think it's not going to be scheduled quite as tightly as previous years. There'll be a keynote and then maybe five talks over two or three tracks on the days. These are just early numbers, I don't know.
Speaker 2:This is the case because we're still working out the CFP comes out, but then the idea being that those are a little bit more spaced out, that they're a bit more predictable, like, maybe we'll have them on the hour so you'll know that as the hour rolls around they'll be in you talking every room. Okay, something like that will subject to change, sure, sure, sure. Then you've got the second day where you can get a lot of that hallway track energy, but also with a focus on a real thing, the focus on a project. Right, and then the third day will be talks. Again, I totally agree with you. This is why Brian is a single track conference, because the paralysis of choice is real. Yeah, so at least I can reduce it from seven talks at one time, which I think did happen at last year's rails come to three. Yeah, last year's rails come for us.
Speaker 1:There was a lot of content there was a lot of content and it was very spread out, because you're on three floors between the expo hall and the keynote room. In the talk room you would see people going up and down the escalator and be like wait, I want to go talk to you. Now you're going back down and yeah, yeah, hopefully Detroit venue Isn't three floors and that would be a huge help.
Speaker 2:I was looking at the maps. I don't know because I've not been there. This is why I'm going next week, but it looks to be two floors. Okay, whether we need both floors or not All times, I don't know. So, yeah, that's the sort of thing I'm thinking about. That's why I'm going. I really feel strongly that I need to see it and walk it so that I can feel whether bottlenecks and the problems will be. We'll try and schedule talks so they're not competing, that they are complimentary talks and that it's easy to do between them. So that's my plan. We'll see what reality it's me with when I get there next week.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah yeah, yeah, everyone's got a plan until they're punched in the mouth or nose. I'll check in with you again after you get back from Detroit and your thoughts on what you can do with the venue space. So we've talked about a lot of cool things and a lot of Interesting stuff coming out with this year's rails comp. Is there anything that we haven't touched on that you want to use for your something cool, new or interesting, or do you want to go a completely different route? Or what do you have for?
Speaker 2:cool, new, interesting. Obviously cool, new and interesting is rails comp. You should definitely come, go and book a ticket now. Bother your boss, use your training budget. It's a good thing. It'll be fun, I promise. But actually I was making notes before, knowing that the three questions were coming, so I've been watching slow horses on Apple TV Low horses, okay, which is Gary Oldman as a British spy master who is just an appalling human with all the spies that are so bad that they get kicked out of my five proper and put in slough house, which is where they put the spies. They can't fire, but on any good this three series of an apple TV. And it's so good.
Speaker 1:Well, scary old man and he's clearly having the best time when you said is Gary Oldman, I thought you're about to say he's a horse playing a horse and I believe it is very good. He absolutely could.
Speaker 2:Yeah so I recommend that I bought a steam deck OLED. Oh yeah, they go, because apparently I thought I was gonna have more spare time than I have. Maybe I'll play on the flight on the way over to Detroit. It's a game called cocoon, which is really, really delightful. It's like a little indie game thing, if you ever played as a game called inside, and it's a game called limbo I played limbo.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's from one of the designers of that. Okay, yeah, it's delightful, and the steam deck is just an amazing piece of kit.
Speaker 1:It is right. I got one too after Nick Schwatter had recommended it on the Ruby on Rails podcast when they were doing their Christmas episode, and he talked about it and it's so cool.
Speaker 2:I bounced in and out of my car several times because I'm like I can't really justify this, I don't need this so good. And now I have all of the games that I thought it was never gonna play, that I bought on steam and now on a machine that I will never play. So that's cool.
Speaker 1:Welcome to parenting yeah, I am impressed that how well horde to the steam deck works for so many games. Like I've played Some beefy triple A games on the steam deck and like yeah, you're not gonna get the same quality resolution out of a performance PC or something, but you're gonna get pretty damn good and have a really good time. So impressed overall. It's proper chunky as well.
Speaker 2:It's good chunky your work on the guns whilst you're using it. So it's not just for weedy gamers, it's for buff gamers who can hold a heavy thing up, yeah, yeah, but actually the cool thing I really wanted to talk about. So today we had a meeting at work and I was explaining the infrastructure of coverage book to we had another new junior developer this year and two other juniors and I used continuity camera on my Mac. You know you can use an iPhone as a webcam. Now I have heard this. Yes, so what I did was I balanced my iPhone on top of my laptop, leaning against my monitor, and what it does is it uses two of the cameras on the iPhone and it takes a picture of your desk as well as of your face, and it puts the picture of your desk, of the squashed, into a window that you can then share, so you can share what you're drawing on your desk as like your share screen on zoom. Huh, it's brilliant. Yeah, this is new.
Speaker 2:You can buy like little magsafe clips that turn your iPhone into a webcam, and I was like, why would I want one of those? I have a webcam, even though I'm talking to you on a serious plan. The web cams not that great. Why would I put my iPhone up there to be the camera? You would do it for this thing, this continuity camera. It's amazing.
Speaker 2:If you want to communicate product stuff through drawing, or I've got this idea, let me do this so you can just click your camera on. You set your camera to be your iPhone camera because it knows your iPhone is nearby, because I know which craft, and then because obviously when you take a picture of a desk it's weird perspective, but it corrects the perspective in the window and they can see your hands drawing on it. It was so useful in that kind of back and forth. It's because then you're not trying to draw on a screen with a mouse or any of that stuff, like you've got a piece of paper on your desk with a pen and you can just draw and then it reverses the angle and then de-squishifies it and it was properly useful for actual work.
Speaker 1:Like I knew you could do. The iPhone is your webcam if you're in the Apple ecosystem, but I didn't know about that. That is awesome. It's very cool. That is very cool. I want to see this in action. You're going to have to show me at some point.
Speaker 2:Actually, I might be able to do it once we finish hanging up here.
Speaker 1:I'll see if.
Speaker 2:I can share my screen and it be the continuity camera. We're doing this recording in a web browser, so how it works with Chrome I've got no idea. I don't even know how it works outside of Chrome.
Speaker 1:So, other than hey everyone, RailsConf this year in Detroit is going to be awesome. You should definitely go. Go tell your boss you're going Do whatever you need to do to get there. Is there anything else you want to talk about before we wrap up?
Speaker 2:I mean also Brighton Ruby. Yeah, also Brighton Ruby. If people don't come to that, I personally have to go and live under a bridge. Oh yeah, if I lose enough money, that's what we'll have.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, well, it looks not bankrupt. Andy, everyone go to Brighton, ruby and RailsConf. What are the dates for RailsConf? Again, it's May 7th to 9th. May 7th to 9th in beautiful Detroit, michigan, detroit. Can I say beautiful?
Speaker 2:I don't know it could be awful, it could be delightful. Hey the Red.
Speaker 1:Wings might make the playoff, so maybe you could catch a Red Wings game. Wire out there, the Red.
Speaker 2:Wings play Ice hockey, which is a sport. I know it's a sport. That's the one with the burly men hitting each other in the cold right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but not football. They do it while skating on ice. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Technically, football is also men hitting each other in the cold. A my sport of choice, ice hockey, red Wings might make the playoffs, who knows? Maybe we'll get lucky and we'll be able to catch a game. Wire out RailsConf, andy, this was a blast. I'm so happy we got to catch up. Thank you for emailing me to come on, because I have not been on social media, so God knows who's trying to get ahold of me. My one month away from social media is almost over, so I can't wait to see how many people have been asking me questions. Cool, awesome. Well, thank you for everything you're doing for RailsConf, also because I'm very excited to see how it all rolls out and that Ufuk is getting the help he deserves. So thanks for coming on the show too, and we will catch you next time. Absolutely my pleasure.
Speaker 2:Good speech you, joey, all right, see you, andy. Bye.
