Code with Jason
Code with Jason
275 - Irina Nazarova, Organizer of SF Ruby Conference
In this episode I talk with Irina Nazarova about the San Francisco Ruby Conference happening November 19-21. She explains why SF needs a Ruby conference, the focus on connecting Ruby startup founders with engineers, showcasing new companies building with Rails, and fostering a pragmatic community centered on growth and innovation.
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Hey, it's Jason, host of the Code with Jason podcast. You're a developer. You like to listen to podcasts. You're listening to one right now. Maybe you like to read blogs and subscribe to email newsletters and stuff like that. Keep in touch. Email newsletters are a really nice way to keep on top of what's going on in the programming world. Except they're actually not. I don't know about you, but the last thing that I want to do after a long day of staring at the screen is sit there and stare at the screen some more. That's why I started a different kind of newsletter. It's a snail mail programming newsletter. That's right. I send an actual envelope in the mail containing a paper newsletter that you can hold in your hands. You can read it on your living room couch, at your kitchen table, in your bed, or in someone else's bed. And when they say, What are you doing in my bed? You can say, I'm reading Jason's newsletter. What does it look like? You might wonder what you might find in this snail mill programming newsletter. You can read about all kinds of programming topics like object-oriented programming, testing, DevOps, AOW. Most of it's pretty technology agnostic. You can also read about other non-programming topics like philosophy, evolutionary theory, business, marketing, economics, psychology, music, cooking, history, geology, language, culture, robotics, and farming. The name of the newsletter is Nonsense Monthly. Here's what some of my readers are saying about it. Helman Kobler from Los Angeles says, thanks much for sending the newsletter. I got it about a week ago and read it on my sofa. It was a totally different experience than reading it on my computer or iPad. It felt more relaxed, more meaningful, something special and out of the ordinary. I'm sure that's what you were going for, so just wanted to let you know that you succeeded. Looking forward to more. Drew Bragg from Philadelphia says, Nonsense Monthly is the only newsletter I deliberately set aside time to read. I read a lot of great newsletters, but there's just something about receiving a piece of mail, physically opening it, and sitting down to read it on paper that is just so awesome. Feels like a lost luxury. Chris Sonier from Dickinson, Texas says, just finished reading my first nonsense monthly snail mail newsletter and truly enjoyed it. Something about holding a physical piece of paper that just feels good. Thank you for this. Can't wait for the next one. Dear listener, if you would like to get letters in the mail from yours truly every month, you can go sign up at nonsensemonthly dot com. That's nonsensemonthly dot com. I'll say it one more time nonsense monthly dot com. And now without further ado, here is today's episode.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you, Jason. Hey everybody.
SPEAKER_01:Uh you've been on the show a number of times before. You're the CEO of Evil Martians and a uh pillar of the Ruby community. Um, but in case anybody's not familiar with you yet, uh you want to tell us about yourself?
SPEAKER_00:Sure. Um I'm not sure about you know the pillar, but yeah, uh I I think I only kind of became an active member of the Ruby Community a few years back. So it's natural that not everybody knows about me. Uh I I remember actually the first time I was on a podcast was Brittany Martin's Ruben Reals podcast. She kind of like brought me up for the very first uh podcast in my life, so that was super fun. Um but um that year I remember I was already at the Well Martians for a bunch of years. Um so I'm not the original founder, I joined around seven or eight years ago. Uh but at some point, so we're doing a lot of Ruby development, we're doing a lot of uh kind of like software development design for startups. So um I remember at some point we were talking about frameworks, languages, and you know what we are choosing. And we have a pretty big JavaScript team that kind of doesn't know Ruby, and and then again, you know, some of the Ruby teammates were growing kind of like tired of Ruby. Um, so we were talking about you know our tech kind of like choices of the tech stack, and I remember somebody we kind of we want to build with Ruby and Rails, and there's nothing like that in the JS world, even though every year we're kind of trying to find something, like we're trying to find a framework that would do something similar in JavaScript. We cannot, and uh um maybe there is specific reasons for that, but this is I think that was a moment for me when I decided okay, I if this is what we believe in as a team, I will work to ensure that to kind of help this stack, to help this stack get more engineers, more companies, new companies, you know, successful ones. That's yeah, that's been my kind of like since then I've become more active, I think.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and you're doing something as we record this very soon, which is kind of in that in that same vein, I think, of helping uh uh foster and grow the Ruby community. Uh tell us about that.
SPEAKER_00:Right. So very, very soon, November 19th, 20th, and 21st, we are hosting the San Francisco Ruby Conference, which is gonna be the first Ruby conference in the South Bay Area since 2014, which is when the last Gagaruko was held. And since then we did not have a Ruby conference in in this major tech hub of the world, and I think it's very sad. But then, so I moved here um a bit more almost two years ago, and I restarted uh the San Francisco Ruby meetup, which has been very successful. So it was just um uh an experiment where you know I wanted to try it out, see who would go, who would come, you know, how many people would join, who would you know want to speak. And since then we had a meetup every month, every month in different companies, in different kind of HQs here. Of course, we are kind of fortunate to have a lot of Ruby companies here that want to host, like GitHub, Cisco, Product Board, Chain, Figma hosted, um, white combinator hosted once. Um so we were kind of like very fortunate with I don't know, New Relic, Century hosted us, they're not a Ruby company, um Angelist, Pinti, like many, many, many companies. Uh and so we have around kind of 80 people every time. Sometimes it's a bit more than 100, sometimes it's a bit less. Um when Planet Scale hosted, we had a kind of like a random, like a uh an extra meetup. Um, because Gazavelin was in town, and uh we did uh kind of like a Ruby plus Elixir meetup, and we could not feed the people in in this space, it was just like crazy. Yeah, I remember that. So anyway, we we ran this meetup and as a kind of like natural, I think, uh development of this idea uh early this year. Well, actually not really, about six months ago, I decided let's run a conference, let's host a real real Ruby conference in San Francisco, which again we planned about six months before, so we didn't have a lot of time. Um but the reason I wanted to have the conference was that I knew that RailsConf was gonna be the final RailsConf this year, and I wanted to have something to look forward to. By the way, I did know that RailsWorld had plans to also host in in the US, which is fine, but at the same time um I've got to say kind of Rails World has a lot of speakers from 37 Signals and Shopify, and um it's really difficult to get there, you know. If I mean, yes, they do have other speakers as well, but you know what I'm talking about.
SPEAKER_01:So I still I wanted to have uh kind of a another Ruby conference, let's say, and yeah, unless you the last the last RailsConf was in Philadelphia uh not that long ago, like this summer or early fall or something. When was that? Do you remember?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that that was summer. Um, don't you remember the month? I was there, yeah. But I kind of knew that they're gonna wrap it up, right? So they they announced this is gonna be the final RailsConf. Um and they're they're not hosting RubyConf, right? Right, RubyCentral is not hosting RubyConf this year, they're doing it next year, and again, RubyConf and is so this is was one of the reasons. I was kind of like I was I wanted to have something to look forward to. The other reason is I wanted to host the Ruby Conference, Ruby and Rails Conference in San Francisco in order to connect founders of Ruby companies and founders of Ruby startups to engineers and also to authors of open source, you know, people who are built tools for uh often for startups, right? Often for new greenfield projects where it's easier to adopt new tools. So um I think the we have we actually have a lot of kind of like success stories in in Ruby on Rails. We have IPOs, we have big companies, we have, I don't know, Shopify, we have China, IPO. Um at the same time, every time people are every time you mention it to somebody, they say, okay, yes, but those all those companies were built 10 years ago or more, right? And what about the new companies today? Is anybody choosing Ruby today? And for me, the answer is always yes, because at the Will Marchants we are exposed to startups, right? We work at seed stage CRC. Um, but I did I did not kind of hear you would not hear about them normally at you know RailsConf or RubyConf. Because one, they will not travel to a big Ruby conference. Uh you know, they are very busy building um those founders. And well, they're not huge yet, right? The you would not use their product products yet because they're just getting started. So there is uh it was difficult to uh to even tell those stories, I guess. And also I gotta say, um, just some people started feeling like uh if they mentioned they built with Ruby Andrews, if they mentioned it on uh I don't know, Reddit, Hacker News, somewhere, Twitter, um, they get like their share of criticism uh back, you know, and then sort of uh skepticism, I guess that maybe is the right word. And I wanted them to feel to not feel that, right? I wanted them to feel that no, it's totally normal and cool. Moreover, it's actually pragmatic and and and cool to build with Rails. And if you and Ruby, and if you look at who is successful and who is actually growing and succeeding, you will see so many of them are building this Ruby on Rails today and kind of choosing it today. So I wanted to tell those stories, and I wanted them, those founders to have all the support you know they need. And what they need is they need connections with engineers because hiring Ruby developers is well, arguably harder than hiring a JS developer, you know, the general in general. Um, so you have you need to be connected. Um right, you need to kind of uh have a pool of Ruby engineers that you know, and um they also need you know certain uh tooling and open source and how to they know how, right? They they need to know okay, how are we building those AI features with Ruby on Rails? How are we building those workflows, you know? Uh how how are we building the modern front ends, right? Because again, um you can I don't know, you can kind of like for some people it's fine to work with no build, you know, it's uh yeah, what wire no build? I'm I have beef with no build specifically to be honest, because usually people come to us, they say, or this JavaScript and this jam uh you know is not building. How what can we do? And we're just like look, use Vit, you'll be fine, and people just solve their problems, their pains. And I mean you could tell them don't use the gem, um but often well they need to, right? They need some house or some integrations. So for many businesses it's um vital, I think, to all of those problems are vital for maybe specifically for venture-backed startups again, right? That are more ambitious, that have to, they cannot always choose the most simple solutions, right? Because they have to compete, they have to try different things. So, yeah, that's uh that's like I think that's what we are doing. Um build yeah, bringing bringing everybody together in San Francisco. And by the way, and finally, the third component, the third reason is I just wanted my friends to come to San Francisco and have fun. Uh, I think uh San Francisco has a unfair reputation on the web. Um kind of like it doesn't do it justice, where um it's beautiful, it's fantastic, uh, there's so much like nature and beauty in in the city. And when you come and only visit downtown, of course, you will have a very specific um experience. That's why we're hosting the conference, not in downtown San Francisco, but in a very beautiful place in Marina, and like you see the Golden Gate Bridge right out of the windows of the venue. So it's like, and you can walk, you can it's it's beautiful, and we have the whole through day three of the conference is not in the venue, it's different events organized by community members. Uh, so we have the whole triathlon of events, so we have a swim, so you can choose, right? You can choose, you can choose. You can you can either swim in the bay to Alcatraz or you can bike.
SPEAKER_01:Um you can swim to Alcatraz. How long of a swim is that? Um, I think it's like four miles. Four miles. Wow. And what are the chances of getting eaten by a shark uh on that trip?
SPEAKER_00:I think maybe non-zero, but it's actually I I think we don't have as many sharks here as we have uh whales, humpback whales, and um sea lions.
SPEAKER_01:I have a friend who got eaten by a humpback whale.
SPEAKER_00:No way.
SPEAKER_01:No.
SPEAKER_00:Right, all right, right. Yeah, no, whales are denied, right? They eat the the smallest things in the water. So um yeah, you can swim. Uh let's say I think it's it's actually quite extreme. I I added it to the agenda, of course, uh, because somebody proposed this, but it sounds incredible, like just incredibly extreme um for professionals. So there is a this swim, there is a bike uh ride, and there is a run, 10k run. Uh so you can do this. And we also have a hack day from Angeles, so it's gonna be just a day of hacking. Um and yeah, I'm also doing a little tour of the Yoda fountain and the Lucas Film Museum, little like lobby museum.
SPEAKER_01:Wait, sorry, a tour of the what?
SPEAKER_00:So um Jason, you you know Star Wars, Star Wars, right? Um so Lucasfilm, that is the creator of Star Wars, whatever trilogy, second trilogy, and now I don't know how many sequels, all of that. So Lucasfilm is based in San Francisco, so their headquarters is here in Presidio, and you can go to their headquarters, and they have a nice museum with real Darth Vader costume with real lightsabers, original, original lightsabers from the original trilogy, and from and there and some others, like a lot of other items. So they have a little museum right in in their headquarters, and uh there is also a Yoda uh fountain uh right in front.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, I did not know about the Yoda fountain. Oh, I didn't know about any of this stuff.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so I want to take my friends there. That's what I'm trying to say.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah. Well, I am deeply upset that I can't make it. Um I'm already having severe FOMO. Um I almost want to go to my wife right after this and be like, hey, let's because we have kind of an agreement that every time I go to a conference, the whole family goes. And so I kind of want to be like, hey, let's all go to San Francisco. Um but anyway. Yep. Yeah, well that sounds fun. Um, okay, so two days of like normal conference stuff, and then day three is you know the these these other uh outside activities.
SPEAKER_00:Right. So you can choose which part of trashlon you want to do, or you can just go uh chill as somebody said I'm perfectly fit for the those couches in Angel list.
SPEAKER_01:And when does when does the arm wrestling take place?
SPEAKER_00:Good question. When you arrive, so listen, right after you arrive, we start the arm wrestling uh thing, and I remember Justin Bowen was pretty good at it, right?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, he beat me.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so he would be there, right? You can rematch, you have a chance.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so that was at Sin City Ruby number two, and then at the third Sin City Ruby, I I arm wrestled a guy. Justin Bowen beat me, but this other guy I arm wrestled destroyed me. It was embarrassing.
SPEAKER_00:I yeah, I remember, and it was kind of unexpected. I don't remember who it was, but it was completely unexpected.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, he just like beat everybody. I didn't know we we had a secret muscle man in attendance and nobody knew it. Um I'm curious about the speaker roster. Can you tell me about some of the speakers?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, um, so this is this is fantastic, I think. So we have um we have Carmin Paolino doing his first keynote. Uh he's the author of Ruby Alola, which is super popular right now. Um, Marco Ross is doing another keynote talking about his all his new open source for the view layer for Rails. And uh then two others are Obi Fernandez talking about um his vision for integration of Rails and AI, and Vladimir Dementev, uh my friend, our friends, uh will do the final keynote, and the title is Rails X. Um, but it's it's a little secret so far. Yeah. Um yeah, so we we have uh we have lots of surprises prepared. I mean we they're like the speakers are literally the best speakers we could think about. We have the full Rails inertia rails team doing workshop on inertia. Um uh we have Noel Rapping doing workshop on like dynamic typing. Um Casper is doing another workshop. Um Justin Bowen is doing and um is doing workshop on active agent. So again, a lot of those things that maybe you heard about, but we want you to kind of sit down and try them out together with you know inside the workshop. Um then we have I don't know, we have Dave Thomas, uh, we have um uh Jeremy Evans, uh uh Takashi um talking about Z JIT. Um you know, and yet, you know, when they they had yet another JIT and now they have I think they just uh went alphabetically to the next letter and said and called the next one Z.
SPEAKER_01:I see Z J.
SPEAKER_00:It's like yet another after yet another, whatever. Uh so they they yeah, they're doing yet another um just in time compiler for Ruby. Um I I would say in general, um, and then we have a lot of founders speakers. So the way it works, we have our more or less classic speaker, classic talks where we either talk about Ruby at scale, you know, some learnings from those big stories. Um for example, Gus uh Steven from Guster will talk about modularization. It's kind of like a round pack work, but what is it? They have something new called packet. I'm I'm I'm afraid to misspell it.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, well, yeah, the modularization tool, yeah, right.
SPEAKER_00:So we have books that will talk about you know learnings from those big uh Ruby companies, and we have Alan and Vito from Syscore and a bunch of other people, and then also we have all sorts of open source. So this is like the other range. Um, this was the second category in our CFP. One was lessons from big companies, you know, Ruby at scale. Uh Intercom, by the way, is given a presentation about their scaling, um, scaling MySQL to two million queries per second or something like that. Um this this is one part, the second part is open source, authors of new open source, ambitious things, uh everything new and exciting. And then the third part, uh, and this is where you know you have Marco and Carmin and others. And the third part is uh demos of Ruby startups. So I I want people to, you know, first of all, be able to say, look, I heard from the founders of two dozen of Ruby, new Ruby startups. I know them, I heard from them, I understand what they're doing, and it, you know, uh maybe you know it's it's gonna be pragmatic for you to have this connection, right? To kind of like know those people, maybe in the future you'd want to work for their startup. This is a pragmatic reason, but I also want people to be able to just say it, right? To just say, look, I know that bolt.new is built on Rails. I talked to the founder or to the CTO or know the team. They are a big sponsor, by the way. Uh our big one of our biggest sponsors. So I I want people in the Ruby community to connect, you know, with those founders. And we have founders that just finished YC Badge. So they're building something fresh, new, already successful to be in Y Combinator Badge, all of that. Um we have all sorts of new products and new startups, and they will do not a traditional technical talk, but they will do 10-minute demos. So about two dozen of them will do each do a 10-minute demo of the product, what they're building with Ruby. And the purpose is to inspire everybody, right? To inspire the community that, oh, this is what we are building. Um, spoiler, a lot of them are building with AI. I mean, like kind of like AI-related products today, right? This is um, and this is fine. I actually want to know what's missing for them because I know they will use some Python in many cases, not in all the cases, of course, but in many cases they have to kind of like reach for some things that are not available in Ruby ecosystem yet. Um, and I want to I want to know, I want us to know what's missing, right? So that you know we can build for them and we can really support all those new and sort of emerging use cases and and support those companies as they grow. And and all of them love Ruby and choose it pragmatically today. Um, and kind of like, and they will have some asks, I think. So uh they some of them will share something like look, this is what I feel is missing, this is what I feel we could have in the communities in the ecosystem. So I think this this would be exciting. So there are very pragmatic reasons for people to come to this conference. One is they will not only meet Ruby engineers, but they will meet founders, they will meet leaders, um, which is kind of good connections. For those companies, of course, the they call us to meet engineers. So we're doing a lot of that, but also we're just in general having a lot of fun seeing, you know, this kind of positive movement, like kind of like positive side of the communities where everything is growing, everything is. People are trying things, people are building things. I think I really enjoy this energy. And I think that there's this energy both in Ruby community and in SF. And when they you know, when you're at the interception of San Francisco energy and Ruby energy, it's just a perfect match. It's where you have people kind of jumping on new ideas, trying them out, and um just enjoying it, I guess. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, San Francisco Ruby Conference feels like something that really should exist. Like it's kind of crazy that there hasn't been one since 2014. Because it seems like again, something that really should exist.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I agree. 100%. And and again, there there used to be a lot of overlap. Um, and I think there still is a lot of there is a lot of overlap. I gotta tell you something. So I was once at a Laravel meetup in San Francisco, and it was a very small meetup, and I was thinking why. And I was thinking, oh, maybe they didn't reach out to these people, to this people. You know, I was kind of like, yeah, I have this internal critic, of course. Um, I was thinking, yeah. But at the same time, I I could not really point out who is using larval, who's based in like which company is using larval based in this F. I couldn't tell you who is using Larval in New York and in Chicago or many other places, but just and it's very easy for me to point out who is using Rails in San Francisco. Um, yeah, last night I sent out another kind of like round of outreach for sponsorships, and I sent out messages to like 25 companies that are not the not like incredibly well known, but for example, I don't know, real the real real. It's like a marketplace that um where you sell expensive fashion items on secondary market, something like that, kind of luxury items on secondary market. Um and so they use they are hiring Rails developers. Um like so many, so many, so many companies that I can like keep learning that they are using Rails, you know. For example, there is a bus on my street uh that is advertising thatch. Um some some like a health tech platform, and so I saw the bus a few times, and then the the folks from Thatch reached out and they are now sponsoring the conference. It turns out they are Ruben Rails company. So what I'm trying to say, there is a lot of Ruby in in SF, and like you said, it's uh it's really it should always have existed, you know, the the conference and the meetup and the the community, yeah, should have always existed.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, interesting. Yeah, it's it's always neat to find out companies that use Rails that you never knew used Rails. Um and I I am just like kicking myself for not being able to come. Um because the more you describe it, the more enticing it sounds. Partly because you know that I'm building my own product, Saturn CI. Um, and it's it's uh CI specifically for Rails and R spec. And it seems like a great opportunity to meet potential customers. And it sounds like, you know, for for anybody who's it it it sounds very like startup focused, like people who are looking for customers or developers to hire, just wanting to get the word out about their product and stuff like that. Um I'm kind of reading between the lines, and and I'm guessing that that's very intentional, like you're wanting to foster, you know, it's it's not just purely technical, like you're wanting to foster the Ruby startup community and stuff like that. Is that kind of the idea?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, exactly. I mean, it still needs to be a technical conference for, you know, uh it's still for engineers, um, but it's not for I don't know, product managers or something like that. Um but it it is a conference where founders and technical founders who choose Ruby who made you know they're making this decision. This is where I want them to meet Ruby engineers so so that they feel comfortable building in this stack also. Think about this. They will see hundreds of Ruby engineers and they will think, right, it's fine, I can find, you know, one, two, three, five that I need right in my next in for this startup right now. Of course, if you are at the scale of chain, you know, folks are hiring something like a hundred sometimes, or Cisco is or big companies like that, um, then you need to train and etc. But for um like mid-size, smaller and mid-size, they they just need to hire from the market, right? They need to hire existing engineers. So um, yes, so this is somebody called it the Ruby, this the Ruby startup, startup conference, which I like. I like um this notion. Um and yeah, uh, for example, right now I I'm I'm I'm doing the outreach to folks that are hiring. So I'm inviting them to join as a spot as a small, you know, smallest tier sponsor and publish their job posting to our job board that you know we will uh advertise, we will kind of promote this job board and these jobs with all the attendees and stuff like that. So we built a job board, we built like a bunch of stuff for this. Um, and yes, it it was actually the idea of one of the sponsors that they want us to have a way of sharing their job, of promoting their job posting, which is cool, right? Uh the market is still not like as hot, whatever, for finding a job. So I think it's still important for people to find to be able to find good jobs, and also they will be able to see those, you know, people from those teams at the conference. They they'll be able to kind of like do the pipe check of the teams. Something that's what I'm thinking. So I want this, I seriously, I want this to be practical, kind of like useful for and I think it it can be useful, it can be really useful. And but I also think that this focus on priority is helpful for the conference and for the community, because we have a very simple goal. The the simple goal is to have more companies choose Ruby today. And why are we doing this? Because we want we want the stack to be more successful in the future, um, right, to grow so that we all can enjoy software engineering, I guess. Uh, we don't have to switch over. Uh so for this, we we need to listen to people, right? Connect to people, understand what's missing, understand um you know, where maybe we lack something, right? But also being very pragmatic. Like I, for example, I would say, look, if you are using some Python in your app, that's totally fine because you are you might be reaching for um fine-tuning, or you might be kind of quite specific data-related libraries that Ruby might not yet have, which is fine. And the question for us is how do you keep the business, how do you integrate with the two, right? How do you kind of keep the business logic that we like and really love to have in Ruby? And this is what Ruby is excels at, right? You can you can uh kind of like write your business logic in a very nice way in Ruby and take care of the Rails kind of helps you design architecture. Of course, you then have to extend it somehow, but still it helps a lot. And you um you then integrate with maybe some services in Python, maybe some services in um Rust, maybe you integrate React front end, god forbid, it's fine. Um I mean you integrate with AI libraries and APIs, Ruby LLM, so adaptive agent, alpha this and Langchain RB, but uh I'm what I'm uh saying is uh it's fine, we are not purists, we don't have to be. I think we need to be very practical, very pragmatic, and kind of figure out what we can do best, uh what's missing, listen to people and and build for this, right? And I think what's cool about Ruby community is it's a large, it's actually a large community. It's not it's pretty diverse, it has different opinions, which is great. Uh people having different opinions, and and and people are very entrepreneurial. People are building, for example, you're building a tool specifically for Rails, CI, um, specifically for R spec. So this makes sense. And we are also building some opinionated stuff, right? In as a bo Marshans. So this is uh this is something pretty unique where in many other ecosystems you don't have that kind of like variety of mindsets and entrepreneurial people building tooling. Of course, you might say, look, uh there's so much tooling being built in JavaScript and TypeScript, which is true. Uh we should take some parts of it. But you know, the I think the downside of TypeScript JavaScript is that they don't have this kind of big tent idea, at least yet. I don't feel like they have a big enough tent. They don't have a framework that is that is a big enough tent.
SPEAKER_01:What do you mean by that?
SPEAKER_00:Um I mean very often uh the new ideas in uh in uh in uh JS TypeScript space means you have to throw away everything you already you already have and kind of migrate to the new stack. Um I uh I mean our website is built on Gatsby. Uh what happened to Gasby used to be this kind of like forward um oriented futuristic frameworks, maybe just four years ago, not that not that long ago. Um and now it's it was it was acquired. It went through a sunset essentially, the Gasby Cloud. And it's not, I mean it's supported from I think from security perspective. So they release patch patches, but it's not going anywhere, like it's not moving anywhere. It's you should migrate off of it. Uh and and we of course we wrote a lot of custom stuff for this framework, and it's not as easy to migrate off of it. Um, so in Rails, you have this kind of I think Rails is like a meta framework, and you can swap, you can say, okay, our spec would probably be not as easy to migrate off of, but we just help somebody migrate from MySQL to actually from Postgres to MySQL. Um and yes, like theoretically, by the way, it's it's not even a migration, right? You just you use active records, everything is abstracted. Well, in reality, of course not. Uh of course we used the there was a lot of uh lots of kind of sp P PostgreSpecific things in in the code base, but still the migration was uh very doable, just a few weeks of work and it's done. Um so I and the same, okay. If you think about build tools, um there's a bit of pain um to market, but still you're not like switching. I'm trying to say you you don't have to switch the whole, the entire framework to try a new idea.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it's very stable. It's yeah it's been around for 20 years. Um it's it's still being improved, but the improvements, the changes are more incremental, they're they're not fundamentally changing things um to a point where you you have to redo the project.
SPEAKER_00:Maybe a better example is actually inertia. Think about inertia. Um you can introduce inertia to the project, to your Rails project. It would feel very Rails-way-like. Uh, and it would be a completely new, by the way, completely independent of the core Rails uh technology. So it's inertia um right as it's built by it's kind of originated in in Laravel. Um inertia Rails specifically is um maintained by Ruby engineers, including uh EnableMushine, but it's I mean, you don't have to ask whatever the permission from DHH to use it. I mean you can what am I trying to say? I'm trying to say there's a lot of innovation happening that is not is not doesn't have to depend on the core of Rails. The core of Rails is kind of adapterized enough. When I say enough, I I mean, of course, maybe it can be adapterized even better. By the way, we are trying to adapterize action cable properly. But it's like it's a long, long, long PR that is just sitting there. But um, but in general, uh the approach is that look, I mean there is action cable as as a as a um abstraction as a pattern, right? So we we uh you know with any cable we can uh integrate through action cable, right, with Rails apps. So what I'm trying to say is um Rails is open, has this kind of idea that you can swap the sub-frameworks on all sides of it. You can swap the front ends, and the reason it works is there's a certain design, it's not um it's a d it's uh it's a choice. It was the choice, I think it was the choice made kind of by the way. I'm not super good with Rails history, but I think somewhere around merging Rails and um Verb. This is why they tried to adapterize more stuff. I'm not sure.
SPEAKER_01:It's uh I was well it seems like maybe your broader point is is something about modularity. Am I understanding that right?
SPEAKER_00:Um modularity.
SPEAKER_01:Like you can kind of swap out one part and it's it's fairly independent.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I mean in some sense, yes. Um I mean there of course there are different patterns to do this. Um by the way, I think Alan and Tita they have a talk about uh kind of like extreme uh in my in my mind, this is an extreme way of abstracting from Rails, kind of how you can abstract your business logic from the framework completely. So they are you know they are uh there's another layer between your your app and and the framework, so that you could theoretically swap the framework, which is cool, of course, not probably not needed when you're just beginning. So maybe at a certain stage. Um but I I I'm um I think it's more it's not it's less about it's less about yes, it is about modularization, but it's less about what Rails can do rather than how Rails allows you to integrate other ideas into it. This is what I like. So uh we can it's flexible enough, you know, for us to be able to work with it in a very flexible way and kind of like not asking permissions. Of course, you could say um, I mean Ruby is um of course the language itself is it's more tricky because uh there's a lot of kind of like conversations, conversation about type system, right? Um can Ruby support some of the new ideas coming from RBS and survey and you know um type signatures and stuff like that. Uh of course this is where the the language I mean has to permit that, right? Um but for but I would say the framework Rails is more flexible even than than Ruby, right? In in that sense, it's like easier to extend Rails. And yeah, that's this that's just my uh my kind of uh five sense. I mean if you think about R spec, R spec is uh uh an extension of Rails that you know uh uh maybe David doesn't like it, you know, and it's fine. That's what I'm trying to say. And you know, the the architecture allows that that we can have competition, we can have different ideas, we can fight, we can prove our points, and this means we can kind of um come up uh eventually with better, better and better ideas and solutions.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah, kind of that thing about how Rails is Omakase, that famous blog post. If you if you don't want to use mini-test, you can use RSpec or vice versa, you can use MySQL or PostgreSQL.
SPEAKER_00:Right. So I I would say omakase is the opposite, actually. No, omacase is what what whatever chefs served you. So omacase in Rails right now is hotwire, no build, MySQL. I don't I'm not sure, but by the way, about MySQL, maybe okay, I'm not sure.
SPEAKER_01:I think it's SQLite now, if I'm not sure. Yeah, SQLite, right.
SPEAKER_00:Um you know all of this, and and and and Kamal and Omarchi. Also kind of on top of it.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah. Yeah, good point. Omakase does mean like the chef just picks everything for you. So yeah, that's that's the opposite idea.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that's the that's the opposite. So what what I'm talking about is yes, you have omakase, but also um it's not just omakase. Because I I wouldn't be able to use omakase rails. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Funny, funny story, real quick. Um, I went to a sushi place a few months ago here in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Um, and I asked the server, Do you guys do omakase here? And she's like, Um, let me go check. And she came back and she's like, What was the word you said? And I'm like, I'm like, omakase. Um, and she's like, Okay. And then she came back and she's like, Yeah, and brought me a plate of just like some random crap, and it was like wasn't very good. And I was like kind of sorry that I lost. Um, but that was that was I found it kind of funny that I was like I learned about that from a Rails blog post, and then I asked for it at a at a sushi place, and I kind of felt like an idiot, um, and I regret doing it. Um anyway.
SPEAKER_00:Um, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and obviously, like the further you get from the ocean, the the worse the sushi is is gonna be. Kind of like the farther north you go, the worse the Mexican food gets. Um, which sadly in Michigan both those things are the case, you know, no ocean. Uh we're super far from Mexico.
SPEAKER_00:It's wait, but you you guys have nice produce. Um, wait a sec. I remember um talking to you guys about maple syrup.
SPEAKER_01:No, oh yeah. Yeah, maple syrup. Yeah, we make it.
SPEAKER_00:So you are you are and and not just you guys, but like the whole region is famous for it, right?
SPEAKER_01:Oh yeah, it's huge here. Yeah. If you drive down the highway, you'll see a bunch of trees with hoses and buckets coming out of them. Yeah, it's real big.
SPEAKER_00:So that's cool.
SPEAKER_01:So you have just Yeah, yeah, I talk shit about Michigan sometimes, but there are a lot of really good things about it. Um okay, so before we go, I want to make sure we we touch again on the high points of the conference and give people the the info they need. So let's talk dates. I know you said the dates again uh already, but let's let's say the dates again and um where do people go to buy a ticket and any info you want to share about like if there's different ticket levels, and I don't know if you're still looking for sponsors or anything like that, but just anything more that you want to share.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, thank you, thank you, Jason. Uh so the conference is November 19th to 21st. 21st is the community day, Friday. Uh, you can go to sfruby.com. We are still accepting some late last minute sponsors. And yeah, we're still doing um a lot of things. We we have a late um late bird tickets on sale now. Uh Jason, I will share a special discount code with your uh listeners. Yeah, and so it's more affordable. And um yeah, I I just want everybody to not miss it. Uh, because it's gonna it's gonna be great. I we have lots of things that I cannot yet talk about because they are kind of like surprise experiences for for the conference, but uh it's gonna be special. We're making it um just a very special moment for everybody who comes and we're creating it's not just one space, we have three tracks, we have workshops, we have second stage, we have other uh kind of like lounges and experiences, and um I don't know, I'm I'm testing some um lightning uh things. So I'm actually trying to recognize emotions from the voice so that we can light up space around this space uh yes, and it's a Ruby app, and this was the first time I I wrote a Ruby app that is running locally and connecting to a local device, to a plugged-in device, um since like forever. And I even forgot how you know local, how the operating system is mounting devices and stuff like that.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Um so it's it's super fun. Yeah, it's super fun. We are we did a lot of fun things. So we did um sfRuby cloud cards. Uh you can check them out at clouds at clouds.sfruby.com. By the way, I should probably add a link to the main site to this. Good idea. Um so it's where every attendee gets gets an invitation to this, and they can generate a nice and cute invitation, personal invitation. So that you upload your photo, and if you are um if you are holding something or you have something on you, or you know, on your hand or somewhere, all those maybe you're holding a cat or a dog or um some other animal. So if you upload a photo like that, it generates just a super super cute story where you know it's it's all in the same style. We are using uh Ruby LLM and Nano Banana uh API to generate the images. And yeah, I think it's very cute. It's my favorite social feed now. I just open it and look at people.
SPEAKER_01:And where do you go to do that?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, you go to clouds uh clouds.sfruby uh.com.
SPEAKER_01:Clouds.sfruby.com, okay.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Okay. Yeah. Okay, so maybe Jason, how about this? I'll send you an invitation to this.
SPEAKER_01:Uh perfect.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, if I send you the invitation, would you upload your photo with something fun?
SPEAKER_01:Oh, of course. I'll like grab a cat or something.
SPEAKER_00:Yes. Cool, cool, cool. Okay, agreed, agreed. Let's do that. Let's do that.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. Um, okay, so November 19th to 21st. That's the conference day.
SPEAKER_00:So that's Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Friday is when we do TRASLAN and Hack Day. Uh, and by the way, there's also an after party after day one. The after party is hosted by our friends from Git Butler. So um, you might not have not heard about this startup yet, but they are it's one of the original co-founders of GitHub, went and created a new kind of Git um startup. So they're trying, they are building new Git tools, experimenting. Uh, and they are big kind of Ruby friends, and they reached out and decided, can we host an after party? I was like, Yes, please. Yeah, so they buy everybody drinks and food and stuff, so it's just fantastic, I think.
SPEAKER_01:Oh nice.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And have fun. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Um, okay. Well, I'm gonna I'm gonna try to come. Um I don't know if it's gonna work, but I'm gonna I'm gonna make a case for it. Um, anyway, okay. Uh we will of course put all that stuff in the show notes. And Irina, as always, it has been an absolute pleasure talking with you, and thanks so much for coming on the show.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you, Jesse. Thank you all. Come join us after me.