Episode 60 - Jeremy Smith

What makes a small Ruby conference feel electric instead of ordinary? We unpack the craft behind Blue Ridge Ruby—why we chose a newly renovated, accessible venue, how a single-track format keeps the room together, and the little details that turn a meetup into a memory. From open lunches across Asheville to surprise sponsor moments, we share the thinking that goes into designing an event that celebrates Ruby, supports new speakers, and still feels human-scale.

Jeremy breaks down the CFP playbook: write clear abstracts with specific outcomes, submit widely, and rehearse before acceptance so you’re not rushing at the end. With only ten talk slots, curation is both art and constraint. We talk honestly about the selection process, why “no” often means “not now,” and how meetups can incubate a 10-minute idea into a conference-ready talk. We also explore the real costs—venues, video, capacity—and why accessibility drove the move to the YMI Cultural Center.

Then we zoom out to the work behind the work: choosing bounded risk to stay motivated, planning sustainable volunteer roles, and creating a container that invites the community to bring their best. On the engineering front, we share how voice-first AI workflows changed our Rails practice. Whisperflow plus LLMs accelerate iteration when conventions set guardrails. We describe using diverge–converge patterns to try multiple implementations, keeping architectural intent while rejecting unnecessary complexity. AI is the nail gun; we’re still the builders who decide what the house should be.

Want to be part of it? The CFP is open, sponsors are welcome, and volunteers make the magic real. Subscribe, share this episode with a Ruby friend, and drop us a review—then send your proposal or reach out about helping in Asheville at BlueRidgeRuby.com.

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Transcript

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Jeremy’s Intro And Role Updates

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of Code and the Coding Coders Who Code It. I'm your host, Drew Bragg, and I'm joined today by a repeat coding coder, Jeremy Smith. Jeremy, anyone who hasn't listened to your last episode or is unfamiliar with you, please do a quick introduction.

SPEAKER_00 0:15

Hey Drew, yeah. Thanks for having me back. I'm Jeremy Smith. I am a product-focused Rails developer. I run a tiny one-person Rails studio called Hybrid, and I do the Indie Rails podcast with my friend Jess. And this is sort of new, but I'm going to be taking over facilitating the Ruby Consultants quarterly call with Ruby Central, which I want to get more people involved in this that are in the consulting space. So going to be helping out there. And I am a once in future conference organizer with Blue Ridge Ruby in Asheville, North Carolina.

SPEAKER_01 0:57

Yes, yes. Excited for that. And we're going to get into all of that in our show. The way this is going to work is I'm going to ask Jeremy three questions, ask him what he's working on. Doesn't actually have to be work work. It can totally be like, hey, I'm putting on a conference style work. What kind of blockers he has, and what's something cool, new, or interesting that he's learned, discovered, built, could be tools, could be books, could be anything. Doesn't have to be coding related.

Inside Ruby Consultants Quarterly Call

SPEAKER_01 1:22

So we were going to talk about Blue Ridge on your what are you working on, but I first want to talk about the call that you're going to be running with Ruby Central. Talk a little bit about that. What's the call like? Who's supposed to be there? Things like that.

SPEAKER_00 1:37

Yeah, the reason I mentioned it, I keep trying to mention it wherever I can because this is sort of a little known kind of quarterly meetup on Zoom for agencies and consultants, freelancers, anybody in kind of Ruby and Rails that provides services. And so it'll be agency owners or people within agencies coming on the call. It'll be independent contractors coming on the call. And we're talking about all the things related to our service work inside of the Ruby Rails ecosystem. You can get a lot of information about sort of the industry in general. But if you want to know Ruby specific stuff, this is like one of the best places to go to kind of share what's going on. What are we seeing in the Ruby space right now? Where are people finding success with leads? What are the challenges people are facing right now in the market, in our particular market? There's really just nowhere else to get that than this call. And quarterly ends up being a pretty decent cadence, I think, for kind of sticking your head up and kind of talking around to other folks in the same area about what's going on. And that's been really helpful. And it's been really nice because we all have our business struggles. And when you're able to raise, you know, an issue in that group and have multiple people say, Yeah, we have the same thing. Yes, we're going through that as well. Yes, we've also seen that. It's really helpful. It's really nice. And maybe in some senses it would be like we're competitors, maybe, but not really. And it feels more like a bunch of people rooting for each other since we're all doing the same kind of work. So typical Ruby community stuff. Yeah, yeah. I love to see it. You know, I don't know if you know what other communities and languages have this kind of thing, but it feels very much Ruby to me.

SPEAKER_01 3:37

For sure. Sounds like it.

SPEAKER_00 3:39

That's awesome. Congrats, I think. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. I think for a while they were trying to decide like there wasn't really a person to go to to facilitate it. And maybe the people that originally suggested starting it didn't know what to do with it or left. And then they were like, what are we doing with this thing? And I keep saying, Oh, I'm loving this. This is good for me. Like, I want more of this. I want more people to come.

Why Peer Sharing Beats Competition

SPEAKER_01 4:03

So what we were actually going to talk about on the what are you working on was your back to helping to run, organize, do all the things, make the magic happen that is Blue Ridge Ruby. So for anyone who doesn't know about Blue Ridge Ruby, hasn't been to one in the past, doesn't see all of your posts about it, recently talk a little bit about Blue Ridge Ruby.

SPEAKER_00 4:26

Yeah. Back in 2022, this post-pandemic, I started going to a lot of Ruby and Rails conferences. And it was a big shift for me in investing more in being involved in the community and in showing up in those places where people are meeting together in person. And that had a huge impact on me that year. And toward the end of the year, I thought, man, I'd love to put on a conference of my own. That's that would be amazing. I was really nervous to try to pull that off on my own, but knew a guy in Asheville who reached out and said, Hey, I'll help you. And that turned out to be Mark, one of my co-organizers. And so the two of us kicked off Blue Ridge Ruby in Asheville in 2023. And it was one of the scariest things that I did, and also one of the things I'm most happy about. It's hard to explain why it had such an impact on me, but when you get over 100 people together and create an experience where they're all contributing to it together and having a great time, it was just amazing. It was an amazing experience, amazing feeling to have like maybe created the container for something really good to happen. And I keep telling people it reminds me of that parable of stone soup. I don't know if you've ever heard this parable before. Okay. So when I was a kid, we had this book, and it's like the story of stone soup. And this guy who is really hungry goes to a town and he's begging for food, but nobody wants to give him anything. So he gets this idea and he finds an old pot and he fills it with water and he starts a fire and he starts cooking and people start walking by and they're saying, What are you making? And he said, Well, I've making stone soup. He has a stone in the pot and the water is cooking. And they're like, Oh, that's interesting. And he's like, Yeah, well, it would be really good if what this really needs is some carrots. And so someone's like, Oh, I got some carrots back at home. So they run out, get the carrots, bring them back. They put those in the pot. Oh, this is smelling really good. Some other people come by, they're like, Oh, what are you making? I'm making stone soup. Yeah, yeah, it would really be good if I added some potatoes. So, oh, we got some potatoes that run, get the potatoes, come back. And this goes on and on. You got the onions and then the meat or whatever. And eventually he's got like a whole stew. And at the end, it feeds him and everybody else. And there's a savvy to that. And uh something I love about that is that this guy didn't like contribute really anything except the container. Like everybody else brought the things, the things that actually made it nourishing, but he had the concept and he set the vision for it and invited people into what became this amazing stew. And so I think about that with lots of things, but particularly with conferences, because it's inviting lots of different people to contribute the things that they have, whether it's speakers or sponsors, volunteers, scholars, just people that are friends coming, bring somebody maybe new into the industry, and everybody's contributing their piece. And then all together, it like makes this really wonderful, like nourishing thing. But somebody has to make the container. Someone just has to be like, put this pot down, throw some stones and water in it, and say, ooh, this smells really good. You know what this needs? And it's kind of magical.

SPEAKER_01 8:00

Yeah. The first Blue Ridge was awesome. Still

Blue Ridge Ruby Origin Story

SPEAKER_01 8:03

one of my favorite conferences that I've been to. It had a special energy to it. I've been to a lot of conferences that have a similar energy. And I feel like the consistency there is twofold. It's an organizer who really cares about putting on a great conference, and it's a small conference. No shade for Rails World or RubyCon for a big conference. Those are special in their own way, but there's something about those smaller where you get to meet everybody, talk to everybody. Especially Blue Ridge was the first one that I had gone to where you had that open lunch concept where instead of like you're sitting in this giant hall and there's some food there and you stand in line for it, and then you sit at a table with maybe eight people. If you're lucky, you go out into the city you're at and meet with giant groups, and like you can't walk past a restaurant without being like, hey, look, there's some Rubyists in there. And that was so cool. And yeah, Blue Ridge was great, and I'm super excited to see you back at it, organizing it and getting it going. The new space looks super cool. The original space was awesome. The new one looks like it can hold a few more people.

SPEAKER_00 10:34

It is smaller. It's old, 207 people seated. The previous space, I think it was maybe around 300, 350, I want to say. And I loved that space. The theater we were in originally was just gorgeous. I fell in love with it. They do weddings there because it's just like a beautiful space. But there were accessibility issues with that building that I didn't feel comfortable using it again. And so I decided to do a search for something else. And the WaiMai Cultural Center came up. It was actually just recently renovated. They've done a really nice job with the space. I think it's going to be great. And it has a lot of unique history to it. So I'm excited about that. They also have like a street level space that is somewhat separate from the auditorium that I'm planning to set up for like hangout space. And so I'm pretty excited about that. I think it's going to come out well. It may be that this ends up being like a long-term space for us. We'll see because the venue ends up being like just so challenging. Like you're trying to design everything else around the spaces that you have, and it determines your capacity and so many other things. So if it works out well, we may end up using them in the future. Also, venue is one of the biggest costs. I think video production might be the biggest, but then venue is like usually right after that, or they might be tied for first or something. So that's significant. And at least this year, it's pretty reasonable. So I'm happy about that. And I'm hoping I want to see if I can pack it out. If I can get 207 people seated in that space, I think it'd be great. So that's what I'm hoping for. And that was really the first thing was figuring out space because you can't do anything else until you know the time and place for something. You can't invite sponsors because you've got nothing to go on. You can't sell tickets because people don't know when it even is. You got to tell me, give me some dates here. You know, like there's so many other things. So it all hangs on that as the first piece. So getting that nailed down in, I think it was end of November was great. And then that really got us rolling. CFPs are open or open soon. They're open until February 3rd. We are a Ruby conference, so not necessarily a Rails conference. Blue Ridge is more broadly Ruby. Probably have some one or two talks related to Rails, and most people there will be probably working in Rails day to day, but the focus is Ruby, but really pretty general within Ruby. Really want to have a broad mix of topics and speakers. Yesterday I released a video where I talked about our CFP process and my sort of general advice on doing talk submissions. And it ended up being like 30 minutes. I didn't need to go on and on. I didn't realize I had so much to say about it. Actually, what who it was, it was Adrian Marinhee was like, hey, you need to make more videos as you like work on Blue Ridge just to share what you're doing. So I was like, okay, I'll start a behind the scenes kind of thing. And my first one was like the CFP process and my advice for people with sending talks to either our conference or other conferences, other Ruby conferences. And so I'm hoping that's helpful. And for folks that are interested, please, this is the time to be writing talk proposals. There's so many CFPs open right now. A few of them, RBQ conf is closing. He extended it one more day. I think it's closing tomorrow.

SPEAKER_01 14:17

That'll

Venue Change And Accessibility

SPEAKER_01 14:18

be January 8th. By the time this goes out, that'll be closed. That would be closed.

SPEAKER_00 14:22

There are some at the end of January, I want to say, but check Rubyevents.org and there's a CFP page and you can see all the upcoming ones. But right now is the time to get talks out there.

SPEAKER_01 14:34

Biggest advice I have for people when it comes to CFPs is like don't wait for the acceptance to start fleshing out the talk too. Like I used to be very much team, submit the CFP and then write the talk if you're accepted. But like usually you're accepted and it's like you have so little time. It feels like a lot of time, but yeah, get out to go do like version one at a meetup virtually or in your town or something to get some reps in, especially if you're new to speaking, like it's completely different when you're actually in front of people giving the talk. Get the CFPs submitted and work on the talk.

SPEAKER_00 15:16

I always time track everything. So it usually takes me around 50 hours to put a talk together. And if that's my one thing I'm doing during that period, I can probably throw 10 hours a week at something. So I'm like five weeks is my minimum to put a talk together. But even that is kind of pushing it. So I'd rather have two months to get a talk together and feel like I was gonna do a good job when I came time to give it.

SPEAKER_01 15:42

So no tracks per se for Blue Ridge Ruby, just a single Ruby in general.

SPEAKER_00 15:48

Single track and no themes this year. Kind of like just having it kind of open like that. And we have 10 talk slots. So it's gonna be a challenge for us to really whittle that down and create a program that has something for everybody. But that is part of the fun trying to figure that out.

SPEAKER_01 16:08

Going through CFPs is a daunting task. It really is.

SPEAKER_00 16:12

Like it's practically like a week of work the week that it drops because people submit their proposals and then you have to hit the ground running because you need to get an announcement out probably the next week. So that week after February 3rd or that week, it's gonna be a ton of work, just reading lots of proposals and making lots of decisions, and then sending lots of messages to people, giving them updates on where their proposal stands.

SPEAKER_01 17:24

I'm sure you're gonna get a ton of good ones. I remember doing the CFPs for the last Rails Conf, and it was just like, I want to see so many of these talks, and we have so few slots to put them in. And it was like we had to give some no's where I just wanted to be like, can we write them like a very detailed, like your talk sounds freaking awesome, but we don't have enough space for everyone's talk. We're so sorry. It was just like, man, I hope please, please submit it to like everywhere else and let me know where accepted because I want to see this talk.

SPEAKER_00 17:55

That was part of my advice actually in the video I just made, which is like, this is a numbers game. And so submit more talk proposals and submit to more conferences. So many times, it's not that we would never use your proposal if it's a no. It's like, wow, we had so many good ones. I would love to see this the next year, or I'd love to see this in another conference. Maybe it needs a few tweaks and it would be great. But it's rarely like, nah, this is no good. You know, it's almost never that. When people can, if you put a few hours into a talk proposal, get it out to as many conferences as you can.

SPEAKER_01 18:31

Meetups too. Meetups are always looking for people to do speakers. You have an idea for a CFP, but maybe you don't know how to make it a 30-minute, 45-minute talk. Start with that 10-minute talk that you give at a meetup. And then as people field questions, you build your talk from there. And then when you

Logistics, Capacity, And Costs

SPEAKER_01 18:49

feel like you have 30 minutes of content, you submit it to a conference. So there's a lot of stages to getting to be able to talk, talk about whatever you want other people to learn. But yeah, that's cool that you're doing the behind the scenes videos on everything going on with Blue Ridge, because it's still a mystery to me. Like, even getting involved with some of the ones in the past, I'm still like, oh, I would have never thought about that. It makes total sense now that I know it.

SPEAKER_00 19:17

But there are a lot of things like that. So even things like, all right, just this morning, I'm looking through Asheville trying to find like cool or interesting like foods that are made in the town. Part of what I think is great about regional conferences is that you get a flavor for this place that you're visiting. And Asheville has a really cool culture. It's pretty granola. There's a lot of like outdoorsy people, a lot of hippie people. And so I was like, found this really good pizza. Yeah, mountain towns have good pizza. I don't know what this is, but I found like this guy that makes artisanal pickles. And I was like, hey, maybe I should do like a pickle bar, you know. So I'm just like looking at random things like that. Like, why are you doing this? Well, I want to give the experience of please don't quote me on the pickle bar. I don't know if I'm gonna do that. But it's just like I'm looking at these things like listen, if I get to Blue Ridge and there's no pickle bar, I'm gonna be pissed. I know, right? But sometimes, like, okay, you have like a sponsor who's like, hey, um, would love to be involved somehow. Are there any special opportunities that we could work out? And then I'm thinking, like, well, what could we do that would be interesting? What would be unique that you haven't seen in another conference that people would talk about later? They would be like, Oh, this is amazing. The first year we did the ice cream sandwich truck that came after the conference.

SPEAKER_01 20:40

That was super cool.

SPEAKER_00 20:41

I love that. That was so great. I mean, I didn't get to go down and do it. I was busy like cleaning up after the conference, but I did get to look, peek down from the third story window at everybody down below, you know, getting their ice cream sandwiches, and that was pretty awesome. So just like cool things like that helps an event stand out in your mind from every other event that you go to. Oh, that was the one where we did blah, blah, blah. That matters. And when we can do that along with sponsors who are looking for something unique to contribute to, I think that can be great. So I ended up on all these random rabbit trails, you know, trying to figure out like what would be interesting, what would be cool, and then these research projects that you never would have expected you'd be doing just because trying to create these unique experiences. Is that like a bit of a blocker?

SPEAKER_01 21:32

You live close enough that you're familiar with the area, and then you're like, how do I give someone a taste of this area that I know well in

CFP Strategy And Speaker Advice

SPEAKER_01 21:44

almost a familiar way? Like, I feel like if I'm very familiar with something, it's almost hard to give people an intro to it where I feel like you're getting the vibe of the thing that I'm trying to show you without being overwhelmed. Because if I'm very familiar, I'm like, I know all the things.

SPEAKER_00 22:00

I think the fact that I live that idea. I think the fact that I live an hour away. Way helps actually in this case because I know the stuff that people would want to go to Asheville for rather than living there and being like, oh, I'm so over this thing because all the tourists come here for that. So I think that absolutely happens. You get like blind to what's unique about the place that you live. But people that come to your town, fly or drive, spend the weekend in your town. And Asheville is a very popular holiday destination, weekend destination, that kind of thing. They're coming for particular things. They're coming for the Blue Ridge Parkway, for the hiking, for you know, all the outdoor activities, for the microbreweries, for the food scene, for the music scene. There's a certain sort of granola, hippie aesthetic that's there that is the outside flavor of Asheville. Well, that's really only one part of Asheville. There's tons of other things, you know, that aren't hippie granola. That's the reality of every place. But when people associate a place in their minds, they kind of want that experience, the sort of first pass experience of that place. And I think like Detroit Railscoff did a good job of playing up Detroit, for example. But people that are from Detroit might be annoyed, you know, like at some point, like, I don't want more Detroit-style pizza or any references to Motown anymore. You know, like, yes, I get it. Like, it's cliche now for us. But for the yeah, for them, you gotta give them the cliche. You know, you gotta give them the thing that they have the association with.

SPEAKER_01 23:37

Yeah, when everybody came to RailsConf in Philly, like you had to go get a cheesesteak. Oh, right. Yeah, absolutely. You don't come to Philadelphia and not get a cheesesteak unless you live here and you've had so many cheesesteaks you don't want to open it one ever again. Um, but that only happens if you don't go to Shays. So, what kind of blockers do you have, either work-wise or related to the conference that you want to talk about?

SPEAKER_00 24:03

This is kind of a different direction, but Blue Ridge ended up being the thing that unblocked me to for one of my blockers, which is I've come to realize more and more that I'm the kind of person that always needs something going on the side, pretty much all the time. Either I'm deciding on the next weird thing that I'm gonna do on the side, or I'm doing it, or I'm like recovering from it and getting ready to do the next one. And it's kind of like endless for me. Like, and in the past, I used to feel bad about it, like guilty that I always need something to make life chaotic or stressing myself out. I've come to accept that it's just like part of my nature that I always need some project. And the last time I was on Code Encoders, it was when I was building Liminal, and that was my big thing. And this was like a little over a year ago. And that was a really fun project, and it didn't quite materialize the way I had hoped, but I did have a lot of fun building it and had a lot of great connections to people who were interested in how I was going about development, my product choices, and all the stuff that I was sharing about it. That was actually one of the big takeaways from building this app was a lot of the people that were most interested in hearing from me wasn't necessarily about my fresh take on old school forums. It was how I was thinking about building products and how I was building with Rails. And after that project, it sort of dawned on me that that was like who was already paying attention to me, other Rails developers and product focused people, and that I really enjoyed making videos and content for them. And so this past year, I changed some things around in the spring to kind of open up some time so I could work on a new project related to content that I was hoping to really get off the ground in 2025. And for a number of personal reasons, I wasn't able to pull that off. And it was really frustrating me. It was a combination of like needing a good amount of time and energy to put in this new venture, but also realizing like I didn't know if I had what it took to pull it off because there was no sort of upper bounds on the time it might take. And for me, like if I go too long without having this other side thing like that I'm working toward, it gets kind of depressing, or like I sort of lose motivation. I kind of need a thing that I'm going for. The thing is, like, I still love my day-to-day work. I love working with my clients, I love building products, I love using Rails every day. But there's something about having some discretionary time that I put toward some bigger goal, some other thing that I have like complete control over. Maybe not complete, but a lot of control over that always makes me feel alive, feel excited, energized, all that. And so this other project that I was hoping to pull off, content-wise, because of the time commitments and because of also the changes with AI, I started to feel like will people like be as interested in Ruby and Rails related content now? And I started seeing people talk about that. Like Nate Burkapec had said something yeah, a while back about this that maybe no one's gonna even care to buy like dev-related content, or you know, if we can just ask LLMs for everything, like maybe it doesn't matter anymore. So I've been like concerned about that. So I needed something that was like exciting to look forward to, something to put this extra energy

Programming A Single-Track Ruby Event

SPEAKER_00 28:04

into, but that had like a clear outcome and a upper bounds to it. And that brought me back around to Blue Ridge. And that's really kind of where I landed. Blue Ridge ended up being a way to unblock myself on having sort of a next thing to work on that was exciting to look forward to. And I don't know why I need something stressful to keep me like excited, but there's some element of risk. I need something risky. I can't risk my client work. I can't risk my day-to-day work, but I need something that feels like risky, where there's some chance of not succeeding that gets me excited and feels like an adventure. I guess maybe that's the way to say it. And with this other project, it was too risky, maybe for where it was too much unknown, and I needed something slightly less risky to go after now. And with a conference, there's not like a real big blocker, it's just lots of details, just lots of details and lots of effort. But it's doable and there's a limit to it. By May 2nd, when the conference is over, it's pretty much done. Not entirely because video production is still being done, but basically done at that point. And so there is an end.

SPEAKER_01 29:26

And there's a moment in time for it.

SPEAKER_00 29:29

Yeah. And I also know because I time track things, that took me 250 hours of in 2023 to put on the conference. And I think I can probably do it in less. I'm aiming toward 200 hours between now and April 30th. So I think that also lets me know like I've got a reasonable idea of how much time I'm putting into this. And yeah, it's a lot of time, but it's doable. I can make this happen. But it's still that enough risk that feels like adventurous to me.

SPEAKER_01 29:58

That makes sense. That's a cool way to unblock yourself going and running a conference. Not, I think, one of the ways that someone's ever mentioned they unblocked themselves before. Like, I was feeling blocked, so I ran a conference. But I like it. You're very self-aware too, of like, I need something going on. I need, I hate being stressed by something, but at the same time, if I'm not a little stressed about it, there's a good chance that I'm not actively working towards it. Even when it comes to like programming books, hey, you can do these steps, and I like I get really engaged for the first few chapters, and I'm like, there's no risk here. Like, if I just put the book back on the shelf, no one knows, no one cares. Yeah, there's gotta be a little bit of stress. There's gotta be a little bit of fight or flight feeling for me to be like, all right, I gotta fucking do this thing. I gotta like, you know, works, got deadlines, works. If I don't do it, my project partner's gonna call me out, you know, my boss is gonna call me out. Okay, that helps me get my work done. I still enjoy what I do, which is why I do it, but the little bit of stress helps. That took me a really long time to figure out. I feel like I was like in my mid-30s when I was finally like, I need stress or I don't function. This is annoying.

SPEAKER_00 31:19

And I like my bulk rights. There's a fine line between the right amount of stress and too much, I think. And sometimes we go overboard. But I think especially when you can pick the thing

Regional Flavor And Memorable Moments

SPEAKER_00 31:34

that you're gonna be stressed about, it makes a big difference. There are plenty of things in my life that are super stressful that I did not pick, or I picked them so long ago that I don't even remember. But when I can pick a project like this and know, okay, I'm gonna be stressed about this. There are gonna be periods where I'm gonna be losing my mind. I'm so stressful, you know, I'm so stressed about this thing. But in general, it's gonna be a good stress because there is an upper limit to how much effort and energy and time I can put into this thing. There is a deadline, it will end, it won't go on in perpetuity. And at the end, there's like a real good outcome that I've seen before. And it may not be the same, and I could fail, and something could go wrong, but probably if I work hard enough and pay attention to the details, I'll be able to pull it off. Probably it's gonna turn out, and I'm gonna be happy I did it. And I may not be able to pull it off the next year, but I commit to this one at a time, you know. Like I think some people expect that with conferences that should sort of be like endless. You can always expect the next one. It's just on repeat or something. And I've come to realize that the people that can pull that off, that is pretty amazing and also pretty rare. And that really each time organizers commit to doing a conference again, it's a monumental effort for them. And taking it one at a time and making the commitment this time and the excitement for that, and not ever feeling the obligation to have to continue something forever. I don't know how you feel with a podcast, but I commit to a podcast, and there's like a somewhat of a schedule grind that you get into that means you're always on the hook in some ways for putting content out there. And I think you can't quite do that same kind of thing with a conference, or maybe you shouldn't. And maybe you shouldn't with podcasting either. I don't know. But at least on my side with Indie Rails, it does feel more doable, I guess, to say, all right, yeah, I can stay on the hook for this.

SPEAKER_01 33:42

Yeah, I have zero pressure in my podcast. If you haven't noticed, I think the last episode came out in November. I took all of December off because I was losing my mind at work. And like the first missed episode, I was like, oh my God, like I can't miss another one. This is horrible. Like, people are expecting a new episode. And then I was like, but I'm stressed out. I won't give a good episode because I'm stressed out. And I'm like, I don't want to be doing this right now. I have so much work to get done before winter break starts, yada, yada. Like, no, you know what? No, I podcast mostly, there's a split. It's mostly for me because I enjoy talking to people. And then I just record the conversation and put it out, and that's my contribution to the community. But like, I don't owe that to anybody. I do want to get that's one of my goals for 2026, is to be a little bit more consistent about getting episodes out or at least planning my breaks, where I say, hey, there won't be a next episode on its normal cadence. The next episode will be X date because I'm taking a break rather than just disappearing off the face of the earth. But things happen.

SPEAKER_00 34:53

Totally, absolutely happen. I think it sounds like you've got a healthy relationship to what you're doing here too, which the thing that I think is dangerous about these kinds of things that we do is that you end up feeling resentful if you are on the hook. There can be a good way to feel like on the hook to deliver something. And if it's perpetual, you can hit a point where you feel like I'm just not in this anymore, but people still want it and I must do it or something. And that's, I think, a danger that I face that I have to watch out for. Because I can overextend myself because I want to be able to deliver the thing people want or something like that. And so I think it's really important, especially with those long-term recurring things that we're putting out to notice that when it's happening.

SPEAKER_01 35:43

The last question is always my favorite. It's what's something cool, new, or interesting, learned, built, discovered,

Blockers, Side Projects, And Motivation

SPEAKER_01 35:50

doesn't have to be coding related, totally can be, can be coding adjacent. What do you have for cool, new, or interesting?

SPEAKER_00 35:58

Yeah, I was thinking about this. And if you had told me two years ago that I would be using LLMs a ton, I would have said, yeah, that makes sense. But if you told me two years ago that I would be talking to my computer as much as I am right now, that I would have been really surprised by. And so I've been using Whisperflow, and I know people are using that. And there are a few other tools people are using. I feel like Monologues one, I think. Yeah, monologue's a pretty popular one. From every. And yeah, so that's been like a real game changer, I guess, in some ways. Like I finally decided to pay for a subscription to that because I tried a few different tools and it felt like Whisperflow was it just fit me best, or whatever. And it's really weird because I want to say probably around 2018 or 2019, long before I was podcasting, or it was like a period of my life where I was doing tons of Rails development work, but I rarely had any conversations with my clients other than emails or yeah, mainly just email. I wasn't podcasting, I wasn't talking to, I didn't really have a lot of Ruby or Rails friends. And so I noticed when I started to do more content type stuff and podcasting that there was a period where it felt like I didn't even know how to talk. Like I don't even know if I can explain it, but I didn't know how to talk because I spent so much time either thinking or just typing or just writing, but not just like off the cuff speaking. And maybe because of that, I'm much more comfortable now talking to my computer when it comes to like, okay, Claude, here's what's going on, here's the thing I'm working on. I need to be able to do this. And so, like, that's been so weird to make that shift from writing, writing specs out to like just speaking. I think the the thing that's amazing is how it can use the context to know when I'm talking about a class or a module or a method, or get pretty close on a lot of those things. Because that seemed like the thing that would never work about it is you're referencing so many class names or method names, and you'd have to just go back and fix all of those. But it gets it right enough that it doesn't block me too much or doesn't block the flow. That's been really cool. Yeah, so I'm using that quite a bit. And then I've discovered that I am also using it more in my note-taking app. So now that I've got it, now that I'm like talking to my computer more, talking to Cloud Code, I'm also just talking into Bear, my Markdown note-taking app. As I'm working on any given project, I'm often summarizing for myself, like, okay, at this point, I've got this part done and I'm struggling to decide how to approach this next piece. And I'm just like saying this out loud and putting this in this. I usually have one big note for every major project or feature that I'm building. And so this note can get really long, but it summarizes everything that I've been working on. And I can go back by day and figure out, oh, this is what I was working on in previous days or whatever. And now I'm just like doing these summaries now with Whisperflow as well. And that also is really helpful. But it's such a dramatic shift from what I was doing five years ago.

SPEAKER_01 39:41

Yeah, AI definitely flipped our jobs in so many ways on their head. Like, I still feel like if you boil down when I first started programming professionally and I had to explain what I did, I feel like that explanation isn't too different anymore. Like I'm still problem solving. I'm still like taking a complex feature and I'm breaking it down into like executable bits and like then developing an architecture and yada yada for the code itself. The biggest shift has been like I type the code a lot less. In some ways, it's like I went from using a manual hammer to like a nail gun. You still have to know how to build a house correctly, or the nail gun's not going to do you any good. Like I feel like AI, if you don't use AI well, garbage in, garbage out, you get crap code from it, and you're just like, this is useless. You suck. Um then it goes, you're absolutely right. But yeah, like learning how to use those tools is the way that we get to continue to do what our jobs were, but it is so different. Yeah, I do miss writing straight out writing code. I just feel like I don't do it anymore. I do like to tweak something, I'm like, I'm not gonna use an LLM to like tweak this method

Choosing Bounded Risk With Conferences

SPEAKER_01 41:04

or something, but like I really don't have to write out syntax much anymore. I have to like read the code that AI wrote and make sure it's not, yeah. I've called it out, been like, this is overly complex. And it's like, you're absolutely right, too complex, and like we trim it down, but yeah, writing code, it always was way less of my job than I thought it would be when I was in school. And it's like borderline non-existent now. It's crazy.

SPEAKER_00 41:34

I think there are some cases maybe where I'm writing there's a part of a client app or a way their architecture is that is overly complex and has a lot of indirection. And I was trying to reimagine what it would look like if I simplified it. It was easier for me to just try to take a fresh sheet of paper and do that myself for one class and then try to explain all of that. Maybe I guess I could try it to. Other way as well and tell Cloud Code exactly what I was thinking. But I felt like I needed to feel it myself. I wouldn't be able to get to the architecture by looking at the rest of the app. One thing that's Cloud's great at is looking at everything else in your app and building the same way. But if you're not happy with the way it's built, what do you do? You could certainly do refactoring, but it seems like there's a like a tendency toward reverting toward whatever is in the code base as it currently stands. And if you want a new pattern, you might have to be pressing harder to make that happen. But yeah, a lot of it is just talking. And then, you know, like yesterday saying, hey, I need you to add a validation to ensure that the started at timestamp is in the future. And then it wanted to do a custom validation. I'm like, well, you can use a comparison. You know, there's a built-in validate comparison. You don't have to do this. So it was trying to do custom validations a bunch. And I'm like, nah, that's not the way I want. I know there's another way to do this. And it's But if you didn't know that, if you didn't know that, you would just accept whatever the AI spit out. And that's where that ends up being the job. You can't give the horse its head. Like I'm always thinking about this being like, all right, we used to have like hand-drawn carts, and now we have horses. We figured out how to hook horses up to our carts, but that means now I've got to hold the reins and I've got to learn not to give this horse like its head to go wherever it wants to go. No, we're not going off into the forest. You've got to stay on the road. We're going this way. No, we can't stop at the stream to drink right now. You need to keep going or whatever it is. You know, like we gotta maintain it's not under our own power anymore, but you're still directing. And you can't just give it its head and let it go wherever it wants.

SPEAKER_01 43:49

It needs to Yeah, you still have to know your shit. If you know nothing about programming, about web development, about how HTTP works, you can talk to an LLM and maybe get some good information, but LLMs hallucinate. These tools aren't perfect. Like you just said, like it was trying to do custom validation, which is a totally valid solution in some cases. But in that case, like there was a better solution. That's where it's like when you were talking about are people gonna want dev content now that we're using LLMs and stuff? And I would argue yes, the smart people will, because like you still have to know how to do this stuff. Sure, you can build a whole SaaS project in a week now with LLMs. Can you maintain it for five years? Maybe you just let AI just do its thing all the time. It won't matter if it's maintainable. Maybe we'll see in five years. There's a group of people that say that, and I'm definitely not there yet. No, I think that it's still super important to like enforce boundaries with architecture, with the code it writes, with the manner in which consistency is done. I think Ruby on Rails, having the convention over configuration, makes it really good for AIs to write Rails code because there are these guardrails. You do it this way. And as long as you know what you're doing or what it should at least look like or feel like, you can use AI to get stuff out

Talking To Computers: Whisperflow

SPEAKER_01 45:24

very quickly. You just have to make sure that you're not just blindly going, yep, do whatever you want. Yep, do whatever you want, yep, do whatever you want. Here's a PR. And then we'll have a different AI agent review that PR and then merge it. And we'll never actually look at the code and hope to God it works. Come on now. I don't know. AI changes so quickly, I could be very wrong. And in like a year, we could be having a completely different conversation about our jobs, but it just feels like the best code that AI is writing is the code that's very much guided along. That's in my experience. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 45:58

Yeah. That's where I'm at. I think I was blown away this summer when I had a couple friends of mine that I'm in a group chat with that were like, you gotta try cloud code. And I was like, all right, I'll try it. And then it was like, oh, okay, okay. And then it was like periods in the fall where I was like, oh man, I don't know what's gonna happen here. Man, I don't know. And I think at the end of the year, I was finally like, all right, I'm happy with this. I think this is a net positive. I don't want to go back the previous way. There are some things that were really nice about that, but I'll tell you, there are days where I'm like, where in the past, if I was hitting a mental exhaustion and I was just like, I can't get my brain to go there. I can't think. Now I can just keep talking. All right, I don't know the best way to do this. Instead, I'd be like thinking about like, how do I solve this problem? Or I don't, I'm stuck. Now I can just talk my way out of it or say, like, give me a solution. And then I can say, no, not that. That's not it. That's not it. It's much easier to be in that mode, you know, like the edit mode than in the raw creation mode. It takes a certain level of energy or a certain kind of focus. And if there are times I don't have that, there are. There are times that I don't have that. And in the past, I would have just pushed through and probably not been very productive. And now I can just say, like, all right, have at it. I'm just explaining it, and then I'll tell you why I don't like your idea. But it'll probably get me unblocked.

SPEAKER_01 47:26

Yeah. Something I used to do was like write everything a few different ways because I didn't know exactly how I wanted it laid out, or like I get halfway through and be like, oh, you know what? I made the wrong decision in the beginning. Let me start from scratch. Like I try not to tie myself to my code too much. That way I gave the best version of it after seeing a couple of different solutions for bigger things, obviously, but like so much easier with AI to just be like, let's write it this way. Okay, stash that or just completely get rid of it. New context. Same goal, same feature, different prompt, different way of explaining what I want and see what that looks like. Sometimes just running the prompt twice, that kind of experimentation helps too. Cause then, like you can tell Claude to like remember things it learned by like updating its own file. That's really helpful too. Where it's like, we went through all these iterations, and this is the solution, and here's why this works. Now update your memory so that next time I ask you, we don't have to go through nine iterations. Like, it's sort of like working with a junior at times. I'm leveling you up, but it needs those guardrails, and you are the guardrails.

SPEAKER_00 48:36

There's a nice part about that, what you were saying, like being able to do it multiple ways. There's this idea of the diverge, converge phases of any project, and diverge is where you're trying to produce a bunch of concepts for something. Like you're building a feature, and maybe you have a first concept of what that feature is going to look like, how it's going to function, but your first idea for it might not be the best one. Same with implementation. Your first idea for how you might implement it might not be the best one. So diverge is like, let's try a bunch of options. And then once we see them, we can converge back to the final. But that can be an expensive thing. So people often do it in design phases. Like for visual design, you might do this. All right, we're rebranding our site or our app or whatever. We're going to do try three different flavors or whatever. You might also do that architecturally or with a feature now. And it's much less expensive to do the diverge stage now because you can just throw an LLM at it.

Voice Notes, Context, And Workflow

SPEAKER_00 49:39

Even if you did one of them yourself, you could let LLMs do two more at very low cost and very low time commitment. And then converge once you've got like those laid out. Like, actually, that's the one we want. Or it's going to be a combination of A and B. Then you've probably done better than if you just tried one thing itself. Sometimes you know, but sometimes you don't. And it's really helpful to see the options.

SPEAKER_01 50:02

Yep. It's a nail gun. You still got to know how to build the house. The nail gun just helps you do it faster once you know what you're doing. That may be a naive way of looking at AI. Maybe I'm not being bullish enough on it, but it's that's been my experience. Like I've definitely adopted it more. We started using it at work. Like we spent all of November like really trying it, really making sure that we were using it in our projects, even if it slowed us down to like get used to it. Like a concerted effort that helped me a lot be more comfortable with it and see the advantages of it. But it also helped me realize like it is just a tool. It's probably the same way people like who were programming with punch cards, and then we had a compiler, were like, it's stupid. It could never replace us. And then like they learn how to use it. And they're like, oh, I still have a job here. I still have a role here. I still have a purpose here. I guide the thing. The compiler just helps us do it faster. Zip. That's it. Those are at least my crazy ass thoughts.

SPEAKER_00 51:05

That's my feeling. Like, I in the middle of the summer, I thought, like, how disruptive is this? I don't know. I think at this point, yes, it's very disruptive, but I still have work. This is making me work more productive. And it was harder to learn programming in general than learn how to use cloud code. I've picked these things up. And you know, I may not be the best at it, but I've already adopted them into my workflow. My workflow has changed dramatically, but I'm still doing my job. And I'm happy about that. For Blue Ridge, are you still looking for volunteers? I forgot to ask that. Yeah. Um thing that's important with volunteers is figuring out like all the sort of roles that you need filled. Because often you can have a lot of people that are interested, but you need to kind of know ahead of time like, here are the things that need to be done that I can sort of hand off to volunteers. I do need to sit down and plan those out. But yes, I'm looking for volunteers. We're still looking for sponsors. Obviously, CFP's open, so the speakers. Yeah, so all of it's wide open. I will be probably doing like a volunteer kickoff meeting in the next couple weeks to just say hello to everybody that wants to help and sort of divvy out some responsibilities. And some of those will happen prior to the conference, and then there'll be the ones that are like specific to the conference. Because if you're helping with registration, that's like a thing that you do during the conference. But you know, there might be other things that that we need sort of earlier on. So depending on what people have time for.

SPEAKER_01 52:41

Okay, cool. So if you're interested in speaking, volunteering, or sponsoring Blue Ridge Ruby, get in contact with you, or is there a Blue Ridge Ruby Direct?

SPEAKER_00 52:51

Yeah, team at Blue RidgeRuby.com is great if you're interested in volunteering. If you are interested in sponsoring, we have a sponsors page and contact information there, and the CFP is on the site as well. So all of this there.

SPEAKER_01 53:03

Yeah, cool, man. Anything else before we wrap it up that you want to talk about? I think we think that's it. Yeah. Cool. Looking forward to Blue Ridge Ruby. It's a great conference. Asheville's an awesome place to host something like that. And the extracurriculars at the end are always good. So definitely looking forward to that. And appreciate you coming back on the show and talking about it. And I'll definitely see you in April. Yeah, so Blue RidgeRuby.com, right, is the site. You're on Blue Sky and X and all the places.

AI As Nail Gun, Not Architect

SPEAKER_01 53:39

Ruby Social and LinkedIn. Yeah. And now when I do LinkedIn, we're doing the socials. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Everywhere on the socials. Awesome. Well, folks, I'll see you in the next one. Jeremy, thanks again for coming on. We're looking forward to having you on again. I appreciate it. Yeah. Look forward to seeing you soon. Bye.