Code and the Coding Coders who Code it
We talk about Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, and everything in between. From tiny tips to bigger challenges we take on 3 questions a show; What are you working on? What's blocking you? What's something cool you want to share?
Code and the Coding Coders who Code it
Episode 54 - Live (at the time) from RailsConf 2025
The Ruby community's most recognizable podcast voices gather for a heartfelt discussion at the final RailsConf in Philadelphia, sharing wisdom that extends far beyond technical topics into the realm of human connection.
From conquering social anxiety at conferences to building meaningful relationships in tech, this panel digs into what makes the Ruby community special. Drew Bragg of Code and the Coding Coders who Code it confesses that despite his outgoing appearance, he still struggles with social interactions, while Stephanie Min from The Bike Shed offers practical conversation starters that anyone can use. Chris Oliver of Remote Ruby reminds us of our built-in connection: "We're all here for the same reason—to talk about Ruby and Rails."
The hosts reveal the secret sauce behind their podcasting journeys—how they started, how they find guests, and what keeps their content fresh after dozens or even hundreds of episodes. David Hill shares how his Ode to RailsConf podcast transformed from an idea floated at last year's conference into over 50 episodes, demonstrating how quickly passion projects can flourish in this supportive community.
Perhaps most touching are the shared memories that have shaped their Ruby journeys: Drew keynoting with Matz in the audience, Stephanie's late-night cookie mission, Chris's first encounter with a listener who recognized his voice, and David's experience contributing to open source during Hack Day. These stories underline how technical communities become chosen families through shared experiences.
Whether you're a seasoned Rubyist or considering joining this welcoming ecosystem, this conversation offers a window into why people stay in Ruby despite the rise of newer technologies—it's the people and connections that transcend the code. Listen for practical advice on starting conversations, launching your own podcast, or simply finding your place in a technical community that feels like coming home.
Want to experience this special community yourself? Attend a Ruby conference, join a meetup, or reach out to any of these podcast hosts online—they're just as approachable as they sound.
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Hello everyone and welcome to a special episode of Code and the Coding Coders who Code it. The following episode was recorded at the very last RailsConf on July 9th 2025 in Philadelphia, pa. It features myself, stephanie Min from the Bike Shed, chris Oliver from Remote Ruby, and it was moderated by David Hill from the Ode to RailsConf podcast and the Ruby Gems podcast. Enjoy.
Speaker 2:Welcome everybody to the Ruby podcast panel at RailsConf. I'll be kind of hosting and moderating. I'm going to introduce myself and my podcast and then we'll just kind of go down the line and give everybody the opportunity to do that. My name is David Hill. I have the Ode to RailsConf podcast that we'll be concluding soon as a kind of a retrospective on memories of RailsConf over the years, and I think I've got two more weeks of episodes and then that'll be done. As was announced this morning before the opening keynote, I'm co-hosting the Ruby Gems podcast with Marty Hott and we're also going to kind of take the opportunity to give a quick shout out to our sponsors, if we have those. My sponsor is a little known, rubious, by the name of Chris Oliver over here and GoRails, so thank you to GoRails for sponsoring my podcast hello everyone.
Speaker 1:My name is Drew Bragg. I am the host of Code and the Coding Coders who Code it. I would like to shout out my sponsors by pulling in Andy Kroll, if y'all don't mind. We have Honey Badger. Thank you very much, Honey Badger. And we have Judo Scale. Thank you very much, Judo Scale.
Speaker 3:Hey, I'm Stephanie Min. I don't have multiple t-shirts on and I don't have a sponsor to shout out. I had no idea that was happening. I was most recently a scene developer at ThoughtBot and I co-hosted the Bike Shed with my co-host, Joel Kinville, who is somewhere in this audience right over there.
Speaker 5:I'm Chris Oliver. I host Remote Ruby with Andrew Mason I think that's him over there. Woo and our sponsors are the same t-shirts there. We've got a honey badger. Do you want them? You can put them on you can show them off.
Speaker 1:I don't need those sweaty t-shirts Not that sweaty, I got one underneath.
Speaker 5:But yeah, shout out to Honey Badger and Judo Scale All right.
Speaker 2:So we kind of brainstormed a set of questions, the topics that we wanted to talk about here. The first one was a scholar from RubyConf. In November last year I met her, kind of talked to her a little bit, since she was from Brazil. I lived in Brazil for a little bit and spoke Portuguese, and so I was just kind of like oh, it's fun to have that connection. She reached out to me a couple months later talking about the podcast. She was getting ready to go to Tropical RB. This was a question she asked me and I kind of wanted to float this to all three of you and see what you have to say about it. How do you get better at talking to people at conferences? Do you do anything to prepare? Is there anything you do that helps in starting conversations with people? Do you have any tips for doing well in a conference setting? Drew, do you have any thoughts on that?
Speaker 1:For one, we are what we consistently do. So if the more you talk to people, the better you will be at it, it's still something that I struggle with, despite you might see me running around acting like a fool and being bouncy and wearing sunglasses inside for no reason, but that's kind of how I deal with the anxiety that comes with interacting with a lot of people. It's something that you work on and you get a little bit better at every conference and you remind yourself I have a social battery. I'm going to destroy it over the next three days and then I'll recover and I'll do better next time. So it's just something. Every time you go out, you just try to put yourself out there a little bit more.
Speaker 3:Well, I used to live in New York City for a year and I was desperately in need of friends and I would constantly be trying to make eye contact with people and smiling at them. No one reciprocated because I guess that's New York for you, but here it works quite well is to just kind of like I don't know, be a friendly face and say hello. And I will share a couple of my go-to questions, which is what's a talk that you saw? Or like, where are you coming from? I think those are usually some pretty easy conversation starters and if you're lucky and you happen to ask that to an extrovert, then they will do the work for you of continuing the conversation. So those are my tips.
Speaker 5:If you make 750 screencasts and go to a conference, conversations just start themselves conference conversations, they start themselves. But no, seriously, we're all here for the same reason to talk about Ruby and Rails and stuff. Any person that you see has a connection with you already. That's why we're here. You can ask them what they're working on, what's interesting, what can they teach you, whatever. There's so many easy ways to connect with people at a conference like this because they're not all strangers. We're all here for the same reasons, the same interests.
Speaker 2:To not completely cheat. I will also answer the question. What I told her was what helped me was structuring it as much as I possibly could. For example, I'm a huge proponent of board game night, which we're all looking forward to. Tonight, drew and I are planning on playing some ridiculous games, but for me I found that having that structure of a board game and the rules of how you interact with another person took all the pressure off of those voices in my brain telling me I'm doing socialing wrong, because now I've got a set of rules by which I operate. I was so much more comfortable and even though I was playing a game, I could also then apply that to how I interacted with those people going forward, because I had kind of lowered those social barriers a bit for myself. So the next question comes from Alan Reidelhoover. He asked to guest or not to guest? That is the question. What are the pros and cons of inviting guests onto your podcast? How do you prepare for a guest?
Speaker 1:Well, I solo host my show, so if I don't have a guest, I don't have a show. Unfortunately, I will always have a guest. Not unfortunately. I like having guests. That's the whole reason why I started podcasting.
Speaker 3:But it does mean that if I can't schedule someone unlike Chris or someone with a co-host, I just won because for a while, the bike shit was me and Joelle and we would just get on every week and just talk, with kind of minimal preparation, and I think I was always so nervous that I don't know, like what do people want to hear what I have to say? And it turns out that I think people like the familiarity of just having people to listen to every week and have a parasocial relationship with. And yeah, I think the best comments that I got was less about like oh, I shared this like really cool tech thing, and more just yeah, I like that I get to listen to people talk about Ruby and Rails and have it be relatable. So I guess it really does depend on what you're hoping to do with the podcast. Yeah, do what feels good for you.
Speaker 5:We're going to answer to this and the last question. So if you want to start conversations with people and you have a podcast, you can just invite anybody you want on. So that's a good way to start conversations with people, start a podcast. But yeah, having guests is a great way to add some variety to the show and stuff. We found doing a remote Ruby sometimes not a lot changes week to week. So having a guest was very helpful to break that up and talk about something different or whatever. But it was often an excuse because we just want to talk to you about what you're building and what you're working on. But you do have to be a lot more prepared. You have to have 10 questions. If somebody just feels strange being on a podcast, it's helpful Now that we use Zoom and can see each other's faces.
Speaker 5:We used to use Zencastr and so it was just kind of nobody saw each other and we're talking to each other and we talk over each other. It was kind of a struggle but we'd have to get to know somebody and get them to tell stories. That can be tough if you don't have a history with them and you're more or less meeting them for the first time on the podcast. That can be a little trickier, but you want to just prepare that way and get to know them and share that on the show and stuff. But yeah, it can be good and stressful at the same time.
Speaker 2:I'm in a similar boat with Drew, where my whole show was predicated on having a guest to interview and talk about their experiences at RailsConf. When I started the podcast, I had a detailed set of questions that I had brainstormed of every possible way a person could have experienced RailsConf as a volunteer, as a speaker, as a scholar guide. I went through the gamut of everything. It's like how did you participate in RailsConf? Let's talk about every nuance of that. But then, as I got more comfortable with it, I stopped using that list of questions and I just started to kind of riffing with it. How did you enjoy RailsConf? It became much more of a casual conversation, and so there's still some preparation there, but at the same time it kind of just became a lot more casual. So our next question comes from Lucian Ginda. I hope I pronounced your name correctly. How can we attract new programmers to learn Ruby and Rails? What's the simplest way to attract new people?
Speaker 5:For me, I got introduced into Rails when I was in school, like in college junior year, and that's a really influential time in people's careers they're trying to figure out what to do with their lives and whatever, and they'll be pushed into. For us it was Java and NET that were being taught in school and then I had a professor that was doing Ruby and Rails. We had Blake Mizzurani from Heroku come out back in 2010 to our CS department. That was maybe 10, 2010 to our CS department. That was like maybe 10, 15, 20 people that were there and we all watched, holy crap. He ran one command and then deployed this Rails application. We have never deployed any of our code ever and so it was just mind blowing to us and that was the kind of stuff that stuck with us.
Speaker 5:This is very different than these other languages, these other communities and stuff, and I also think the Scholars and Guides program is phenomenal because it gets people who are in the beginnings of their careers to the community and then they get to realize this is more like family than a business networking event or whatever. So it really changes things a lot. I think the earlier in somebody's career we can get in front of them. I feel like that will help a ton.
Speaker 3:One thing that I think I've observed or noticed is that every year at these conferences there's always a really big number of people who are here at the conference for the first time, who are new to Rails. I ran a workshop earlier this morning and that was one of my questions, for folks is like, who here has been using Rails for less than a year, like less than three years, and I would say that it was almost half. So in some ways I think it's maybe we're already doing this really well, and I also kind of had surveyed people too about where their background in programming was from, whether they were self-taught or had formal college education or went to a boot camp, and somehow we all ended up here. So I'm going to say that perhaps it's just something that we're already organically pretty good at and maybe, like you said, I think it will be cool to see if it becomes something that gets taught in more formal college settings. But this word of mouth thing has been working pretty well for us so far.
Speaker 1:Yeah, definitely I think, ensuring that it's being taught and being presented to those learning, whether it's in a CS, in college environment or if it's through the boot camps. I know a lot of boot camps have moved away from Rails because there wasn't a lot of jobs for those entering. So I think keeping the availability of junior roles open is going to seriously help. If someone's going and looking for a role to determine what language they should learn, if they see a ton of open Ruby and Rails roles, they're going to feel confident that learning this will help them get a job and get them paid. I think that will be something that if people are anxious to learn it because there's a lot of jobs, people will then also be able to teach it and we'll get a lot of people coming to ruby and rails because that's where the jobs are I feel like any answer I give is going to be really cheap and low level.
Speaker 2:After those ones, for me the biggest draw has been the community. On top of like yeah, absolutely need to be paid to food for my family and roof over their head and those types of necessities, but the community has just been so open and welcoming and amazing and it's like wow, there's almost an expectation. It's like, yeah, you should step up, you should participate, you should engage in the community and be a part of it and not just be a passive on the side there just kind of watching and consuming. And so, yeah, the way the community kind of just opened up to me. Once I realized that and started trying to participate more, I was like, oh, wow, people are okay with me having a voice and engaging in things and that was kind of an eye-opener for me and hopefully it'll help bring more people in when they realize that too.
Speaker 3:Can I say something that Absolutely? Is that okay? Sure, okay. If you all didn't know, it was at last RailsConf that David was floating the idea of, like, what if I started a podcast? So it was just this time last year that he went from. This is a thing that I kind of want to do. Is this a good idea, bad idea? To having done, how many episodes have you done now?
Speaker 2:When it's over, it'll be 52 episodes.
Speaker 3:Over 52 episodes. It's about to co-host another podcast, so this is perhaps a sign that, like, if you can think of it, you can figure out how to make it happen.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you. And I assigned a bit of blame to Drew here as well, because the year that I met Drew, he was telling me about his podcast and how he used the podcast as an excuse to go talk to interesting people, and then, five minutes later, I watched him do that and go up to Aaron Patterson and ask him to be on the podcast, and so I was like, oh, wow, a, that's an interesting avenue to take with it. That's something that stuck with me for a long time. And B he is actually doing that. He's. He's not just saying, oh, that's a thing. I used to trick my brain, which is something that I have done, but he actually did that in front of me, and so I thought that's really interesting that I got to see that aaron still hasn't been on the show, so if you see him, please remind him.
Speaker 1:He's supposed to come on my show, you know what show he has been on.
Speaker 2:he's come on my show. You know what show he has been on? He's been on my show. No, all right. What's your favorite? Railsconf or RubyConf? Memory?
Speaker 1:Board game night is always the highlight of my conference because I love board games. It's a great way to meet new people outside of just a conference setting. But a little more selfishly, I got to keynote RubyConf in Chicago last year and that was an amazing experience and I will never forget that. I've spoken at a few conferences now, but keynoting to a room that big with that many people and then I do a silly little game show where I talk about weird things, about Ruby, and sitting in the front row is Mats, the creator of the freaking language, and I'm poking a little bit of fun at him. I'm talking about how I named my dog, mats, and it's just this surreal experience of I'm talking to all of these people. Mats is there.
Speaker 3:I'm talking about this language, that I love and that will always stick out in my head.
Speaker 3:I have a few really great memories since becoming a speaker, but I think one of the ones that I want to highlight because it's kind of one of those things that's like it just happens because you're with threatens, you know.
Speaker 3:It's not anything specific about the conference, it's just like we're all here. A few years ago, at Earl's Conf in Portland I think it was at a Doubletree or I think the hotel was a Doubletree, and if anyone knows that, the Doubletree has free cookies that's why it's a hotel chain and I'm loyal to but they'll give you free warm cookies when you check in. And one night I think I was with some people who were speaking and they were just doing some dry runs in the hotel lobby and so we were all kind of gathering. It was like probably 10 pm and we were supporting them practicing and I got to go up to the reception and ask for seven cookies to bring to all my friends and they opened a drawer, like a warmer drawer, of these cookies and I had to explain to them that they were for other people. But my other pro tip is cookies at Doubletree.
Speaker 2:I'm sure that's not the first person someone said yeah, these are totally for other people.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's fair.
Speaker 5:There's been so many various memories. This year is wild that I get to co-chair the very last RailsConf Super special feeling. But, honestly, the one memory that I think about the most was a few years after starting doing screencasts and things, I got to go to my first RailsConf in Atlanta. I forget what year, that was 2015. And I was super awkward. I didn't know anybody at all and grabbed lunch, went through the line just occasionally talking awkwardly with other people, and then try and find a table to sit down at and I'm like is anybody sitting here? And they're like nope, come sit with us. And then somebody goes.
Speaker 5:I heard your voice in the office last week and I was like this is weird. And that was the first time that I realized all these videos I'd made and published on the internet and I get to see views and maybe an avatar and a comment or something and really actually got to interact with people who are listening to the screencast or even listening to the podcast. You don't get to interact with all the people or know who is all listening to it. So that's forever ingrained in my brain as just one of those moments. It was like, oh, this is what it's all about the community and everything, so that was a good time.
Speaker 2:My favorite memory has to do with meeting one of our Ruby celebrities, Nadia Oduayo. I met her the first time, and I think it was Kansas City when she gave the Game Theory keynote. I met her very briefly, in passing, in the hallway. She overheard the conversation I was having with somebody that was going to game night that night and she expressed dismay that she wasn't able to go to game night because she already had plans for the evening. But then I ended up following her on Twitter and interacting with her on Twitter over the next several years and then last year at RailsConf, after her amazing keynote, I went up to say hi and say she did an amazing job and she remembered me from our Twitter interactions, not from before. At RailsConf we just started talking again. I was like, oh yeah, she's really awesome and we've had conversations since then.
Speaker 2:I got to work with her on SpeakerLine, her open source project for showing CFP submissions so that people coming into the community can get an idea of how people do these. I got to work on that with her last year at the Hack Day, which was super fun, If any of you have the opportunity to do the Hack Day like we had today and last year at the hack day, which was super fun, If any of you have the opportunity to do hack day like we had today and last year. So it's kind of a surreal experience having the maintainer there at the table with you. Load up the project, clone it from GitHub and within five minutes I found a bug. There was an edit screen that wasn't reusing the form partial, it was just doing it in line, so it didn't do everything correctly. It's like, oh well, here's a PR to fix this bug. That was already in the application and it was really kind of oh wow, maybe contributing to open source wasn't as difficult and hard as I thought it was.
Speaker 3:I actually have another story about Hack Day.
Speaker 2:Oh, please do.
Speaker 3:It's okay to share. So I think it was last year at RailsConf. There was a ThoughtBot table that I felt obligated to be at because I worked there and I had not contributed to any of ThoughtBot's open source at that point yet, but I was just kind of there to help other people do it, even though I hadn't done it myself, and I honestly was there to hang out more than anything. But then a couple of people showed up and were actually interested in doing it and I was like, okay, I'll do it too. And the three of us managed to close an issue on FactoryBot together. And yeah, I got to kind of at that person who opened it and be like this is released now.
Speaker 3:And it was just one of those things that sometimes even it's not as difficult as you might think, it can be just as easy as like hmm, let's look of those things that sometimes even it's not as difficult as you might think, it can be just as easy as like hmm, like, let's look at the things that are good. First issues, even without the maintainer present, I think, yeah, I was a fake, a fake open source contributor that day, but I guess now I officially am on the little screen on the little screen.
Speaker 2:Having someone who's kind of an authority of the open source project. Having someone there in person I found was super helpful to lowering that bar. That was kind of an intimidation factor almost, because anonymized internet communication you can't read tone, you can't read body language it's really easy to take something that's said in a very different way than how it was meant. So having someone there at the table where you could just look up and be like I have a question about this thing how do you want to approach this problem and actually have that conversation face-to-face was so beneficial to getting started.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's a really good point. I do think it's validating to be like I think I would do this and just for someone else to be like yeah, that sounds reasonable to me. There is no authoritative way to do it, but having a buddy to just be like, yeah, what you're saying makes sense, I think, is really valuable.
Speaker 2:Okay, For our next question what is one thing you would build into Rails if you were given complete and free reign to add something to Rails?
Speaker 1:I mean authentication's there now. So I think it's complete right.
Speaker 5:I'd add registration. Just authentication doesn't have registration.
Speaker 1:I mean I got nothing Authentication's in there, I think I do.
Speaker 5:Are there any features you almost always add, though?
Speaker 2:I'm surprised Chris hasn't jumped in with ActiveRecord search yet.
Speaker 5:So search yet so that's coming search would be nice. Yeah, not there yet search.
Speaker 1:Final answer.
Speaker 3:Chat. I feel like that's something that I have had to add to a lot of apps. Yeah, I don't actually stand by that answer, by the way. I'm just saying that File uploads is a good example, rich text.
Speaker 5:And then it's like, at that point, what else? Maybe most applications need notifications, but that means such a vast different thing to every single person. It's a pretty tricky question. I feel like, yeah, every app needs search, but different types of search might be more important for certain applications. And then, once it's in there, you got to maintain it forever, forever.
Speaker 1:Forever. That's one of the nice things about Rails. If it's not there, there's a gem for that too, and so it's sort of hard to be like, well, what needs to be in Rails? It's like, well, what does every application need? Probably most need notifications, but maybe not all of them, and there's a great notice gem to do notifications and almost anything I can think like, is there something I almost always add? I'm trying to think of the gems I add. I'm like, does it need to be in Rails or is it just so happens that I build those types of applications? I don't know if it needs to be in Rails, where everyone is going to use this.
Speaker 2:I don't know what I would add into Rails. Lately I've kind of had this sense that there's a lot of things that have evolved recently in a lot of areas of Rails, but that the front end has been pretty static, I feel like, for a while, and so I feel like we're doing some new thoughts and new ways of doing the front end maybe. But I mean we have Hotwire and Stimulus and and turbo, which I love and adore and wish I could work with more, and so maybe it's more. Just what I'm feeling is I need to work with that more, and since I don't get to do that in my day job, yeah, I was gonna ask if you were talking about html rendering or javascript or components or all of the above probably all of the above.
Speaker 2:Yeah, professionally, I'm stuck using view js right now and so, and so I would really love to be able to do Hotwire and Turbo and Stimulus.
Speaker 5:There are worse things than Vuejs.
Speaker 2:I can confirm, I think I've worked with some of the worst things as well, and thankfully I'm not there anymore, but still, it's just kind of like I really wish I was doing something a little bit different.
Speaker 3:I was just reminded of Robbie Russell's talk yesterday. That was the Rails features we loved, lost and laughed at, and I was kind of like, oh yeah, there's so many things that have been taken out of Rails over time right, because it turns out that they weren't quite right for just Rails itself. And there were things that he said like, oh, here's some features that we laughed at, are kind of are no longer, and I'm like, oh, that actually sounds like a really good idea. Like the observers one, I was like, oh, I can see how that would have been useful. I did not live through that era, so collective wisdom is helping me out there, so I don't know, I think just. The point I'm trying to make, though, is that I think it's really cool that things that we thought would be really useful we've learned from and just be like, oh, actually, maybe that's not. And then it is a living thing.
Speaker 5:Yeah, you reminded me of the very first Rails app.
Speaker 5:I worked on some of the Zooniverse projects. This portion of the app that I was working on was all active resource and so we had one Rails app that was a repository of CMS content and we would sync that across Rails applications so some of them would update content, but we had a central app that you would do all the writing and categorization and administration stuff in there and then we'd sync the content across. And the idea of making API requests look like ActiveRecord requests sounded cool and I thought it was really awesome. And then very quickly you're like, wait a minute, joins don't make sense across a network like that. This is not a database and I can see pretty quickly because I think that got deprecated right around when I was getting into Rails or whatever and I was like, well, it seems really awesome. But then you start using it and you're like, well, actually the conceptual compression doesn't quite match up to what actually is happening here behind the scenes and that one's really interesting to look back on and see that.
Speaker 3:I actually think that it could be awesome for the right person or team. I met someone earlier who was like I'm looking for people who are into active resource because it's still kicking for them, and I think that's one of those things. That's okay. Actually, this would be good outside of Rails as a separate gem, right, and maybe it's not something that we all need, but it will work. That's what you need. I think it's not something that we all need, but it will work.
Speaker 2:That's what you need. I think it's kind of funny because I had the exact same experience that you did, Chris, where I ran into Active Resource and I was like, oh wow, this is kind of cool, and at the moment I tried to use it, it was just like this isn't quite working the way I thought it would. So those are all the questions that we had brainstormed for the session. Should we take some questions from the audience, If there's anybody that would like to ask a question? Yeah, Anton, why don't you come up here and I'll hand you the mic?
Speaker 4:Hi everyone. I have one question about your first ever podcast you ever made. It was a while ago probably, and I'm curious what was your last trigger to make this very first podcast, and whether it was intentional or situational. Maybe you made a podcast just for yourself and then decided to publish it.
Speaker 1:I have to blame two people for my show. I have to blame Jason Sweat, because I listened to him do a podcast, where he's like my podcast is basically an excuse to talk to people that I wouldn't normally have an excuse to talk to and I was like that's a great idea, I'm stealing that. And then I didn't actually do anything and I was texting with Andrew Mason one night and I was like one of these days I'll do it, one of these days I'll do it. And he's like let's do it right now. Of my ADHD brain, that was like all right, we're doing it now, let's go. And that's how my podcast came to be.
Speaker 3:So it's Andrew Mason's fault. I luckily inherited a podcast and that came with an audience, so that was very nice. But, yeah, there have been many different iterations or seasons and life cycles of the bike shed, so prior co-hosts include Derek and Sage, and I listened regularly to Chris Toomey and Steph Curry. If folks remember that era and this was before I worked at Thoughtbot I thought they were so just like relatable, thought they were my speaking of parasocial relationships, I had one and, yeah, then I got to know them once I started working there and Joel was the one who invited me to kind of co-host the show with him and I was terrified, but it was one of those things that's like, oh, I think this is uncomfortable in like the good way that people say is required to grow as a person. So that's how it happened for me.
Speaker 5:Our first episode was, I think, just Jason Charnes and I would hop on Zoom and talk about Rails and life and random stuff, and he was trying to do an online meetup and it was just so hard to get speakers every month and organize that and just get people to attend a Zoom call. So he tried that a few times and we were just talking about those things over Zoom ourselves and we were like, why don't we just turn it into a podcast and we can just have our therapy session together and record it and publish that on the internet. And that's really it. We didn't want to do any editing or anything. We just wanted to sit down, record and click upload.
Speaker 5:And over time that got a little trickier. We're like you have issues with audio one time or background noise or something, and you do need editing. So over time we got Paul Thank God for Paul, our editor and our sponsors make that possible and everything and so it's evolved over time, but it was literally just yeah, people might find this interesting, but who cares? It doesn't matter if anybody listens to this or not. We just thought we would record it and click publish. That was it.
Speaker 3:I actually have a funny story. I don't think I've shared this with you before, but I was talking to Brittany Martin one time because she hosted the Ruby on Rails podcast and I was telling her about all of my fears about hosting the bike shed and just I did feel like I was kind of stepping into some big shoes that I had to fill. And then she was like have you ever listened to Remote Ruby? They just get on there and and talk, and so you'll be fine.
Speaker 5:Well, that's good. Yeah, Part of it too is you want to share your personality. Some podcasts do make sense to be scripted and everything, and we're like that's not us, we're just going to wing it and whatever. But it also helps people connect with you too, or whatever. But that's also one of the funny things. Coming to a conference, Someone will say hi and you're like it feels like we've been friends for a long time. But I don't know if I know this person Well. They know you really well because they've listened to the podcast. And they come up and say hi, and that's another cheat code and you're like we're automatically friends because you've listened to the podcast, and that's pretty fun.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's never a weird thing where someone to come up and tell me that they listen. It's always a good thing, it's always really sweet, it's always very flattering. So if that is something that you've been nervous about, I promise you that people are mostly completely just grateful that you're talking to them, engaging with them about it.
Speaker 2:And Stephanie, it's kind of funny that you mentioned Brittany Martin, because I was going to tell a story about her too.
Speaker 3:Yeah, go for it.
Speaker 2:I think this was two years ago I don't remember exactly when it was Because she was running the Ruby on Rails podcast and I just had so many questions for her about how to start a podcast Because even then I was like I wanted to do it. I had no idea how and idea how, and trying to find a niche that worked for me for a podcast was a struggle. And so she basically was like well, why don't you come on to the Ruby on Rails podcast and then you can ask me the questions that you want to ask? And so that was my first experience podcasting was being one of her guests on the Ruby on Rails podcast. I think I can say that literally was a huge help of inspiration of us, kind of like because she had that Google Doc that she would send to guests of the questions that you'd be talking about. So like, okay, I've got a sense now for how I can do this, for how I can do prep, for how I can do the scheduling, and just having that kind of guest introduction to podcasting before trying to do it on my own was a really big help.
Speaker 2:Mr Alan Reidelhoover, apparently you have another question how do you get guests? To come on your podcast.
Speaker 5:You want to come on our podcast? I'd love to.
Speaker 1:You've already been on my podcast. Yeah, I'm actually terrible at that. Vast majority of my guests have either been friends or I was like shit, I need an episode. Will you come on real quick, because I don't have an episode? Or they will ask me. Someone will come and say hey, I'm working on X and I really want to talk about it. Can I come on your show and talk about it Because you have a good format for whatever? Yeah, that's great. You did the work for me. I need to get better at actually approaching people and saying you should come on my show.
Speaker 3:I've done it maybe once with Aaron, who still hasn't been on my show. I've cold emailed people to be on the bike show before and it works out well, I think. Kind of like what I was saying earlier, it's flattering for people. You know, like I think most people actually feel really good to receive an invitation, so in fact you're doing them a favor is how I like to think about it. But I've been in the same boat where it has been like oh shoot, we're recording and I need a friend. But when I do have a little bit more capacity and I think you all spoke to it earlier it's like who do you want to meet? It's a really good reason to reach out to them and the worst that can happen is you don't get a response. But most of us don't get responses to our emails sometimes.
Speaker 5:Yeah, that's a really good point. We've had people on our podcast that I've never dreamed of. Adam Wathen and Derek Sivers was on our podcast and we're like it's wild that Derek Sivers was on there. He did Rails a long time ago really, almost before I was even a Rails developer, but I remember seeing his blog posts and stuff and to ask somebody to be on the podcast, like you said, it's an honor for them, but also like they get to share stories and it's a benefit to their audience too. So like we can invite somebody on like Adam Wathen and he's like well, cool, this is like we would just hang out and love to chat privately anyways, but we can have that conversation and then I get a lot more out of it than just that, so he can share that with his audience and stuff.
Speaker 5:And I feel like that's another reason why people seem overly happy to say yes. I've been always surprised that I don't know that anybody's ever really said, nah, sorry, I don't want to be on there. They feel honored and it's always because I have so many questions I want you on the show. Let's dig into all these different things like your background and how'd you get here and what are you doing and what are you doing next? It's just pure interest that they're like. Well, yeah, of course I'll be on.
Speaker 3:So yeah, I was actually just thinking about how in the email inbox for the bike shed, we actually got a lot of people saying I'll be on your podcast, have me on your podcast. But you know, a lot of the times this was just SEO kind of mostly spam. That I did remember seeing one email about, like a motorbike mechanic or something who wanted to be on the bike shed because they didn't know that the bike shed was actually about tech and rails. So, yeah, I think when you do have that platform, you're actually in a really good position to be like can I use this as an opportunity for other people? And people usually are grateful for it, including potential motorbike mechanics.
Speaker 1:Yeah, see, I don't have that problem. I have a very SEO optimized name. Everybody knows what's going on on my podcast and what we're talking about.
Speaker 2:Yeah, for me. Because of the nature of the podcast I was doing and I wanted to get a wide variety of opinions and perspectives on RailsConf, I had to be really proactive about who I emailed and invited on the show. But every now and then I'd have someone on the show and they would give me referrals to other people. Probably the principal example of this for me was, again, nadia, because she's awesome. After I had her on the show she connected me to Chad Fowler so that then I could have him on the show and talk about the whole inception of RailsConf and Ruby Central and how that all started. And so the proactivity has to be there. But at the same time, when someone comes on the show, if they've got, hey, you should go talk to that person over there. Those opportunities are amazing. Any other questions from the audience? How do you come up with a?
Speaker 5:constant stream of fresh ideas that are interesting to the audience.
Speaker 3:I feel personally attacked by this question because Joelle and I would struggle to have a fresh backlog of ideas every single week. I don't know if you're asking this for yourself or just kind of to share our process with people, but we would get together every I don't know like every quarter or something and try to just bang out a bunch of trail cards to add to our list. But there was always, oh what's, something that has felt relevant to us during that given week, if we've been working on that for client work. But yeah, I actually think that maybe we should have taken something out of the playbook of asking the audience of like, what do you want to hear us talk about on the bike shed, Because you all seem to have lots of questions. I don't know where you all were when we were trying to fill out topics.
Speaker 5:If we don't have guests, it can be like a little redundant week to week. You know, I'm still working on the same project I was working on last week, so that can be quite a challenge. But yeah, sometimes we just get worked up about something and we're like we're going to rant about the asset pipeline this week or whatever. But trying to keep an eye on what's new in Rails or Ruby occasionally helps go down the rabbit hole of some various things or whatever you haven't looked into and you're like you know what? I'm not entirely sure all the details of how frozen string literals work. So I'm going to go look at that and we can talk about that this week or whatever.
Speaker 2:And thankfully we have this whole ecosystem of gems and things that there's always something new and interesting coming out from somebody that it's usually not hard to find. Something it's like oh, I don't know anything about acidic job. Maybe I can go deep, dive into that and talk to Steven and get to know that a little bit better.
Speaker 1:You're lucky too. You can just talk about Stripe every episode and have something to talk about. Right, I'm lucky. I have the same format for every show same three questions. It's just up to the person coming on the show to talk about whatever they're excited about, and that makes it really easy to just keep the episode rolling and everything the three questions are there is just guardrails to keep us from going completely up I think we have time for one more question.
Speaker 2:Andrew mason over there. Hey y'all big fan. I wanted to ask y'all what is one guest from each of y'all's shows that has been very influential or that left a lasting impression on y'all? I'll go first because I've already said her name twice, so we'll go for the trifecta. Nadia Odoayo is amazing, awesome human being, awesome story. She was one of the people that I ran this idea for the podcast by last year and she was so supportive and amazing Connecting me to Chad Fowler. Just everything about my experience and interactions with her has been amazing.
Speaker 1:So that's my pick why those episodes are special to me is because we end up talking about ADHD a lot, which for a while not so much now, but when I first started the show it was tough for me to talk about having it. It still felt bad to say I have ADHD or to be medicated for something. And being able to talk about it so openly with you helped me a lot and I hope it helped people who listen to the episodes. So those are some of my special episodes.
Speaker 3:I had Steph Curry on the show, like a return of her on the show and I don't know. We got to be a little bit campy and be like, oh, stephanie and Stephanie. But yeah, I mean, like I mentioned, as someone who got to listen to her on the bike shed with Chris, long before I ever imagined I would be hosting the show, it did feel really special and, yeah, at that point we were just kind of getting to talk as friends on the show and I also hope that for listeners it was a really nice, just a way to catch up with what she was up to.
Speaker 5:Man, there's so many conversations, but there are several people that I remember like we recorded the episode and we hit stop recording and then we talked for another two hours and I wish I continued recording Jose Valim was one of them that we could have talked for eight hours straight about everything. And those are always like man, there was such a good conversation and we could have just kept going and going. And I don't know, sometimes you really deeply connect with the guests like that and they're just super interesting and you just say, wow, I can't believe we just had that conversation and I'm hungry and I've had to go to the bathroom for like two hours now. But just incredibly grateful for those moments and things, and I wish so badly that I didn't hit the stop recording button. Who cares if it's a four-hour long podcast Watch Lex Friedman and his podcasts are ridiculously long sometimes and if the conversation is good, just let it keep going, All right.
Speaker 2:Well, we're out of time and we've got another panel coming in next. So thank you all for joining us on Ruby Podcast Panel today and I hope you enjoy the rest of the conference.
Speaker 5:Thanks for listening.
