The Ruby Gems Podcast
A Ruby Central podcast that takes an inside look at the people, projects, and progress shaping the Ruby community. Discover the gems in Ruby and connect to this vibrant group of amazing people.
The Ruby Gems Podcast
Irina Nazarova: SFRuby Conf
Irina Nazarova shares her journey revitalizing San Francisco's Ruby community through local meetups and the upcoming SF Ruby Conference. She explains her mission to connect startups with Ruby developers while creating opportunities in a challenging job market.
• Moved to San Francisco in January 2024 and restarted the dormant Ruby meetup
• First meetup attracted about 160 signups with approximately 100 attendees
• Creates opportunities for developers to connect with Ruby companies like Cisco Meraki, Chime, and Figma
• Ensures each meetup features at least one presentation from a Ruby startup
• Organizing the first San Francisco Ruby Conference at Fort Mason in November
• Conference will feature "Ruby Startup Demos" and a panel of CTOs from $10B+ Rails companies
• Identifies challenges in making Ruby accessible to newcomers
• Believes languages optimized for humans like Ruby may have advantages in the AI age
• Recommends Inertia Rails gem for integrating Rails with modern frontend frameworks
Join us at the SF Ruby meetup whenever you're on the West Coast and submit your talk! Check out our conference this November and become part of our vibrant community.
Welcome to the RubyGems podcast brought to you by Ruby Central, where we uncover the stories behind the code. We're your hosts.
David Hill:I'm Marty Hutt and I'm David Hill, and we're thrilled to have Irina Nazarova with us today. Irina is a key figure in the San Francisco Ruby community and works with Evil Martians, the renowned consultancy known for their open source contributions and innovative web development work. She's been instrumental in organizing both the local SF Ruby meetup and the upcoming SF Ruby conference happening this November right in San Francisco. Whether you're a longtime Rubyist or new to the community, irina brings a wealth of experience in building and nurturing developer communities, and we're excited to hear her insights on what makes the SF Ruby scene so vibrant. Thanks for joining us today, arena.
Irina Nazarova:Hey Marty, hey David, Thanks so much for having me. I feel super shy after this intro, but let's move on.
Marty Haught:It's all good. It's all good. Now you're currently in Porto, right?
Irina Nazarova:That's right. Yep, yeah, we're on top of my movements. Yeah, I just thoroughly enjoyed friendly rb in bucharest. That was dope, that was crazy. And now I'm kind of in between the conferences now. So uruka is starting in a couple days in vienna de castella, which is super close to porto, and I decided I'm going to spend a few days in Porto and recharge and work. Try to answer all the emails.
Marty Haught:Oh yes, that's kind of the lovely thing about doing that Ruby Triathlon in Europe where you have time in between each conference so you can enjoy sort of your locale there where you're visiting. Yeah.
Irina Nazarova:Yeah, it's pretty crazy. Porto is beautiful. You should all come visit.
Marty Haught:I wanted to stay too, but I have a lot to do and I couldn't stay in europe for several weeks.
David Hill:So alas, I did apply to do the mc job for yoroku because I thought it's in portugal and I speak portuguese. It'd be great to go to portugal and actually have an excuse to make that trip, but so many trips I want to take now and it's like, oh, there's not enough time and not enough money to make all of them happen.
Marty Haught:Well, speaking of conferences, I am looking forward to coming to SF Ruby in November and I'm wondering, irina, if you can tell us sort of what inspired you to start SF Ruby, because this is the first year, right, this is the first actual time.
Irina Nazarova:Yeah, start SFRuby, because this is the first year. Right, this is the first actual time. Yeah, that's the first one and it's really just a continuation, logical continuation, of the SFRuby meetup. So the story is this I moved to San Francisco in January 2024. And I mean, I knew some people we have clients and most clients are based in San Francisco but I kind of didn't have friends. Oh yeah, to have my real connections, real friends, something more continuous, something deeper than just meeting people now and then.
Irina Nazarova:Yeah, and I figured there, apparently, of course there was a Ruby meetup in San Francisco before COVID and basically almost everywhere around the world. It kind of died during COVID and it was not restarted. And actually Brandon Weaver was looking to restart it and we talked about it. I just remembered, I almost forgot. We talked about it when I visited the year before, kind of like half a year before. So he wanted to restart it and he told me about it, but when I moved, you know, he still didn't do it and he also kind of got a new job and knew he was kind of busy.
Irina Nazarova:He's at One Medical now you know stuff like that. So I decided I'm going to try. And yeah, just to be honest, just met some folks from GitHub and asked if they could host us and they have this very nice venue which is GitHub headquarters, and they have this very nice venue which is GitHub headquarters and they host a lot of meetups.
Irina Nazarova:So, yeah, I created a page on Luma, which is where all the kind of like at least San Francisco and maybe New York based meetups are usually, you know, using this platform for events. And yep, we got started and I think the first one got something like 160 signups. I was inspired by that.
Marty Haught:Whoa.
Irina Nazarova:Of course we don't have 100%. We have like 35% show up rate from the signups which is pretty low, like only a third yeah, only a third.
Irina Nazarova:I would say some of them that are we cannot advertise less. They have higher percentage, strangely, but it's how it is. You know things come up, but we had a very nice crowd there. I think that first meetup, of course, had much higher show up rate. I think we had about 100 people because it was. It was only what I. I invited people personally on LinkedIn, so I would go to LinkedIn. I have a paid account for work and I searched Ruby on Rails people in San Francisco and I would just send them direct messages inviting them to the meetup.
Irina Nazarova:Oh, wow, okay them direct messages inviting them to the meetup. Oh wow, okay, it had cool conversion. It had also good responses. I had responses like wow, I was looking to, I didn't know about, I mean, I want to go, maybe I kind of go right now, but you know, I really want to go. So it was all inspired by this demand. I think there was a demand in the community. That's what I'm trying to say. It's there, it exists. I believe it exists and how I know it is. The second meetup was actually not organized by me. Folks from New Relic reached out themselves and then I helped a bit. But I remember the second meetup was born out of the first one. I mean not going to lie with some of them, I still have to promote them and search for a venue.
Marty Haught:It's not like it's all solved, it's always yeah.
Irina Nazarova:It's still some work, but I feel the pull and the main pull is from the audience and the people. People want to be in person with each other. People want to find jobs. This is other People want to find jobs. This is important right now, right.
Marty Haught:Right.
Irina Nazarova:We still have a very kind of tricky job market where opportunities exist but finding a job is really hard. So the local meetup in San Francisco. We are privileged to have a lot of companies, a lot of Ruby companies.
Marty Haught:Yeah.
Irina Nazarova:They are hiring. For example, I don't know, Cisco Meraki was hiring a lot, Chime was hiring a lot towards their IPO All of those companies. Now Figma is hiring Ruby developers and they hosted us. That's fun.
Marty Haught:Yeah.
Irina Nazarova:So lots of things like that that are simply fascinating and I think I keep learning about this. So, for example, I just learned about company's company, omada Health, and they IPO'd this year and I didn't know it.
Marty Haught:Wow.
Irina Nazarova:They are on Ruby on Rails and I guess what I'm trying to say is I'm uncovering so much new information, new stuff and this kind of willingness of people to network, get connected, also share. So for the meetup, I'm trying to kind of target this idea that there must be a talk from a startup on every meetup, because this is very specific for San Francisco that we have so many startups, very specific for San Francisco that we have so many startups. In some way, startups are not often are not the part of the same information space. Sometimes they're kind of excluded from the same networks versus people working for larger companies that go to conferences. One of our meetups was hosted by Y Combinator and this of course, helped us get kind of like in front of a lot of startups.
Irina Nazarova:And for the startups to pay attention, because they may be not reading Rails Reddit or my Twitter, which they should, of course, yeah of course, but you know, focusing on other things, right, right.
Irina Nazarova:Which is fine, but this is what we're doing, and now, with the conference, the idea is that just to kind of take it one step further and make it a very meaningful experience for everybody, have people come to San Francisco for this and for not just the locals, but people from the United States and from around the world to be connected. My main goal is actually to connect Ruby startups with the Ruby community.
Marty Haught:Yeah.
Irina Nazarova:So that community gets inspired, hears those stories Also. For startups it's easier to hire when they know great engineers. Also think about this. Community learns what startups need, what their needs are, what's missing, what the gaps are and the gaps are, of course, different than the gaps that maybe Shopify, github have.
Irina Nazarova:Those are different gaps and I was learning about this in my also startups on Rails interviews that I was kind of doing at the same time. It was all kind of happening at the same time Because 2054 was when I also applied to RailsConf with the talk startups on Rails Right and also got connected to a lot of startups doing interviews with them. So, yeah, so my kind of mission is to connect startups and the community so that rails, rails, rails, ecosystem, ruby, ruby ecosystem are better serving the needs of those new fast-paced companies for sure, sure yeah.
Irina Nazarova:Because they are, in some way, the future. I think we should support those companies and also even learning their stories is also supporting us right, because we get inspired. We get maybe lots of folks want jobs at startups. Some folks don't want jobs at startups which is fair. Yeah, yeah, that's kind of the goal right To have it more to support startups. Some folks don't want jobs at startups, which is fair. Yeah, that's kind of the goal right To have it more to support startups.
David Hill:So, in terms of just organizing the conference, what kind of challenges have you faced? We used to have a lot of these regional conferences and along with everything else, they kind of died out with COVID. So it's awesome to see them starting to come back. But I assume there's kind of been a lot of loss of knowledge and experience in doing those things. So I was just kind of wondering what kind of challenges have you faced? What advice would you give someone looking to do something like that in their area?
Irina Nazarova:One of my thoughts is that I want this conference to be kind of transferable. So what I'm trying to say is I want this conference. This is now run by me, by us at Evil Martians mostly, and other people, but we have a very nice group of organizers and we'll share more about that. But if we run out of steam and if we are, I don't know, old and lazy, I don't know or maybe things happen right, life happens. I want to be able to actually pass it on and maybe figure out a nice way of doing this, because this is missing. This is missing. Eurocore, which is happening in Portugal this week, has a very nice way of transferring the conference to a new group of organizers every year. By the way, it's extremely hard, extremely stressful, I think, to pick up a conference and just organize it. By the way, eurocore led to the creation of so many European conferences. If you ask, oh, why are there so many European conferences? Why are there so many? It's because so many of them originally were started as a Yuruco.
Marty Haught:Yeah, and now you have.
Irina Nazarova:Baltic Ruby, balkan Ruby, wroclaw, friendly Okay, friendly didn't, but many, many of them. So that was difficult, that a lot of that continuation is not there, right? We could not connect. To be honest, I just got access to a Twitter account, sfruby and it's still complicated. So the guy who ran it very nice guy, bosco, we could only reach him on Signal.
Marty Haught:Okay.
Irina Nazarova:Somebody from the community managed to do it, so we're just super, super cool. But think about this and the problem is this account was active last time in 2012 wow maybe when twitter was still in reels.
Marty Haught:Okay yeah, maybe, yeah, maybe that yeah, maybe something.
Irina Nazarova:Wow, so maybe not. Yeah, so this is problematic and okay, the main thing that we could pass on, I mean, obviously, the domain names and the social media accounts and the different groups Although I got to say so, the old groups on meetupcom. I don't think they are all that useful, to be honest, because we have access to that. Thankfully, that group had many organizers about 50, and about 6,000 people. So imagine there is a group on meetupcom with 6,000 people and about 50 organizers and we post our meetup there and we get 10 signups.
Marty Haught:Yeah, meetup there and we get 10 signups.
Irina Nazarova:What I'm trying to say is that if something is old, then chances are people are not using it anymore and you should not really try to recover it. So don't waste time trying to recover those incredibly old resources. Maybe my experience is that people can I don't know stop getting. I don't know put editmeetupcom to spam or something like that. It's actually really hard to leave a group if you on meetupcom.
Marty Haught:Oh, I know, yeah, I know.
Irina Nazarova:They make it so that it's hard, I guess.
Marty Haught:Yeah.
Irina Nazarova:But what I would want to have is, of course, contacts with sponsors.
Marty Haught:But what I would want to have is of course, contacts with sponsors.
Irina Nazarova:Yeah, okay, yes, we have those big companies in San Francisco but, as any big company, an engineer in this company has no idea who to reach out to you because the org structure is so crazy. Some people know, some people don't, and when you have the right contact, things are just moving so much faster. When you have a bad contact, then things get lost and nobody responds, because in bigger that's how it works. A few resources where I'm checking who's using Ruby, because I'm even getting this list and I think this is important for the meetup or conference organizer to know which companies that have presence here in my area are on Ruby and on Rails. So we have using Rails from Andy Kroll, which is a nice list.
Irina Nazarova:What I'm trying to say. This was the auto-generated list, right, he's getting this metadata from some resources. It's not like it's a list where you have to sign up, because the lists where each company has to sign up, they are nice. We also have now multiple sites like this, but the problem is it's too short, it's too small. Those lists are not full. They're not going to be full, I guess. So we should pull data from, of course, the job postings. If somebody is looking for Ruby on Rails engineer, chances are they have some Ruby, and that's why I like rubyonremotecom. By the way, anybody looking for a job, a Ruby job, you should follow their social media. They have the best news, the best job openings opportunities. Of course, it's focused on remote jobs, but many of us do like that, so those two resources are useful. Other than that is just kind of the venue, the AV.
Irina Nazarova:Yeah yeah, furniture. Actually, we're not looking for the simple paths.
Marty Haught:Oh, okay.
Irina Nazarova:Yeah, we got the venue that I really liked. I really just love this place in Marina. Yeah, with the view of the Golden Gate Bridge, in a very safe neighborhood. There is a nice kind of like park on the hill, there's a marina you can walk. It's all super, super beautiful. Just the essence of San Francisco.
Marty Haught:Right Fort.
Irina Nazarova:Mason, the problem is it's empty. The venue is nice but it's kind of completely, yeah yeah, it's completely empty. So this means I mean there are, of course, more professional conferencing venues in the city where you have all the AV and chairs and everything is kind of solved for you. But luckily, I'm very grateful to everybody who's helping me my colleagues at Evil Martians and other folks from the Asafoetida community that are helping now, and we just had the first kind of organizers meeting last week. Okay, so people are involved.
Marty Haught:I want to say first of all, there's some very ingenious things you're doing around generating interest and reaching out both on the meetup level and on the conference level, that I think a lot of organizers don't do, and I think that really will make a difference. Yay for that. That's awesome.
David Hill:And also.
Marty Haught:I think the whole, like Fort Mason being this sort of blank canvas, is really special, because we've been to tons of conferences that are just the hotel ballroom, the convention center and they feel like that kind of space. When you can find a local venue that lets you kind of express yourself and create something unique. That's really special. And I know it's a lot of work you probably have. We'll hopefully have a decorator or whatever helping you with that, but, like that, gives you the opportunity to make something truly unique. So kudos to you.
Irina Nazarova:A hundred percent. A hundred percent, yeah, it's super cool and we have more space for different ideas and we have already a lot of secrets planned that I cannot reveal. Yeah, so it's going to be, I think, pretty special. Still, the main driver is the community and the real pull from both companies Companies that continue, by the way, reaching out, so we kind of have the full schedule, but Ruby companies, ruby startups, continue reaching out asking to demo, so we'll have Ruby startup demos.
Marty Haught:By the way.
Irina Nazarova:this is something that Boulder could do. Okay, not every location could do the Ruby startup demos, but a bunch of them could. I think Paris RB could do it. One of our Ruby demo startups is from Paris, it's Lago.
Marty Haught:Okay, yeah.
Irina Nazarova:And I'm sure, by the way, we just had RubyConf India and there's so many startups there and again, I'm, of course, forgetting a lot of stuff, but this is my topic. So I have a bit of a tunnel vision right where I'm searching for new companies, searching for new startups, trying to bring them over and kind of celebrate them in some sense. Right, I see there is opportunity for that, not only in San Francisco, but of course, san Francisco is probably best. London has so many startups, just incredible. So this is kind of like a new format where, instead of asking them to do a very deep technical talk, which many of them kind of don't have time to do and they will continue hesitating and they continue overthinking it. We don't need that, right. We just want them to tell us about what they're building, how they're using.
Irina Nazarova:Ruby. Any gaps Beautiful. They can talk about their own products. That's why we're doing 10-minute Ruby startup demos and this is the new format. But I think it also brings those founders to the conference because they come to present, to demo, to connect with engineers, to connect with Rubies, to connect with authors of open source, to learn about the new vicious open source.
Marty Haught:also to connect with each other, because it feels a bit lonely, uh being a founder, being a founder for sure yeah right, you're not with this kind of javascript bandwagon or I mean, who wants to be in the javascript bandwagon, right, yeah.
Irina Nazarova:Yeah. But, you want to see people like you. You want to see successful companies. So we're going to have four CTOs of 10 billion, plus Rails companies. This is the criteria.
Marty Haught:Okay, so the.
Irina Nazarova:CTO panel. The criteria is you have to be $10 billion valuation.
Marty Haught:Wow, way to set a high bar. Yeah, super cool yeah.
Irina Nazarova:And I think it's going to be cool for those startups to see those CTOs of companies that kind of made it like.
Marty Haught:Gusto.
Irina Nazarova:Chime, clio, wow yeah, stuff like that, so super excited. It's only possible because of Ruby engineers. It's only possible because engineers want it, right, right, and they are incredibly active and every Ruby engineer who is attending the meetup or coming to the conference getting the ticket. This is where it's really what it's based on. It's based on, yes, the startups, yes, the companies, but also the people, the engineers who want to go out there, network, connect, make friends, meet new companies, meet new companies. And let me just say, 10 or 12 years ago, when I was a Ruby engineer, you know, starting learning, I didn't even know about conferences for some reason. And I think there are many people like that, right, and people who are active are bringing themselves and bringing their efforts to the community, people who are active, contributing, doing different things. They are the source of it all. Right, they are the reason this is all happening and this is magical. I think it just exists in the Ruby community, not because of any of us.
Marty Haught:Yeah, it's already there. It's already there, maybe because of Ruby creating a local meetup or a conference. Once they get a few of the elements together, it works because people, these developers love coming together, they love talking about that. It does take work, as you've kind of talked about already. We can see you're spending a lot of time and investing in that, but you get results, meaning people are attracted to it, companies are attracted to it, and so you're giving them that space to come together and then, of course, as you say, magic happens.
Irina Nazarova:And I feel people are proactive. For example, in a self-Ruby, folks organized a Ruby AI hackathon. I just joined as a participant and it was amazing. I want us to do it again and things like that right. And then people contribute, people get together. By the way, people ask incredibly deep questions at those meetups. So we had a meetup with Figma and the last speaker was Jeremy Evans.
Irina Nazarova:So, he was talking about inefficient allocations in Ruby. I thought we're not gonna have that big of a discussion of this topic because it's more about c right in some sense. Yeah, and we had something like 12 questions, everybody asking everybody, everybody participating, see, wow, yeah, that's what I'm talking, that's impressive, incredibly active and brilliant group of people.
David Hill:Everything that you've kind of been talking about so far and this might be a me perception thing, and so I'm kind of asking a clarifying question this all sounds very awesome, but very geared towards kind of very experienced people. Is there any concern or any steps you're taking to try and make it more accessible to newcomers to Ruby?
Irina Nazarova:Unresolved problem, I would say we don't even have a clear path, at least the one that I know of, for getting substantially more Ruby developers, and I think the good thing is that I feel like companies are getting more vocal and more present about using Ruby on Rails and eventually we will overcome this kind of like a death valley of near Ruby engineers Because the problem is with the bootcamps. Yes, you could say most people don't go through bootcamps. True, many people are self-taught. True, we have Go self-taught. True, we have Go Rails, which is great, which is the resource, and Chris and Go Rails. This is the voices of hey, how will we bring in more Ruby developers?
Irina Nazarova:Also, the new Getting Started Guide. By the way, the work of Rails Foundation on, I think, amanda has a very clear focus on making Rails better for new engineers, which is perfect. We're trying to contribute a little bit. By the way, at Evil Martians, we're building this whole. So we just migrated Rails getting started. Guide to WebAssembly, so it runs in the browser without having to install Ruby on Rails. By the way, folks, you probably know better, right, there's something going on about simplifying the installation of Ruby on.
Marty Haught:Rails.
Irina Nazarova:Is it?
Marty Haught:We definitely need to make that easier, for sure.
Irina Nazarova:So there's this, of course, the resources, but I want new engineers to know that there is, by the way, one of the reasons we called our conference San Francisco Ruby Conference, so that it's very self-explanatory it's not Goga Ruko.
David Hill:Right or something more?
Irina Nazarova:vague right, so it's super clear. You see it somewhere, you immediately understand what it is, and I want those new engineers that are considering what they should learn, I want them to see okay, this is in San Francisco, there are many companies that are interested, there are many startups, there is future, there's path forward and it looks cool.
Marty Haught:Yeah, it does look cool.
Irina Nazarova:That's our kind of five cents, but other than that, I think maybe we could do something more here, because we have again, we have those big companies. Some of them are, many of them are in San Francisco. The reason I'm talking about big companies is that because I think new talent, new developers have better path for a few years inside a big, larger organization. Right, right, their resources, yeah, of course it's an investment. And of course, by the way, all of those companies are training engineers, because if you have to hire 100 engineers in a year, you're probably not going to be able to hire them from the market. So you're doing a lot of internal training and I think time is due. But I think there's still room for maybe more support, more something, and again, when?
Marty Haught:you say support, are you thinking like resources that people can use, or do you mean like developed programs, that sort of on-ramp developers? I'm just kind of curious sort of specific in this space, kind of what do you think we need to work on and develop?
Irina Nazarova:So, in terms of dev tooling, of course we can simplify it and of course we have to kind of bring it up to on par with the other stacks. I don't know, I just recently installed Astra Not recently, some time ago and it was just incredibly cute. Let me just say that the installation process made me kind of green, I don't know, maybe not everybody's cup of tea, but just like that. So, yes, but what junior new engineers, early career engineers, really need is real-world tasks, somebody to trust them with, real-world tasks, which only tasks are there inside organizations. They're inside companies or businesses or maybe nonprofit organizations, but tasks are inside companies. So they need trust.
Irina Nazarova:You know, and this is where, theoretically, I could even see an organization, either an organization supporting the bootcamps more, or maybe some even like efforts, outreach, to connect bootcamps with those Rails companies so that maybe the curriculum could be in some sense tied to those big companies, but that would ensure that the people that graduate from the graduates can become junior engineers in this or that big organization. So I'm thinking about this kind of type of connection. Also, there could be an organization that helps mid-size companies hire juniors, and what I mean by helps is, by the way, we had something like that right. I just didn't hear about it for some time. There was a company helping help companies hire junior robustes, wearing them up. I forgot. I learned about it in some conferences a year ago, two years ago.
Marty Haught:Okay.
Irina Nazarova:Yeah, there was something about that, but I think we need again. So I would say mid-sized companies could only maybe do it with external support. Large-sized companies could do it. We could kind of pair them up and connect them with some bootcamps to help them.
Marty Haught:Yeah, sort of like an internship model where there's yeah.
Irina Nazarova:Of course, I'm thinking about our company and we're hiring extremely experienced, brilliant people. Unfortunately, and even more so in the last few years, because of the expectations of the market and what is expected of people and the expectations just grew so much.
Irina Nazarova:Everybody's expected to be a full stack and to be a professional database optimizer and kind of pixel perfect UI and it's all super fast. And of course, now with AI, you should be able to move 10 times faster right On top of what you already should have been doing. So the expectations are crazy and maybe somebody from the listeners has a better idea of how to solve this because it's an unresolved problem.
Marty Haught:Yeah, I mean, I think that's true. Where does the next generation of programmers come from, rubeus?
Irina Nazarova:Yeah, in some sense, I think. Right now this year, when AI is getting so much better, all the software engineers, regardless of the stack, are thinking okay, where am I? Or should I advise my 16-year-old cousin to do computer science?
Marty Haught:Right.
Irina Nazarova:And it's fine. I mean, I think the industry is changing. I think the skills we have are important. We probably need to learn new skills, and this is scary right. Yeah, Because yeah, we're getting closer and closer to business in some sense, and there's like fewer and fewer, you know, specializing engineers although they're still there, but people who would say I just want to write code, not talk to anybody and leave me alone Right.
Irina Nazarova:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because again now it's still communication is important, right? Communication is how we talk to each other, how we make decisions together. This is becoming more and more important, even in the role of a software engineer, and maybe this is scary, but at the same time, maybe it's fun also.
Marty Haught:I don't know it could be an adventure. I mean, a change is always scary, and the unknown of what next year is going to be like, especially now it feels.
Irina Nazarova:Yeah, so but having said that, I think for junior engineers, obviously it's important to stay on top of the AI stuff. And let me say this a bunch of Ruby companies right now are building AI powered automations In SF. Probably the biggest is this new AI support agent called Finn from Intercom. Intercom is a Ruby company, yes, so they built this AI, you know, automated support agent. Of course, Most probably they use some Python there, but most probably it also touches Ruby, sure Ruby, and people who are needed in these companies are people who understand prompting techniques, people who understand agentic techniques, quality techniques and, I got to say, very often, people who nail it are very young. Because it could be a sort of advantage if you are entering the industry right now, because you're learning all the new stuff instead of all the old stuff. I mean, we old guys and girls, we can also learn, of course, Right.
Irina Nazarova:I'm kidding, okay, we are not old, old, we are just getting started, barely grew up. Anyway, I think there is an edge there where I definitely see some of the younger people, early career people, let's say early career people, nailing the skills that are really in demand. Yeah, and there is opportunity for that. The question is okay. The main question is is that Ruby is relevant for them? And this is what we want to ensure, because I believe Ruby is incredibly relevant and Rails in particular, because Rails gives us this code, organization and conventions. And, by the way, there was recently, I think last week, a benchmark published where Ruby and especially Elixir, by the way, performed. Ruby and Elixir performed better on benchmarks on, you know, bench, software engineering bench. It was an extended bench that covered 20 languages and Ruby and Elixir performed better than JavaScript, typescript and Python.
Irina Nazarova:And a lot better the language that with the kind of best performance, best top performance, you know, the best performance of their best whatever is Elixir, which is everybody. People kept saying things like oh, javascript, typescript and Python are going to win the LLM race just because there's so much code out there, there's so much code to train on, which is true, there's so many open source, closed source, right projects, products built with those in that stack. Still, I know, maybe using one benchmark is not enough. Of course there needs to be more, et cetera, et cetera, but at least in this particular data point, we can see that, at least from some perspective, ruby performs better solving LLM tasks with Ruby better than with JavaScript, typescript and Python. Why and, by the way, think about the winner is Elixir. So this is where I think we can get an intuition of why and I should not say that there's less shitty code written in Elixir versus some other stacks, but this is important, right? What we're training on and again, ruby is LLMs behave super close to how humans behave.
Irina Nazarova:They have similar problems to human problems. So the language that is optimized for humans versus language that is optimized for machines like C, arguably Okay. Well, I'll go there. Different opinions, but we still believe that Ruby is at least optimized for humans, right For readability, for clarity, for joy. Rails is optimized for building a web application Ruby how it's structured, the conventions, less boilerplate so this helps humans. This helps LLMs as well. So I think there's actually a lot of potential here and maybe languages that are optimized for humans are going to win the AI race.
Marty Haught:Right, yeah, I mean I think Matt's talked about Ruby and the AI age as that idea. They'll get good enough and that's super interesting. Well, irina, we have gotten to the time when we're going to do our Ruby roundup. Wow, are you ready?
Irina Nazarova:Let's see, these are the truly hard questions now. Right.
David Hill:So, irina, what's your go-to comfort food?
Irina Nazarova:I love the food that is really hard to find. My dad's mom is from Uzbekistan and I love the food, the Uzbek food, the food coming from that region. And usually, normally, I just have to cook with myself, because it's really hard to find, but in New York, by the way, there is now a Tashkent supermarket. Okay, it has all the best titles. I was in New York. I went there three times.
Marty Haught:Very nice. Yeah, all right. Are you reading anything for fun? Right now I read a very nice.
Irina Nazarova:Yeah, all right. Are you reading anything for fun? Right now I read a very nice cookbook. Okay, it's gonna sound strange. I read a super, super nice cookbook called four california kitchens okay, and I just read it, which is strange right for a cookbook.
Marty Haught:But maybe not. Did it have like stories like telling the journey of food and sort of why this dish was exactly?
Irina Nazarova:they're actually super cool books, yeah I just have so many books that I'm supposed to read for work. Yeah, they pile up every day.
David Hill:I don't know what to do with it yeah are there any tv shows or movies that you're watching right now that you're enjoying?
Irina Nazarova:I just watched Wednesday season two. It was great. It was so good. Yeah, and by the way it was, apparently it was filmed in Romania oh, that's cool when I just was. Yeah, and it was even part of, so everybody knew about it.
Marty Haught:Okay, fun, fun connection there. All right, I think we have already covered this, but what's got you excited in tech right now?
Irina Nazarova:I'm excited about Ruby.
Marty Haught:All right, I'm excited about Ruby source Seriously.
Irina Nazarova:Yeah, no, I believe you. It's how it is.
David Hill:Yeah, and because you cannot fake it. I guess you should do what you're excited about. Do you have any favorite?
Irina Nazarova:gems that you'd like to share. Okay, let me then name inertia rails.
Marty Haught:Let's do this okay, inertia rails why?
Irina Nazarova:why I like inertia rails. It's a gem, because inertia rails, Because Inertia Rails is built by Brendan and Brian. They built it a few years ago and to bring Inertia the pattern that was originally built for Laravel of integrating backend with frontend frameworks into Rails. So Laravel stole a bunch of stuff from Rails.
Marty Haught:Inspired. It was inspired, by yeah, exactly, no, yeah, yeah.
Irina Nazarova:Exactly, exactly, no, in a good way. And now we are stealing something back which is inertia. This is the main thing. And now we have one of the Martians. Svet is contributing a lot to it, and somebody recently called him Sylvester, so I might just continue doing that. Yeah, because his name is just Sviatoslav. It's a bit tricky.
Marty Haught:Right, okay.
Irina Nazarova:So Inertia Rails is just a great new way of building Rails frontend right. Yeah right when you want to use React or V and Angular and then you don't have to build the whole SPA began from frontend and et cetera, et cetera and then figure out how you're going to integrate it with Rails and the whole API and stuff. Inertia feels super, super simple in Rails. Rails, because it's just generating a view that is an inertia view.
Marty Haught:Right.
Irina Nazarova:Everything else, the controller, the routing, everything is Rails. I like it.
Marty Haught:That's great, that's awesome. Good answer, love it. Okay, we have one last question, which is where can people find you on the internet?
Irina Nazarova:So I write a lot to Evil Martians blog. By the way, a new post about Rails is coming out soon, tomorrow, and so you can sign up there. You can also follow me on Twitter, blue Sky and even LinkedIn Okay, linkedin is pretty active, by the way. That's been interesting and, of course, at theephrubi meetup.
Irina Nazarova:At Cephrubi yes, and the Cephrubi conference. So, folks, yeah, join us at the conference and I want everybody to know that, whenever you are on the West Coast and San Francisco, check out our meetups, submit your talk, come join join us. Marty, you should go, you should come and speak.
Marty Haught:I should come. I will come, I will be there. Yeah, that's great. I will make sure we'll get these all in the show notes, all these links. I've got a whole list of all the things we talked about today. We'll make sure that gets in there.
Irina Nazarova:Yeah thank you, thank you all right.
Marty Haught:Reena, glorious time, lovely to talk to you. Thank you for joining us today.
Irina Nazarova:Thank you.
David Hill:Thank you so much for tuning into the Ruby Gems podcast. We hope you enjoyed this episode. You can find show notes and links to everything we discussed at rubygemspodcastcom.
Marty Haught:If you have a topic you'd like us to cover or have feedback, we'd love to hear from you. Please email podcast at rubycentralorg. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and consider leaving a five-star review. It really helps others find the podcast. Until next time, thanks for being such a gem.
