Episode 34 - Ufuk Kayserilioglu

Discover the heartbeat of Ruby with Ufuk Kayserilioglu, the engineering maestro at Shopify, as we unravel the layers of Ruby infrastructure and the bright future of Rails development. Ufuk's insights into the meticulous work of maintaining CRuby reveal the fine art of balancing performance with modernity while also diving into the exciting realms of TruffleRuby and the Prism compiler. His recent appointment to the Ruby Central board brings a fresh perspective to the community's cherished events, igniting innovative visions for RailsConf that are sure to resonate with enthusiasts and professionals alike.

Feel the buzz of RailsConf as we praise the lineup of visionary speakers set to grace the stage, each chosen with the utmost care to embody the conference's core Rails theme. The anticipation bubbles over as we discuss the wealth of knowledge awaiting attendees, from software craftsmanship to the intricate web of professional relationships that flourish within the Rails ecosystem. Get a glimpse of what Hack Days promises, an unparalleled opportunity for real-time collaboration that could very well become the centerpiece of your RailsConf experience.

As we gear up for one of the most pivotal gatherings in the Ruby community, we highlight the essential role of Ruby Central—our steward of Ruby's shared resources and the architect of iconic events like RailsConf and RubyConf. The chapter closes with a nod to the potential of supporting local meetups and regional conferences, an endeavor that strengthens the fabric of our community. And for a touch of tech magic, we share tales of Tailscale's impact on developer networking, a pathway to career ascension for many. Stay connected with us online for the latest on RailsConf and more, and prepare to accelerate your professional journey in the world of Ruby.

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Transcript

Speaker 1 0:01

Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Code and the Coding Coders who Code it. I'm your host, drew Bragg, and I'm joined today by my friend and occasional mentor, ufuk. And Ufuk, I have to admit, despite us being friends for a few years now and your undying willingness to hop on a call with me whenever I am struggling with something, I still can't pronounce your last name. I'm so sorry. So for anyone who doesn't know you or how to pronounce your last name, could you please introduce yourself, including your last name?

Speaker 2 0:38

Yeah, of course. Well, that's really funny. For anyone who doesn't know me, my name is Ofok Kayseri Leolo. It's a mouthful.

Speaker 1 0:42

Sounds like you're struggling with it too.

Speaker 2 0:44

I mean, I feel a little bit better about my attempts, but I think when I was on with Jason in one of those episodes I broke down exactly what the last name meant and how to pronounce it. Obviously that's too academic for people that I know in the community to remember or even pronounce, but that's totally fine. Basically, everyone in the community knows me as Ufuk, and that's great. I love being the only Ufuk in the community.

Speaker 1 1:16

It's a pretty unique first name, so I feel like the last name necessity of specifying which Ufuk we're talking about is sort of unnecessary, because you're the one and only Thank you.

Speaker 2 1:28

Thank you Again. For people that don't know me, I'm a longtime Rubyist. I'm currently working as the engineering manager of the Ruby infrastructure team at Shopify. The Ruby infrastructure team is part of the Ruby and Rails infrastructure team at Shopify. The Ruby infrastructure team is part of the Ruby and Rails infrastructure team at Shopify because Shopify's platform is built on Ruby and Rails as core technologies. We're deeply invested in making sure that those technologies grow with the company and have growing and thriving communities and they keep being technologies of choice for many, many years going forward. That's why Ruby and Rails infrastructure as a team is set up to invest in Rails and Ruby technologies.

Speaker 2 2:20

I'm thankful that I'm able to work with a lot of bright minds on the team in general, but I'm also super humbled to have had the chance to take part in the Ruby infrastructure part of the story, a story where we're looking at different Ruby implementations, most notably the Ruby implementation that we all use, cruby, but to a smaller extent.

Speaker 2 2:51

We're looking at TruffleRuby to see if it's viable for some of our workloads as well.

Speaker 2 2:57

But when I say we look at CRuby, we actually do a lot of work inside CRuby to make sure that it continues being performant and is more performant going forward, that it continues to be a modern code base that's easy to work in, that's easy to extend, easy to build on, etc.

Speaker 2 3:18

So a lot of the things that we built are kind of behind the scenes. Things like widgetGIT that most people just turn on using a flag and get the benefits off. They don't go in and do anything with YGIT so it's not exposed to any of the Rubyists really. But some of the things are like the new Prism compiler, for example, is accessible from Rubyland. So if you have any need to understand any Ruby code as an entity in your code base, you'd better reach for Prism as a gem and say prismparse and get the Ruby code that you need to understand so that it can give you back syntax tree etc. So that's the kind of work that our team is doing. We work on the virtual machine, the garbage collector and all the other bits of Ruby to make sure that it continues being performant and scalable, Awesome.

Speaker 1 4:16

Yeah, much appreciation for your work. We've had a few of your teammates on in the past. I've had Kevin Newton on talking about the parser. I had the distinct pleasure of working with him on the parser, which is definitely a break from my day job in the best way A little overwhelming but very awesome and I've had Viddy on to talk about the Ruby LSP, so I think he's not part of your team anymore. Right, they're split into their own user experience developer experience.

Speaker 2 4:46

I think he's not part of your team anymore. Right, they're split into their own user experience. Yes, developer experience is a top level team inside the Ruby and Rails infrastructure team and they're also doing awesome work.

Speaker 1 4:54

So just the general team that you have and that you get to be a part of is super awesome, but there's another team that you're a part of now that is a little more top of mind Indeed.

Speaker 2 5:07

Last November so November 2023, I joined the Ruby Central board as one of the four new board members that they took on board I guess Board on board, I don't know if there's a better term for that but my primary motivation for joining the Ruby Central board was to bring all the work that I'm already doing as part of my role leading the Ruby infrastructure team working with many different companies in the ecosystem to talk about the things we're doing in the Ruby ecosystem, to work with the Ruby core committers team, to be aligned on all the things that we'll be doing in the Ruby ecosystem, to bring a lot of those connections and that work to the open source work that Ruby Central is doing. So that was my primary motivation for joining the board in the first place and I'm already doing some work in that direction as well. But I quickly found myself in the role being the chair of RailsConf. That's coming up in actually about six weeks In close. Yeah, I was in a position where I was the only co-chair, which kind of made me the chair of RailsConf for a bit, until I reached out to Andy Kroll and said are you interested in joining me to run this thing? Little bit reluctantly, but I'm really grateful that he did so because he brings a wealth of how to do conferences the right way experience, which I obviously don't have.

Speaker 2 6:53

I had ideas about what RailsConf could be and what I think it should be, and the kind of slight changes we need to make to the program or how it's run or the speaker lineup or the kind of talks that we want at the conference. I had ideas around that, but I obviously don't have any conference organization experience. Thankfully, ruby Central has a lot of that muscle built and we're also working with professional organization team now since RubyConf, which is making things much easier for the board members to organize these conferences. So they're responsible for a lot of the logistics of the video recording, a lot of the setup, contracts, making sure that there's enough coffee, making sure that there's enough water for everyone, etc. Enough coffee, making sure that there's enough water for everyone, etc. All these things board members who were chairing these conferences had to be concerned with previously and we have the luxury of not having to be concerned with those so we can focus on the conference. So, yeah, that's another thing that I'm currently engaged with Busy man, busy man.

Speaker 1 8:08

So the way that the show normally works is I'll ask you three questions what are you working on? What kind of blockers do you have? And then we'll have something cool, new or interesting to talk about. I have a feeling the what are you working on has something to do with RailsConf. So we're just going to talk about RailsConf for a bit and not get into the work stuff that you're working on. But, of course, if, at any time, you do want to talk about a work thing, let's change gears and do it because it'll be fun.

Excitement for RailsConf Speaker Lineup

Speaker 1 8:38

And then, when we get to the cool, new or interesting thing, that is completely open-ended. It doesn't have to be coding-related, it doesn't have to deal with Ruby or Rails or anything that any of us would know about. It totally can, though. If there's a very specific thing coming up at RailsConf that you're excited about that maybe not a lot of people know about, you can also talk about that. So this is where I would ask what are you working on? But really, what I want to ask is how excited are you for the speaker lineup that you have going on? Because I looked at it after it was announced and it's incredible. It's awesome there's so many people on there that I know from the internet or know personally or just really want to meet. It's an awesome lineup.

Speaker 2 10:02

I'm very excited. So I think you kind of stole my thunder.

Speaker 1 10:06

I'm so sorry. I think, you're really jazzed about it.

Speaker 2 10:10

No, no, sorry, Mike. I'm very jazzed about the speaker lineup and I'm super thankful to Andy and the program committee for putting that together. I was less involved with that. Andy took the charge and worked with the conference track selection part of the program committee that we have and worked with the conference track selection part of the program committee that we have, and they did an amazing job of picking up these talks and the lineup. And we had to say no to a lot of amazing talks as well because we didn't have enough slots, which was a pity because we still had more talks that we would have loved to have seen.

Speaker 2 10:48

On the program, I think most of my input was aligned with Andy's vision was to set the theme and the vision for what we wanted RailsConf to be about, which was more about building with Rails. So I kept repeating that to everyone. I kept repeating that to Andy when I was asking him if he would co-chair with me, and I also said the same thing to all the program committee members as we were recruiting them. We said this RailsConf will be a little bit more focused on putting Rails at the core of the conference and for showcasing to people all the cool ways in which you can build with Rails. And when I say build with Rails, people think, oh, like, how do you build software with Rails or how do you build companies with Rails. But it's broader than that, because you can also build a career with Rails and you can also build other things with Rails, build relationships with Rails by going to RailsConf or other conferences around Rails. So it's actually a broader umbrella.

Speaker 2 12:01

But there was a feeling that RailsConf didn't have enough Rails content. Recently I was hearing that from some people and for a while I think I was seeing that too. It was still a great conference, but maybe it had lost the connection with Rails being the core theme. So we said to ourselves, what if we brought that back? What if we made every talk to be about Rails? And I think the program and the speaker lineup that we have is probably a testament to setting that vision, because there's so many talks there.

Speaker 2 12:45

That gets you excited, probably for the reason that there's a wealth of information there. There's real life sweat and tears, experience that people will be talking about, things that they've done, that they want to share with other people, and there's so much content there that people, if they come to the conference can be learning, not just because they were at the talk session, because you can also watch the video, but also because you can talk to the speakers there. You can engage with the speakers during the hack day or in the hallway track, or just hang out with them in the social events, which gives you more opportunities to learn from the same people that you watched on stage a couple of hours ago. So that's why I'm just calling out to all of your listeners, if they haven't already bought their tickets, to buy their tickets today so that they get to experience not only great speakers on stage, but also get a chance to hang out with them and work with them in different settings.

Speaker 1 13:46

Absolutely, I highly recommend it. Awesome lineup and I'm glad you mentioned Hack Days. That's pretty new still. I'm still not convinced that everybody knows about it, although if they've listened to my episode with Andy, they know a little bit more about it.

Speaker 1 14:00

It was at RubyConf. It was the first day. I was a huge fan of it. I really enjoyed getting to go into the room, either meet a maintainer or just be able to say hi in person, sit down with them.

Speaker 1 14:12

A couple of friends and I worked on the Ruby LSP with Vinny and it was awesome having him right there to help us get the development environment set up.

Speaker 1 14:20

Even though we followed the readme. It's never the same, but it was a really great experience and the only thing that I came out of it thinking as a negative was it sort of sucks that it was on the first day, because then you go to a talk or two and you're like I want to work on that or I want to see that in practice. I want to interact with that person, and I didn't say it to anybody, but you guys all read my mind and put it on the second day, which is great, great. I am really interested to hear from you what you hope Hack Days is like at RailsConf for being on the second day being a companion to the workshops and not this first day, where I think a lot of people skipped it because they were just like I don't even know what this is, but now, with its sandwich, it's almost like yeah, I'm there anyway, I'm gonna go to it. What's your hope for?

Speaker 2 15:07

it. That was indeed the feedback we got from many people when we did this at RubyConf. So you didn't have to say it, because we heard that. And it was also quite obvious that there was a logistical problem with doing that the first day because it was really hard. Because, for people who don't know, I was also on the program committee for RubyConf and I was responsible for organizing the Hackday part of RubyConf and I know firsthand how hard it was for us to communicate with project maintainers that were inviting to the event because this was pre-conference. It's really hard to reach out to people because the conference Slack is set up quite close to the conference so you don't have a direct line of communication. If you try to do like a chain email, that's really hard as well. And as the program community we also didn't know a lot of the logistics. We hadn't seen the event space in person, so didn't know like what kind of a room we would be having, et cetera. It's like all sorts of problems that make it hard to do on the first day because it's a new experience for everyone, whereas we heard that if it's the second day, like you said, if there's a talk on the first day and people are excited about it. They can be like, oh yeah, I want to talk to this guy or this woman and just work with them during the hack day and learn more about this thing and I want to contribute to whatever they're doing, which I think a lot of people said that at RubyConf about Kevin Newton's talk, which was on the second day, and it was a packed room and he talked about parsing Ruby and he told people you can do this too, because I didn't know anything about parsing parsing at all, let alone parsing Ruby, a couple of years back. I just got interested and I basically learned as I was building things and people got really excited about it and people said to us oh, if only that was a talk on the first day, we would go and work with Kevin on the second day.

Speaker 2 17:11

In fact, it was the second day. So, yeah, we heard that and that's why we're putting it on the second day. So our aim we're still inviting some open source project maintainers who are maintaining projects around the Rails ecosystem. We will have people and maintainers from the RubyGems team who are already working with Ruby Central. They'll be there. Of course, we'll have some Rails core members. If I know correctly, we'll have four Rails core members there who will be working with people about things related to Rails core and we're also going to, like I said, invite more open source project maintainers. But because this is on the second day, we'll open signups in person during the first day and say these are the projects that are running. We'll probably have a chart or something somewhere. Didn't plan that far out yet.

Speaker 1 18:05

You still got six weeks, it's fine.

Speaker 2 18:07

Yeah, we have when people can, just so that we understand what the demand is for various groups. People can put their names on for projects or they can put their own projects on the board right, because that's also a thing that we're open to. If you're there, drew, if you have a project idea, like a new thing that you want to build with people, you can put the project idea up there and maybe people will sign up for it and you can build it while you have the room and the community there already. So that's the kind of intentional co-working opportunity that we're trying to create by front-loading some of it with open source maintainers who already are interested in working with other people and are good at doing that too. So we're front-loading with those people, but we're more than open for the community to bring their own thing and to work on that as well, which, again, is easier once you have it on the second day, whereas if it's on the first day, it's really hard to coordinate something like that.

Speaker 1 19:11

I can definitely see how Kevin's talk would have jazzed people up to contribute. His talk was fantastic, as they always are, but when he got to the point of like you can do this and we need, as a collective community, to stop just artificially gatekeeping these lower level things because they're not like once you learn it, you can do it, and we make it artificially hard sometimes, he had a lot of passion when he was saying that and it definitely made me go like, yes, I want to do more parser work. This is so cool and so second day pro second day, that's going to be awesome.

Speaker 2 19:47

But I just want to say when we talk about the second day. I realized that we mostly talk about the hack day because I think that's something new. But the second day isn't just about hack day. So we'll have the hack day running full day. We'll open the day up with a keynote from John Hawthorne. He'll be talking about how he approaches open source and how he builds the many tools that he's building, and then we'll split into workshops and Hack Day. So workshops are also going to be running at the same time as Hack Day. So if people aren't interested in sitting down and working with other open source people or working on a project, they're more than welcome and invited to look at the workshops, because we have amazing workshops running at the same time as well.

Speaker 2 20:38

I think because Hack Day is such a new concept, we're really excited about it and we end up talking more about that.

Speaker 2 20:45

But I just want to make sure that we're fair to all the workshops that will be there and will be running. We have amazing people running really deep technical workshops too, so if you're really interested in learning more about those topics, please go to the workshops. We'll have workshops running in the morning and in the afternoon, so if you want to join one workshop and maybe you can come to the Hack Day etc, you can mix and match. It's a very flexible day, but it's intentionally set up so that it's not competing for attention against any of the talks that are happening. The talks are all lined up on the first and the last day so that you don't miss out on a lot of the conference just because you wanted to work with other people or you wanted to learn from other people in a workshop setting, which, historically, has been quite unfair to either people who are going to workshops or to people who are missing out on their audience as they're trying to give a talk on stage.

Speaker 1 21:46

Yeah, I've said that in the past, dang, I really want to go to this workshop, especially because they're not recorded. But then I'm going to miss these two talks and I'm interested in, but hey, I pick one. So I'm like man, I wish they would split it, and then you did. And now the problem is there's three workshops that I want to go to and I can't go to them because they're all at the same time. But I totally understand there's going to be overlap. It is just quite amusing that. Yes, no-transcript.

Speaker 1 22:40

So, you've got great workshops alongside with the Hack Day, with a nice break in between so that you can still do both, which is great planning. And then you have your last day. You have some incredible keynotes, man, you're crushing it, which is awesome because it's going to be a great conference. But you made mention of bringing Andy in, since he kind of knows how to run a conference a little bit, and this is your first time running a conference. What was something that you learned during this about running a conference that you just would have had no idea otherwise it didn't even cross your mind like this is something that we need to worry about as conference organizers, and andy was like oh yeah, I have to do that every year I think the most surprising thing for me was realizing how many micro decisions you are expected to make for the conference.

Importance of Ruby Central in Community

Speaker 2 23:35

Because you need to think about the website, what you're showcasing on the website, because things change. Like now we're looking for volunteers, let's showcase that. Now we have the program live, let's showcase that. Or something is not looking right on the website, you need to deal with that. Or you need to think about t-shirts. You need to think about all the different things. You need to think about tickets. You need to think about sponsors. So many different things, so many micro decisions, because a lot of what I guess I was seeing from the outside was the program, the speakers, the event itself. But I've quickly realized, being on the other side, that's the tip of the iceberg. In order to bring us that show. A lot of other work needs to be done behind the scenes to support that. So I think that's the biggest learning for me I was missing out on a lot of the work that needs to happen in the background.

Speaker 1 25:29

What's something that you could identify as a blocker during this planning period? Hopefully something that you have figured out by now, if it's not shout it out, but what's something at least from a hey. My next question is what are blockers that you have? What's something that came up and like really was a bit of a blocker?

Speaker 2 25:49

I'm sure I do. I just try to figure out ways in which I can go past them. I guess, Right, but it's not my current blocker, but for a while, my biggest blocker was, like I said, I didn't have a co-chair and I didn't know how to put on a conference like this on my own. So I'm super grateful for Andy joining the conference and I learned so much from him and he's been super hands-on. This is what we need to take care of, this is what we need to make sure that we're doing, this is what we should concentrate on. And he was like yeah, the ABC of the conference, this is how you run something like that.

Speaker 2 26:29

I guess the time when I felt most blocked was just being alone and not knowing how to do this. There's already a team that was responsible for doing the logistics and putting the show on. But when I was thinking about the time when oh, I need to figure out what the program committee should look like, how to invite them, how to do a kickoff with them, give them a goal, how to set up the CFP website, open it, collect all the things and then go through them and do a top lineup selection, etc. All on my own. I was dreading it Right. So I guess that was the biggest blocker. Now things are flowing quite smoothly on the RailsConf side. I think we're in a good place. We are looking to sell more tickets. I think the more participation that we have at this conference, the better it's going to be for everyone. So yeah, I don't think that's a blocker per se, but if we have more ticket sales it's going to be much better for Ruby Central and for RailsConf as well. But nothing I would call a blocker right now.

Speaker 1 27:43

So you talked about joining the Ruby Central board with goals that were not putting on RailsConf, but you found yourself putting on RailsConf. And I've talked about Ruby Central in the past, so I don't want to rehash everything, but in case people are not listening to every episode, I do think it would be prudent to have your take on what is so important about Ruby Central, because it is a vitally important piece of the Ruby ecosystem and community, and I don't think people realize or appreciate it as much as potentially they should. So what would be your? Let's just call it an elevator pitch. It doesn't have to be 90 seconds, but what's your pitch to the Ruby community of why Ruby Central is important and where do you hope to take it now that you have a little bit of a higher level of involvement?

Speaker 2 28:40

I think being able to succinctly verbalize what Ruby Central or anything is about is important. So that's why I've been thinking about this for a long time and I think what I like saying right now is Ruby Central is the nonprofit organization that takes care of the Ruby commons for the whole community. So in any community there are commons where you're not quite sure whose responsibility it is to take care of those commons, because it's common for everyone, so it feels like it's everyone's responsibility. But when something is everyone's responsibility, it's as good as being no one's responsibility, because everyone thinks someone else is going to do something about it and it's really important for someone to take that on as a responsibility and as a main goal. In some communities those are for-profit organizations. In our community it's a non-profit organization, ruby Central, whose goal is to take care of those commons for our Ruby community.

Speaker 2 29:46

And when I say commons, the big thing is taking care of all the common infrastructure that we rely on, which is RubyGems and Bundler. So there's a huge investment in the rubygemsorg website, which is serving billions of gems per month. It's an enormous scale. There's a big investment on the RubyGems client that we interact with when we do gem install or whatever. And there's a big investment in the Bundler client which we use every time we use bundle, install or put together a gem file and the fact that those tools are so much an integral part of our developer lives. Most of the time they work so well that they're like, so seamless and behind the scenes that we often forget that they even exist. We just take for granted that they're there and they'll continue working and that they'll be secure, which is really important. We forget that takes a lot of work from someone and that someone in our community is Ruby Central. So that's the big commons that Ruby Central is taking care of for our community. Another one is the intentional get-togethers. Most of the time those are conferences. Ruby Central is putting on RailsConf and RubyConf every year for decades now and that's a shared common for our community as well. And we're also looking at how more involved we can be with meetups, because meetups are a lifeline of our community, if that's the right expression, because that's where people have most of their first experiences meeting the community or learning or taking their first steps into our community. So it's really important to have a healthy ecosystem of meetups local meetups running, because not everyone's able to come to conferences, either the big ones or the regional ones. So meetups are really important and we're also looking at ways in which we can support more regional conferences as well. So there are a few things that Ruby Central is already taking care of and there are a few areas where we want to have more involvement. But again, like I said, I think the common theme here is Ruby Central is the entity that thinks about how it can make life easier or better for the broader Ruby community.

Speaker 2 32:25

When we look at other languages, there are similar organizations.

Speaker 2 32:30

So, for example, our sister community, I guess, is the Python community.

Speaker 2 32:34

So there's the Python Software Foundation, but differently, the Python Software Foundation, psf, is both the driver of the language and the community, whereas in our community the language is driven by the Ruby core team, and the Ruby core team is funded through other means. Team is funded through other means. So Ruby Central isn't responsible for driving the language forward, but Ruby Central is responsible for a lot of the core components that our usage of the language rely on. So we could be all using just Ruby as the language on its own, but I guess most of us are relying on gems that we pull from RubyGems, et cetera. So all the RubyGems and bundler tools that come with Ruby but are developed by Ruby Central makes the Ruby ecosystem much richer in my opinion. So, yeah, that's the kind of more exciting part of Ruby Central that made me want to join the board, so that open source work that Ruby Central is doing continues to be healthy and continues to grow and that we have enough funding to do that kind of work, and at bigger scale possibly.

Speaker 1 33:54

Because we don't want to go back to the old way of installing gems which was just curl a URL and eval whatever came back and that's how you get a Ruby gem on your In 2024, that sounds insane, but I do completely understand how that used to be, like hey, this is just a viable way of doing things. But thank God we have people making us do things much more securely now. But it is a lot of work and it does take funding and that's why I have my ruby central membership and continue to try and get to the conferences thank you as a support mechanism, because it is a very vital piece to the community and I'm also very excited that ruby central kind of I don't want to say giving a nod to or recognizing, but just understanding that meetups are a thing and that meetups are an important bit of the community. And none of us know what we're doing, like some guys. Like Boulder Ruby meetup group run by Marty They've got Marty at the helm. That's a great, well-run meetup.

Speaker 1 34:56

I help co-run PhillyRB and we have no idea what we're doing. We just are like hey, we're going to open GatherTown on the second Tuesday of every month for an hour and a half and hope some people show up. People do show up. It's great and we have awesome conversations, but it's really just us hanging out. We don't know what we're doing and it's really nice that Ruby Central is saying that's a perfectly fine way to run a meetup, but also, if you want to do more, here's kind of a playbook, a shared wealth of knowledge. Every meetup organizer is in some sort of channel to communicate and meeting up and discussing how we can all have this. The rising tide raises all ships kind of deal, and I really appreciate Ruby Central getting involved in that because it is another great way of expanding and building our community. So much appreciated.

Speaker 2 35:48

There are a lot of shared problems for meetups as well. Right, I was also participating in the Ruby Turkey group as well. I don't have enough time to participate in any of their events anymore. Can't imagine why, but one of the biggest problems we had with trying to put any meetups together was getting people to speak about something. People are either shy or they don't want to go and talk about something, or they feel like they don't have anything to talk about, and it's really hard to convince people. But also, when you're not in the US or like mainland Europe, it also becomes harder to invite people. If you're doing an in-person event, it's also hard for anyone to be in the vicinity so that you can say, oh, would you like to give us a talk while you're here in Istanbul, sort of thing.

Tailscale

Speaker 2 36:44

So yeah, there's shared problems and shared concerns, and I think a lot of it is. People are looking for speakers and it's hard to find speakers. Maybe we can have a centralized list of people who want to speak and list of meetups and we can match them or something. I don't know, I'm just making ideas as I go along, I guess. But we are interested in seeing what are some of the things we could be doing in that space to be helpful to meetup organizers.

Speaker 1 37:16

Yeah, it's just very nice to have sort of like a shared brain where you're just like, hey, this is what we do, and then people can say what they do and you're like, oh, I like that idea, I'm stealing it. And it's like, oh, no, it's not stealing. I want you to take the idea. I want all the meetups to work out well, but it's hard to do that without that dedicated space that Ruby Central is currently providing, of these meetups or the meetups of meetup organizers. I guess, as it were, on to my favorite question, and even after you answer this question, we can keep going for as long as you want. I have all the time in the world for you, but I do want to know what is something cool, new or interesting that you've recently learned, discovered, built or just generally excited about. Go.

Speaker 2 38:01

Yeah, I've been listening to your show and I keep thinking what would be my answer to this question. I think the thing I want to leave people with is Tailscale. It's a commercial product, but they have a very generous free tier. So if anyone has heard of WireGuard, which is like a VPN technology, it's an open source VPN technology. Tailscale is the company that took that technology and commercialized it and it's one of those magical products that seamlessly, just works. I can't quite explain it, but what it is. It creates a virtual private mesh network for all of your devices that have Tailscale installed on them. It makes it super easy and seamless for you to access any of your other devices through that virtual network and it's just install and forget. You install it, you log in with your account and then you log in with your account on your other devices Android, iphone, ios, macs and Linux. All platforms are supported and all your devices basically coexist on this virtual network and they've built really cool technologies on top of these. We can seamlessly send files between these devices because they know each other as if they're on the same network. So they have this file sending technology built on top of it and they keep building really cool stuff.

Speaker 2 39:42

If anyone in the community remembers SS Shuttle or whatever it was called, it was like a VPN over SSH sort of thing. The guy who built that tool Apenwar, however you pronounce his GitHub handle he is part of the brains behind this company. He built a lot of cool technologies in his career, so I've been watching everything that he was doing, and when he built Tailscale, I was like, oh, this looks interesting. So I've been using Tailscale for a while. It makes it really easy to also access your cloud environments as well, and you can also use it to expose local services to the internet, because you can set up one of the machines on your network as an exit node or a relay, etc. It's very versatile. You can use it in multiple different ways and people have really creative uses for it. So, yeah, I recommend everyone to take a look at what it is and to see how it might work for them.

Speaker 1 40:44

I'm looking at it right now. It looks super cool. Good, you got a good one. I like it. You never know what people are going to answer with when I ask them what's something cool, new or interesting? And I've gotten everything from products and books and cloud whitening and endangered hobbies, and that's why it's my favorite question, because I never know what's about to come out of my guest's mouth when I'm like what's something cool, new or interesting, and they're like this and I'm like you are right, that is cool and interesting and something I'm going to check out because this is super cool.

Speaker 2 41:23

Is there anything else you want to talk about before we do my terrible wrap-up job? No, I think we talked about RailsConf. That's really top of mind for me. I really want that conference to be very successful, and success for me is making sure that people who come to see the talks and to engage in the hack day to leave fulfilled and happy and having learned something and having made connections and I really want that specifically for early career developers will be there, because I think they are the ones that are at the beginning of their journey to making those connections or to building that network or to of their learning in general, and I want to make sure that they leave happy and fulfilled and having learned something and having made some connections that will last them a lifetime. So that's the main thing. That's top of mind for me, and if anyone's interested in being there and taking part in that journey, please buy your ticket today. If you buy your ticket before the end of this month, I don't know when this episode is going to be, unfortunately.

Speaker 1 42:38

April, 2nd April, something Okay then.

Speaker 2 42:42

I guess the prices would have already gone up, but it's still not too late. If you can afford it, if you want to be there, if you want to join us, more than welcome to be there. I think it will be good for your career and it would be good for your career and it would be good for your network to come and meet a lot of the great people that will be there at the conference. So I think that's what I want to leave people with more than anything. Come, let's make this party better together I wholeheartedly agree with all that.

Speaker 1 43:17

Going to Ruby and Rails comps have been hugely influential in my career, both from a learning and growing as a developer and also the networks of friends and people I can bounce all ideas off of and mentor figures that I've gotten from just meeting and interacting with people at conferences have been. It's so invaluable, it's amazing. The community is wonderful. So not too surprised, but as an early career dev it was a little like wow, people are just genuinely excited to like help, so awesome. So yes, if you can make your way out to Detroit in early May, highly recommend it.

Speaker 1 43:59

Check out rubyconforg or Susie railsconforg for this one, railsconforg for the schedule of amazing speakers and to buy your ticket. But other than railsconf, where can folks follow you on the internet?

Speaker 2 44:19

If people go to ufukdev, that's U-F-U-K dot dev. That's my personal website. It has links to my socials. People can follow me on Twitter X whatever it's called today or Mastodon and all the other social media platforms Mastodon and all the other social media platforms. I try to have a presence on all of them, and they can also find links to my talks and podcast appearances on my website too, if they want to learn more about me. But if they want to learn more about RailsConf, like you said, go to RailsConforg. Or if you want to learn more about Ruby Central and all the things that we do at Ruby Central, they can also go to RubyCentralorg and learn more about that.

Speaker 1 45:03

Awesome. Well, ufu, thank you so much for coming on. It has been a pleasure having you on. I'm so happy that I finally was able to get you on. We're definitely going to bring you back on so that we can talk about all the cool stuff you have going on at work, but we wanted to talk about RailsConf and how exciting it's going to be, because you have such an awesome program committee. You have an awesome co-chair, you yourself are awesome, thank you and an amazing speaker and workshop lineup. So super excited for everybody who gets to go and experience it. Hopefully, I will be one of those. Fingers crossed Until next time. Thank you for listening and talk to you in the next one.