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Genadi Samokovarov - Balkan Ruby organizer
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Since the first moment I met Genadi I felt “this guy is great to be around“!
In this episode he talks about the 🇧🇬 ruby community, organising conferences, his current work and open source history.
Find Genadi http://gsamokovarov.com/
Balkan Ruby https://balkanruby.com/
Join Sofia local ruby meetup https://rubybanitsa.com/
Balkan Ruby Conference Organizer Insights
Speaker 1hey everyone , welcome to another friendly show episode . Uh , this is a quick one at balcony , ruby , and we are here with uh , with our host , genadis , and , yeah , we'd like to have a chat with you . Like uh , personally , as a , as a conference organizer , I would like to know what , what does a conference mean to you , why , why would you go to a conference and , of course , why put this conference on like this amazing platform ?
Speaker 2true , thank you for keeping guys . So hello everyone , I'm the nice and curve . I don't talk and really so I don't know . The conferences for me kind of started randomly because I went to oracle in salzburg back in 2015 and I learned that it travels . I was like can you go to sofia ? And it did come to something kind of pitched it and it worked , uh , and I really enjoyed that . I really enjoyed the party .
Speaker 2I really enjoyed the you know , enjoy the idea of you know this , learning you know in a very casual setting okay , so you organized a record in soviet in 2016 2016 .
Speaker 12016 . Just visiting your first conference and said OK , I want this next year .
Speaker 2Yeah , it was like a gimmick . I was like this thing travels .
Speaker 1Can we try it ? I know , let's do it .
Speaker 2I was very proactive and eager and , yes , somehow it happened . People voted for us and with El Ruko 2016 , we got hooked . It kind of worked for us . It the work of 2016 . We got hooked . It kind of worked for us . It was a good experience and it gave us a lot of good contacts with speakers . I used to do some open source work . I contributed to rails a bit , so I had some contacts with the community and I invited a lot of people and they came okay so that's good so this was like a good , uh good start for me .
Speaker 3No and back in those ancient times how many attendees uh came to sofia for a recall almost 700 , so it was so my first event was a very big one but it was just you know it was the same as balcony single track conference , uh , two days , uh , seven talks a day , something like this .
Speaker 2Okay , so I got my start in conference organizing with that and I kind of got hooked because I I really enjoy , enjoy this . It's a lot of work yeah yeah , but face , yeah , it pays emotionally and I just I just like it . Yeah , so I don't have like a super deeper meaning . I don't want to change the world or something . Yeah , do something good for want to change the world or something . Yeah , do something good for ruby . It's more selfish in a bit . Yeah , in a way , I really enjoy . I really enjoy this .
Speaker 1I really enjoy us being here , and now , now that I have kids , it's getting harder and harder for me to travel yeah , so just making this here it kind of kind of makes sense you want to go to conferences , so you run your own , so everybody else comes kind of makes sense .
Speaker 2You want to go to conferences , so you run your own , so everybody else comes closely . Yeah , yeah , I really , I really I really enjoy this and I think it's good for our community because we get to meet you folks and we get to make some contacts . It's not necessarily like a good business for us , but it's good experience for us .
Speaker 3Yeah and what is the bulgarian ruby community like um it's ?
Speaker 2it's kind of a small , I think , like everywhere , but not so small . It's pretty good . To be honest , I really , I really enjoy it . Um , as you can see , bosh , the rally in this conference . It's , it's good . It's pretty technical . We have , I think , some very interesting technical work that we do , um , but we don't organize as much . If I don't do it , we probably won't have .
Speaker 1So the meetup is called ruby bonita .
Speaker 2So besides balkan ruby , I run the local meetup which is called ruby banica .
Speaker 3Okay , which is a fun story it's .
Speaker 2But euroco started it as well for europe . You ordered way too much banister , this local pastry , so banister is this local pastry that we have here in bulgaria . Uh , and we , we saw that we weren't gonna eat it , but we already paid for it . So we said to the vendor please don't bake this bun , it's tomorrow . Just leave those 50 kilos and you just have it throughout the year .
Speaker 2Oh my god , that's interesting and for us to have the balance of the year . Oh my God , that's interesting For us to have the Banica throughout the year . We have like 50 kilos of Banica in the back of the building In credit In credit . Yeah , so we started this event and we called it Rui Banica . That's awesome . I think it's a nice name , so it's stuck . So we started having Rui Banica before Balkan Ruby . That's amazing .
Speaker 3How much do we still have ?
Speaker 2Oh , no , no , we already ate it .
Speaker 1We ate it throughout one year , maybe Because you had meetup , so that's great we had the meetup .
Speaker 2So we started the meetup in 2017 maybe and , yeah , we went to the Balkan Ruby in 2017 , but it was already autumn . So we had another crazy idea . We started another conference called PartialConf . It was about functional programming on the web . I was learning elm all the time . Do you remember this thing ?
Speaker 2yes , yes , yes , it's kind of like haskell , like yes yes , uh , for the web and um , I was able to , we were able to pull off , uh , this functional conference for two years and next year , in 2018 , it was the first edition of alcan ruby .
Speaker 1Okay , and it's it's all right , did the function ? I think I feel like every developer has this functional period where you know I want a new professional program . Did that pass on ? And they said , okay , I'm back to ruby . I want to do a ruby in a way .
Speaker 2But what state for me is like maybe the react way of thinking for uh , okay , ux design so I think this was helpful for helpful for me and because of of Ruby , we had good contact with the Elixir community and we had Sasha Juric and Mihael Muskeva . So , yeah , we had a good room with .
Speaker 3Elixir . And talking more about the local community , what are the biggest Bulgarian Ruby companies ?
Speaker 2So I work for one of those . I work for Dexcom . We are a product company and we are making software for accountants Not necessarily accounting software , not this one . We found our own niche where we can help accountants and we make software for them .
Speaker 3Not accounting software for accountants .
Speaker 2Really , yeah , what we do . Our biggest product is called Dexprepare and we do data extraction . So we try to automate the most error prone , tedious and boring work of the accountants , which is inputting the client counting data into the accounting system . So we are using machine learning . Before it was cool to extract data out of documents , receipts , invoices , all kinds of documents . We can figure out the currency , the tax , the line items , everything and input it into the system . So we used to have no humans to actually go through it and train our models . But now , with the bigger models , we we're using less and less , you know , human , but we still need some to just to be accurate . You know .
Speaker 3Are you using gpt or yama ?
Speaker 2um , not for our main , uh , main work . We have our own for that . Yeah , okay , yeah .
Speaker 1Nice .
Speaker 3Proprietary AI .
Speaker 2Yeah , so yeah , we do utilize some of the Archer models because it helps us get some results quicker , because it reduces our training time , like if a feature training training feature would take us like a half a year .
Speaker 1It can now take us much less because regarding , I want to get back to the conference . Uh again , sure , uh , we haven't seen all the talks .
Speaker 2We have , I think , three left which one did you like the most ? I always enjoy borschtar stocks . Okay , I think his uh , uh , his talks are very personal , very straight . How can I say it in English ? They're fun and they're also real , real yeah you see , yeah . I was very interested about how he monetizes it and , yeah , he's a very , very fun lecture . Yeah , very fun speakers to be honest .
Speaker 1Yes , and he said it right like there was . Those were like very uh cool subjects that he approached and those are some issues yeah , but I am looking looking forward for next talk I think everybody is looking for next . He should have some , uh , something fun . Something fun , yeah , something to remember for us to remember the other talks as well .
Speaker 2I think , yeah , yeah yeah , so this year we're running this business team , so I don't think that balcony is a business conference . I think we are a ruby conference by hand . Yeah and uh , it was like calling games now . It was like like a marketing trick this business team but I think it was very . It's very timely . It's very timely with the current market .
Speaker 1Yeah , I think it turned on very well I think I was talking with some other friends like , uh , right now there are a lot of layoffs and I think a lot of developers are now thinking , hey , maybe I got laid off , maybe this is my you know , kick in the bottle , maybe start something , start a product , and a lot of people are interested in this business in the business teams . Yeah , I think it's very timely .
Speaker 2I think it's very timely and we have to be more focused now because , because of this , where we spent our attention from like what , what kind of products do we build ? And ruby and rails are especially suitable for like , yeah , indie developers , one-man teams , like a lot of talk .
Speaker 1You see , he built it all himself Pretty fucking good , but and he still has time to make talks and build gems and everything that is a gem . I don't know if you've seen his talks .
Speaker 3I really like that . Some conferences are specialized , uh specialize , for example , of Russell RB is like hardcore technical talks and Vulcan is like uh , between the Ruby and business .
Speaker 2Yeah , I think I like to think that we used to be a bit more technical one , but you know , since this is our first event in five years , vulcan Ruby started to happen , to happen in 2018 , 2019 . We're going to have an event in 2020 .
Evolution of BalkanRubando Events
Speaker 2But you know , the world changed then . So COVID hit us and we changed , the world changed . We grew up as a people , as people . We have kids now and one of my kids has a disability , so we kind of changed and our interests changed , yes , as well . Yeah , so I think BalkanRubando is kind of a reflection of us and the way we like to run the events . Um , so now we were interested in business . Who knows , uh , maybe next year we'll run something else .
Speaker 3Well , this year we are not having the rail sauce that we had in greece last year , so this is like , uh , the subject . This is a beautiful renaissance for us .
Speaker 2The perfect replacement , yeah , yeah and you see , uh first , uh , the first announcement maybe for for the show we will run back room again .
Speaker 1Wow , that's perfect expressivity , cool . Well , thank you so much , kenadi . Thank you for having us , thank you for this amazing conference together and looking forward to
