Alan Ridlehoover

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You're listening to the Ode to RailsConf podcast, where we reminisce about RailsConf over the years.
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I'm your host, david Hill, and joining me today is Alan Reitlhover.
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Alan, thank you for joining me on the podcast today.
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Could you introduce yourself to our listeners?
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Yeah, thanks for having me.
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My name's Alan Ridlehoover.
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Like you said, I am senior engineering manager at Cisco and I've got about 14 years of Rails experience now.
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Prior to that I did a lot of NET and prior to that, windows desktop stuff.
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So I've been around in the industry a long time and I've seen enough things to know that Rails is super special and Ruby in particular is also really super special.
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Once I made the transition, I decided I'm not ever going back.
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I did the transition, I decided I'm not ever going back.
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I did the same.
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I started out professionally with PHP and did that for a couple of years and dabbled in a couple of other things.
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But, yeah, once I stumbled into Ruby on accident because I got hired at a marketing agency to do Java work.
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And then I showed up on day one and they said we don't have anything for you to work on in Java, we're going to just put you on a different team.
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Go learn this thing called Ruby on Rails.
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And so I got super lucky and decided to never look back.
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Yeah, I kind of had a similar experience.
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I was looking to move from Seattle to San Francisco and there's no NET work here in San Francisco, so I had to find something else and found a little startup that wanted a senior engineer and was willing to teach me, and the rest is history.
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Nice.
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I don't know about you, but I found that learning the two of them together, ruby and Rails, was really hard.
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That was a very confusing thing, and it's actually one of the reasons why I went to my first Rails Conf was I felt like maybe these people could help me separate the two, tangle, teach me Yep, yeah.
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I don't know that.
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I had a firm distinction in my mind of what was Ruby and what was Rails for a long time, just because, yeah, I was learning both at the same time, the same as you did, and it's all just Ruby on Rails.
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Yep, Like active support is one way to describe it.
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Would be a junk drawer, but another way to describe it would be like Ruby plus plus Right, it does all kinds of things that you get used to in Rails and then you're like, wait, I can't do that.
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Yeah, so you've been to a number of different conferences between RailsConf and RubyConf.
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Can you tell us a little bit about your first RailsConf experience?
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What was that like, going into that environment for the first time?
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I was super excited.
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This was 2012 in Portland.
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I just started using Ruby in 2011.
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So it was really fresh Ruby and Rails and was just super excited to learn as much as I could in that short period of time.
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I remember there was a talk by Sandy Metz that talked about what to test and what not to test.
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It was just a fantastic talk.
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My mind was blown after watching it.
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I've been doing automated testing for years and the way she described it was so clear and so easy to understand that I've been doing it for over a decade at that point and it clarified things for me even after having done it for over a decade.
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Probably three different keynotes that were all very informative.
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The first was DHH.
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He gave a keynote on Russian doll caching.
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This is all the way back in 2012.
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And then Yehuda Katz got up and gave a keynote on Ember and basically said look, russian delcashing is not the only way you can do this.
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Here's Ember.
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Why don't you try it out?
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And then it was the first time I'd ever seen an Aaron Patterson keynote and I just about fell out of my chair.
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It was so funny.
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Those are the four talks I remember the most.
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I also remember one of my coworkers getting up and doing a lightning talk, which he was hilarious.
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It was just an incredibly fun team building and learning opportunity for me and my team, which was great.
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I think 2012 was also my first RailsConf, so we were both there for the first time the same year.
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Wow.
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Were you in Sandy's talk?
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That's the one that just blew my mind I don't remember if I was or not, I don't know that I had any awareness of Sandy Metz at that point in time.
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I didn't.
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That was my first exposure to her.
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Right, I remember DHH's talk.
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I remember Yehuda's talk because I remember I was anxiously trying to get Ember to work for stuff that I was tinkering with for a long time.
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It never quite worked for me, but I was excited about the concept and the patterns of it for a long time.
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And then, yeah, aaron makes me die laughing every single keynote.
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He's just so entertaining and at the same time, so very good at weaving in actual educational content.
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Yeah, can I tell you a funny story about him?
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Absolutely.
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Aaron and my friend Fito and I were all speakers at Tropical RB last year and Fito and I spoke before him.
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We gave our talk on complexity, which we've given several times, spoke before him.
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We gave our talk on complexity, which we've given several times, and the talk centers around conditionals and how to explore polymorphism and get rid of the conditionals or at least move the conditional into a factory.
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And he gets up there I can't remember exactly what his talk was about because the joke he told distracted me completely from his talk.
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He got up there and he threw up this giant if statement on the screen and he looked at it.
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And he turned around and looked at us in the audience and he said, yeah, I don't know how complex this is and I was like, well, that was okay.
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Nice.
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Aaron's a really fun guy to interact with, just because he's always got that sharp, witty sense of humor that you never know when something's going to come out.
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I'm going to fast forward a little bit to more recent times.
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I warned you in our pre-call that I wanted to share this story.
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I think this was the first time I actually met and interacted with you.
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I don't think that we've met and interacted before this.
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This was at RubyConf just this past November.
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We were both kind of chatting with Nadia.
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I remember that.
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Nadia and freedom.
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Right, I forgot, freedom was there for part of that.
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But yeah, so we were chatting and you started talking about again kind of like what you said about how that one element of Aaron's talk kind of took you completely out.
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You don't remember what the actual rest of the talk was about.
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The same thing kind of happened for me.
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I don't remember exactly what it was that you were talking about.
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I think it was a talk that you had been preparing.
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Yeah, it was a lightning talk that I didn't get to do.
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Okay.
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Maybe this year.
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Maybe this year, but you were talking about it and you shared this idea.
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Of trust was the antidote for fear.
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That was the thing that jumped out at me that night.
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It was the last night of RubyConf, if I remember correctly.
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Yeah, it was at the reception afterward.
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Right, it was the reception afterward the conference was over.
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We were all just kind of like enjoying the last night before heading home.
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And you said that and that really just stuck in my head for some reason.
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The conversation ended and we all kind of went our separate ways.
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I was going to go to the karaoke party a few blocks away.
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I had never been invited to an event post-conference before and a friend at the conference had made sure to include me in the invitation.
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I had never done karaoke before and so I get there and I'm enjoying being there as part of the group and the crowd.
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But we're five or six songs in and I haven't gotten the will to get up and go sign myself up to do something yet and I can just kind of feel my internal motor just kind of grinding.
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If I don't get up soon, I know I'm not going to.
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And then what you just said just kind of like echoed back in my head.
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Trust is the antidote for fear.
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Do you trust the people around you right now?
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And I just kind of looked around and it was like there's a bunch of Ruby Central people.
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It was other people who had volunteered at the conference.
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In particular, sarah May was there in the room.
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On top of all of the awesome stuff Sarah has done for the community in general.
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I had worked with Sarah for a good six months years ago at Pivotal Labs and so I knew her just looking around at the room and reframing it of.
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Do I trust the people around me?
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Yes, I do, so I don't need to be afraid.
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And then I had an amazing night.
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The rest of the night I don't even know how many songs I got up there and did, but we just did.
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Oh, that's awesome.
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I just started going up every three or four songs.
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I'd give space for everybody else to do something and then I'd go up and pick another one and for my first karaoke experience, it was amazing, and a big part of that is thanks to you, because I happened to be in the right place at the right time to hear about this lightning talk that you didn't even get to give.
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Yeah, it had a huge impact on my night and on my memory of that whole conference.
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I wanted to share that on part of the podcast and really kind of thank you for that conversation because that made a huge difference to me.
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That's awesome and we was hoping to give that talk at RubyConf, but the competition to get on the roster was so fast and so furious I didn't get in.
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Just for some context.
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We were standing, we were talking with Freedom and Nadia Odenayu Is Freedom's last name Dumlao.
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Yep, okay, freedom, dumlao and Nadia Odenayu, and somehow the topic of fear came up.
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I don't remember exactly.
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And well, I prepared a talk on fear and I wanted to share it and I didn't get a chance to, but I'll share it with you now.
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And basically, you have this imposter syndrome or you might have just a general fear of rejection, and ultimately the talk boils down to trust between people is the antidote for that fear, it's what enables psychological safety, it's what enables vulnerability between people, it's just trust.
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And so I shared that phrase and Nadia whacked me in the arm and said did you come up with that?
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And Freedom goes.
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Man, that needs to be on a t-shirt.
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And then, a couple of days later, you sent me a message, I think via Blue Sky or Slack or something.
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Some DM somewhere.
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Yeah, yeah.
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And you shared your story and I was like, oh my God, I really got to give this talk now because it resonates, it totally resonates.
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Hopefully I'll get a chance to deliver it this year at RailsConf.
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I'm going to be sitting on the screen ready to go.
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I believe the plan is that the signups for lightning talks is going to be done before the conference even happens.
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There'll be, an email that goes out that basically says if you want to do lightning talks, the signups are going to be over here opening at this time.
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So keep an eye on the emails.
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I will do.
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But yeah, so we talked a little bit about your attending the first RailsConf, a bit about some of my personal experiences with you and with that attempt at a lightning talk.
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You've been a speaker.
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But the thing I really wanted to ask about cause I don't think I've talked with anyone about this angle of attending these conferences yet You've been attending RailsConf and RubyConf for a number of years now as a sponsor.
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What does the conference get from that arrangement of you being a sponsor and what do you get for being a sponsor?
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How does that work for everybody?
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Well, there's different reasons to sponsor.
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How does that work for everybody?
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Well, there's different reasons to sponsor.
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I've actually sponsored both Ruby and RailsConf at a couple of different employers.
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So the first time was RubyConf in New Orleans I think that was 2017.
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We went to recruit and we came back with one new employee.
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We were a small startup and that was an amazing outcome for us, particularly because our booth was right next to Shopify and Shopify was a big rail shop at that time and we were a tiny rail shop and they were giving out cooler stuff than us, so that was kind of fun.
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Then, in 2022, I was fortunate enough with Fito, my co-speaker, to be accepted at RubyConf Mini and give our presentation, and so we did that and we had such a positive experience that when we came back to the office, we convinced leadership to send a larger contingent of people to RailsConf in Portland that next year so that would have been 2023.
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And we sent 10 people and one recruiter.
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We didn't sponsor, we just had enough people there that we felt like we could meet people.
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Right Came back with, I think, 30 or 40 different email addresses and people who were at some stage of thinking about looking which without a booth.
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That was phenomenal.
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That's not bad.
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Yeah, I'm not sure we ever made any hires from that list, but it proved to our recruiting department that hey, there's something here.
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If we can get that many people with this small of an investment into our funnel, maybe we could try scaling that.
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And so let's see RubyConf.
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That year was San Diego.
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We did like a silver level sponsorship in San Diego.
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I was fortunate enough to get accepted again and speak at that conference.
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We actually is that right.
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I'm missing a RubyConf in there.
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That's all during the pandemic era.
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There's inevitably a missing year in there somewhere.
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Well, 2022 is RubyConf Mini and RubyConf Houston, and then Portland and then Atlanta, and then that was 2023, 2024.
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I'm mixing up years.
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Maybe I'm off on the years.
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Anyway, so we had begun sponsoring with a silver sponsorship and had a small booth and gave away swag and participated in the career fair and just in general had a pretty successful trip, came back with quite a few emails and contacts.
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Again, I'm not sure we actually hired anybody at that point.
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It's not something that you just start and then immediately have success with.
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It's something you have to build a runway with.
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You have to get your name out there.
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People have to understand who you are before they'll consider coming and talking to you, and so those first couple of years were really just about bringing our name into the community.
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Meraki, historically, was a very prolific user of Ruby and Rails.
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Like I said in the pre-call, we've got over 4 million lines of Ruby code in our code base.
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Not all of it rails.
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The monolith might be 60% of that.
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The remainder is like operation scripts and all kinds of stuff.
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We're very heavily invested in it, but we've not really gone back to the community with any of the things that we've built for ourselves, and so we didn't have a name in the community.
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We weren't known like Shopify or any of the other big names.
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I think I misspoke.
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I said Shopify earlier about New Orleans.
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It was actually Stitch Fix.
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Stitch Fix had much cooler swag than we did.
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So as we were starting out, we did a few conferences where we made small investments and started to see some traction.
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But more recently, with top tier sponsorship of the conferences, it really has put our name and our honestly my face in front of a lot of people and we have had significant success recruiting in the last couple of years through these conferences.
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That's not the only reason to promote the conference or to sponsor the conference.
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Other folks are there for sales and they're trying to sell something to the developer community, but for us it's 100% about recruiting.
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No-transcript, most consumers aren't going to go out and buy a Meraki wireless access point.
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They're a thousand dollars.
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So we're not in the consumer space, so we're not marketing to you from that perspective when we come to these conferences and honestly I can't imagine a better partner for us than Ruby Central.
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They have such an inclusive, such a kind of an everybody in mentality about the conferences but the community at large.
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It's a safe space for anyone to come, as long as you're a Rubyist and you're into Rails, and it doesn't matter who you are, come as you are, and that actually really significantly aligns with Cisco's philosophy.
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We have a phrase that we use called our purpose powering an inclusive future for all, which just resonates.
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So this is a really powerful relationship.
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That's what we get out of it.
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What Ruby Central gets out of it is a significant investment, and these conferences are very expensive, particularly like you're going to have it in a major US city at a major hotel.
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Those are going to be really expensive for the organizers to put on, and so if we can offset a significant chunk of that, that's a huge help to the organizers.
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We really have enjoyed the relationship and we're sad to see the end of RailsConf, because we've had these opportunities twice a year to sort of fill the top of our recruiting funnel and you get somebody's name in April and probably by July they're out of the market, and so to have a second conference later in the year where we can refill the funnel has been a huge help, and so one of the things we've been thinking about is we try to figure how are we going to bring people into our organization.
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We have over a thousand engineers in the organization, which isn't big by some standards, but it's huge by others, yeah.
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It's a perspective thing.
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Yeah, exactly.
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But even if we just had 10% attrition, we'd need to be finding a hundred engineers every year and that's just to stay where we are and we're actually growing.
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So that would be even harder.
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So we need lots of folks coming into that funnel.
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And there's a decision we made this year to expand our sponsorships beyond the Ruby Central conferences to more regional conferences here in the US.
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Specifically, we've already invested in Synth City Ruby, we're investing in XORuby, which is in planning stages now, and we'll be investing in Rocky Mountain Ruby later this year.
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We're trying our hand at can we fill the funnel differently and maybe through different events.
00:19:54.526 --> 00:19:56.772
And the fun thing was like Sin City Ruby.
00:19:56.772 --> 00:19:58.317
There were very few sponsors.
00:19:58.317 --> 00:20:05.385
First of all, it's a very small conference and for us to come in with a large donation was very helpful to the organizers.
00:20:05.385 --> 00:20:08.593
We were the only sponsor there who was recruiting.
00:20:08.593 --> 00:20:13.327
We had this exclusive audience and we had a lot of interest.
00:20:13.327 --> 00:20:14.751
A lot of folks come and talk to us.
00:20:14.751 --> 00:20:25.414
Percentage-wise, I'd say we got 10 or 15% of the conference to come talk to us about wow, what are we doing and where are we hiring?
00:20:25.414 --> 00:20:26.116
What are we looking for?
00:20:26.116 --> 00:20:31.627
And I know for a fact that there were several interviews to come out of that, so that was very successful.
00:20:31.627 --> 00:20:41.397
The investment was tiny in comparison to the larger investment of one of the big conferences, so at least on that first note, things went well.
00:20:42.606 --> 00:20:45.540
Xoruby, those events are going to be one-day events, much smaller.
00:20:45.540 --> 00:20:55.309
We'll probably send a small contingent, may not even send a recruiter, but the goal is there's going to be many more of those and they're going to be spread out across the country.
00:20:55.309 --> 00:20:58.486
So we'll find out how that works as well.
00:20:58.486 --> 00:21:07.571
And the regional conferences because they're local, the community that supports them tends to be slightly more regional and not national.
00:21:07.571 --> 00:21:11.392
It's hard for them to attract sponsors.
00:21:11.392 --> 00:21:26.288
When I showed up with a check that was substantial enough that they are actually going to be able to put on the conference, the appreciation back is just huge.
00:21:26.288 --> 00:21:33.001
So not that I want to compete with other people to recruit at these conferences, but as somebody who's done it and had success with it, I can't recommend it enough, preston.
00:21:33.021 --> 00:21:33.665
Pyshko, nice.
00:21:33.665 --> 00:21:42.626
So I have two very kind of different avenues of questions that I want to ask about sponsoring conferences here now.
00:21:42.626 --> 00:21:49.795
When I've gone to the sponsor booths before, I always just feel incredibly awkward.
00:21:49.795 --> 00:21:56.796
I don't really know what to say when I am there talking to someone like you or someone from Cisco Meraki.
00:21:56.796 --> 00:22:09.039
So if you were there in the booth, what is like a good conversation starter, someone coming up to you at the sponsor booth, what's a good?
00:22:09.039 --> 00:22:11.125
Does that make sense?
00:22:11.125 --> 00:22:18.623
What I'm asking is like you're here because you're recruiting and I'm in this room because I am thinking about looking for a new job.
00:22:18.623 --> 00:22:21.564
My brain just goes well, you give me a job.
00:22:22.196 --> 00:22:30.467
That's not going to be the good conversation starter but, my brain's stuck on it though, so it's like what's a good?
00:22:31.208 --> 00:22:31.949
approach.
00:22:31.949 --> 00:22:41.804
The question I get most often most frequently and this is probably because we haven't yet hit saturation on our brand is what do you guys do?
00:22:41.804 --> 00:22:43.968
Why are you here?
00:22:43.968 --> 00:22:45.478
Because people don't even know.
00:22:45.478 --> 00:22:47.865
Like Cisco, don't they sell networking equipment?
00:22:47.865 --> 00:22:59.723
Yes, in fact we do, and so my usual first answer is to just explain what we do and explain how we use Rails, because a lot of times people are like wait, cisco puts Rails in their hardware.
00:22:59.723 --> 00:23:00.998
No, we do not.
00:23:00.998 --> 00:23:03.161
The hardware, the firmware, is written in C++.
00:23:04.515 --> 00:23:25.368
But the fact that we have a giant cloud application that we use to manage all these devices, and the fact that Cisco has now not just announced that all of these devices are going to be coming, all Cisco devices are coming to the Meraki dashboard they haven't just announced that, but this week at Cisco Live we sort of brought all of it together into one place.
00:23:25.368 --> 00:23:32.506
All of the dashboard is now in one place, and we introduced some new dashboard technology as well.
00:23:32.506 --> 00:23:50.146
It blew my mind and internally you don't even hear about these things until you're at Cisco Live there was an AI-based dashboard building tool that you would go to it and say, hey, this seems to be a problem and it would research the problem, pull up a graph from some other dashboard, plop it into this one.
00:23:50.146 --> 00:23:57.729
You and the AI would together debug the problem and it would just keep pulling in dashboard graphs and things that supported its conclusions.
00:23:57.729 --> 00:24:04.729
And ultimately, when you get to the end of it and you think you've identified it, the AI can just go fix it, can just go change the settings to fix it.
00:24:04.775 --> 00:24:07.243
It's pretty mind-blowing, wow, pretty cool stuff.
00:24:07.243 --> 00:24:15.806
It's kind of revolutionary in the networking market, but anyway, so for your conversation starter, what do you guys do?
00:24:15.806 --> 00:24:16.988
Why are you here?
00:24:16.988 --> 00:24:18.721
What brought you to RailsConf?
00:24:18.721 --> 00:24:29.174
That's always a good one, and if it's hey, we're selling our wares, you can take one of the pieces of swag and thank them and move on, because nobody wants to take the swag home with them.
00:24:29.174 --> 00:24:33.344
Little secret we do not want to ship the swag home, we want you to take it.
00:24:35.188 --> 00:24:35.729
That's fair.
00:24:35.729 --> 00:24:38.861
Yeah, all right.
00:24:38.861 --> 00:24:59.500
The other question I had, which is maybe the more interesting one so, looking forward to the future of the Ruby community, with RailsConf coming to an end this year, ruby Central announced that one of the things they'll be working on is trying to provide more support and help to the regional conferences.
00:24:59.500 --> 00:25:04.036
You mentioned before how you've started sponsoring some of the regional conferences.
00:25:04.036 --> 00:25:17.778
I have this kind of niggling idea in the back of my head of wouldn't it be cool to do a conference in Orlando, literally on this call as we're recording, we would call it the Ruby magic or the magic Ruby conference.
00:25:17.778 --> 00:25:23.769
I have this kind of fledgling baby idea in the back of my head.
00:25:23.769 --> 00:25:32.950
As we're talking about it, I was like, oh yeah, definitely would need the assistance of sponsorships to make that a reality, because I could not do that on my own.
00:25:32.950 --> 00:25:42.627
How does that conversation start with a conference organizer and a potential sponsor like yourself to make that kind of arrangement?
00:25:43.048 --> 00:25:46.113
and a potential sponsor like yourself to make that kind of arrangement.
00:25:46.113 --> 00:25:49.483
Yeah, before you come to the sponsor, you need to have kind of a prospectus of this is what we plan to do.
00:25:49.483 --> 00:25:52.182
This is the audience size we're shooting for.
00:25:52.182 --> 00:25:54.378
We're targeting this region.
00:25:54.378 --> 00:26:02.175
You know, like you'd be targeting the Southeast With Blue Ridge Ruby not happening this year and I don't know what the future of that conference is.
00:26:02.175 --> 00:26:12.188
There is a huge opportunity for a conference in the Southeast, absolutely In terms of first steps, ruby Central is a great place to start.
00:26:12.188 --> 00:26:20.583
I would start with Shan, the new executive director, and maybe work with some of the folks who coordinate Ruby and RailsConf.
00:26:20.583 --> 00:26:23.107
I'm sure Shan could point you in the right direction there.
00:26:23.107 --> 00:26:27.146
But also I would talk to other regional organizers.
00:26:27.146 --> 00:26:34.996
I would talk to the folks behind Madison Ruby and Sin City Ruby and Blue Ridge Ruby, even though Sin City has now ended and Blue Ridge is kind of up in the air.
00:26:34.996 --> 00:26:39.330
Talk to those organizers, learn from them how hard it is.
00:26:39.873 --> 00:26:40.515
It's very hard.
00:26:40.515 --> 00:26:43.305
I am confident it is very hard.
00:26:43.305 --> 00:26:51.369
Like you mentioned, Sin City Ruby isn't happening again because Jason, he was tight on the finances of it for a little while.
00:26:52.071 --> 00:26:53.615
Yeah, I used to go to it.
00:26:53.615 --> 00:27:00.659
I don't know where that ended up, but it would have not been in the same place as he ended up if we hadn't been involved Right, we hadn't been involved.
00:27:00.659 --> 00:27:11.957
And for us, as a sponsor, to see that there's a regional conference happening in the Southeast where there are several different strong Ruby communities, that would be big, that would be attractive to us.
00:27:11.957 --> 00:27:14.262
A lot of it would depend on timing.
00:27:14.262 --> 00:27:17.875
We're probably not going to do two conferences in the same month.
00:27:17.875 --> 00:27:21.058
So think about where do you want to put this?
00:27:21.058 --> 00:27:24.803
In terms of timing, holidays are not a great time.
00:27:24.803 --> 00:27:34.251
Not a lot of conferences in December, probably not even January, honestly, for obvious reasons, although people might want to travel to Orlando in January.
00:27:36.855 --> 00:27:43.261
I mean maybe Find out from the people who've done it how hard it is, but also how rewarding it is.
00:27:43.261 --> 00:27:49.929
I've heard both sides and it sounds like a phenomenal experience from the organizer's side.
00:27:51.049 --> 00:28:01.787
Okay, well, thank you, because that actually gives me some things to think about and to look at as far as doing something with this baby idea and seeing if I can get it to actually grow into something real.
00:28:02.315 --> 00:28:04.583
You know who you should talk to is Irina.
00:28:04.583 --> 00:28:09.598
She has put together a San Francisco Ruby meetup.
00:28:09.598 --> 00:28:10.661
That is phenomenal.
00:28:10.661 --> 00:28:21.865
We have three or four talks every month and probably 60 to 80 people every month, which for a meetup is just huge.
00:28:21.865 --> 00:28:30.645
And so now she's snowballing that into a conference where she's expecting 300 attendees in San Francisco.
00:28:30.645 --> 00:28:41.277
I think it's going to be in November, which is when RubyConf would have been ordinarily, and I'm stoked that she's pulling that off and she's getting it off the ground.
00:28:41.277 --> 00:28:47.807
She has organizational skills way better than mine, way better than mine.
00:28:49.035 --> 00:28:52.423
Adarsh from Ruby Central, former executive director.
00:28:52.423 --> 00:28:53.906
He lives in Oakland.
00:28:53.906 --> 00:29:05.596
I live in further east, in the East Bay, and he kept trying to get me to organize a Ruby meetup and I'm like super busy, not very good organizational skills for something like that.
00:29:05.596 --> 00:29:11.088
Best I could muster was three people and that was pretty sad.
00:29:11.088 --> 00:29:13.318
But we had fun that evening.
00:29:13.318 --> 00:29:15.923
We chatted, had some coffee, it was nice.
00:29:15.923 --> 00:29:19.395
The first meetup that Irina organized.
00:29:19.395 --> 00:29:21.959
I think there were 50 or 60 people there.
00:29:21.959 --> 00:29:28.888
Wow, Part of it's the breadth of her, of her network Contacts, her network in the industry.
00:29:28.888 --> 00:29:30.471
Yeah, I talked to her.
00:29:30.471 --> 00:29:32.821
See if you can get some advice from her.
00:29:33.516 --> 00:29:35.163
I did talk to her already, kind of.
00:29:35.163 --> 00:29:38.365
I had her on the podcast at the time of recording.
00:29:38.365 --> 00:29:40.082
Her episode is coming out next.
00:29:40.082 --> 00:29:42.599
So yeah, I have talked to her.
00:29:42.599 --> 00:29:56.336
I might have to reach out and ask some more targeted, non-podcast recorded questions about doing this, because it's an idea I've kind of been toying with for a little while and it's like maybe there's something I should actually do with this.
00:29:57.298 --> 00:30:00.664
I fully support your desire to do that Awesome.
00:30:01.487 --> 00:30:01.768
All right.
00:30:01.768 --> 00:30:03.872
Well, my newest question.
00:30:03.872 --> 00:30:22.285
I've added kind of to the rotation for this podcast, with RailsConf coming to a close this year and under a month now, which is terrifying how quickly this is coming up what are your thoughts in terms of, like, the future of the Ruby community and looking beyond RailsConf?
00:30:23.227 --> 00:30:27.015
You know I have a rather unique perspective there.
00:30:27.015 --> 00:30:47.701
I came up through a bunch of startups who are all doing Ruby and Rails and they have unique challenges and unique needs, but most of the time they're pretty early in their development lifecycle and don't have a lot of the challenges that we do with a 19-year-old Rails app that started on Rails 1.
00:30:47.701 --> 00:30:52.128
And we literally started five months after Rails 1 shipped.
00:30:52.128 --> 00:31:01.410
Wow, that's when we were founded, and at that point the skinny controller fat model thing didn't exist.
00:31:01.410 --> 00:31:04.236
No one had read the Rails way because it didn't get written.
00:31:04.236 --> 00:31:08.249
For another two years we hadn't lived through the Ruby 1.9 upgrade.
00:31:09.271 --> 00:31:13.564
Rails 3 brought things like being able to chain active record queries.
00:31:13.564 --> 00:31:15.146
That wasn't a thing prior to that.
00:31:15.146 --> 00:31:17.196
It brought Bundler.
00:31:17.196 --> 00:31:21.925
That wasn't a thing prior to that, not to mention the NBC stuff.
00:31:21.925 --> 00:31:23.568
All that was Rails 3.
00:31:24.234 --> 00:31:28.982
And so we have this giant load of tech debt that we've been carrying along with us over the years.
00:31:28.982 --> 00:31:32.143
And we're not the only one in this position.
00:31:32.143 --> 00:31:42.719
There are many other organizations of various sizes that have these Rails apps that are this old and there's really no guidance in the community about how to do that, how to do that.
00:31:42.719 --> 00:32:07.640
Well, the standard Rails best practices are skinny controllers, fat models, and when you've got 4 million lines to code, those fat models are really, really unbearably big, and so there's got to be a way of organizing the code that is more well-suited for these super large applications.
00:32:07.660 --> 00:32:38.131
I know Shopify uses engines quite extensively, but I've had fewer conversations with other teams that are trying to manage code bases at this scale, and I personally would love maybe this is my idea for a conference I would love a conference where we bring together organizations who are struggling with these kinds of scale issues, not transactional scale, because I think Rails has got that, so I'm talking more about the kind of scale like how do you scale your team and your code base to support a large team when you're in a situation where you feel like you need it?
00:32:38.131 --> 00:32:51.599
Personally, I'd love to see like an open space conference where people just bring their own topics and we chat about things that are concerning to us on that day and try and learn and share, share and learn from each other.
00:32:52.494 --> 00:33:06.239
And ultimately, that's one of the reasons I have loved RailsConf and RubyConf so much because of those types of opportunities to sit down and have a conversation with someone about those types of problems, that sit down and have a conversation with someone about those types of problems that we're trying to solve.
00:33:06.239 --> 00:33:23.828
The times in my career where I have felt most fulfilled and empowered are those times where I'm not thinking solely as a software engineer and I'm thinking more as a problem solver and identifying a problem and then using software as a tool to solve that actual problem.
00:33:23.828 --> 00:33:33.265
So yeah, those types of opportunities are rarer, I think, than they should be, Because when they happen they're just marvelous.
00:33:34.976 --> 00:33:38.185
We didn't even talk about this, but AI is going to change a lot of that stuff.
00:33:38.185 --> 00:33:40.683
Hopefully it frees us up to think more at that level.
00:33:40.683 --> 00:33:47.403
The jury's out on where it's going to land and honestly, that's probably another area Day by day.
00:33:48.536 --> 00:33:55.269
Yeah, it's probably another area, though, where the Ruby community could benefit from some kind of gathering around that topic.
00:33:55.269 --> 00:34:18.317
I know that there's an AI-related meetup in New York that I haven't yet had an opportunity to check out via their feed I'm not sure if they even have a feed, but I mean, that's an area that Python gets a lot of print because of its involvement in AI, but there's a ton of activity going on in Ruby as well, and for the community to come together and talk about it together would, I think, be pretty powerful.
00:34:18.317 --> 00:34:22.202
The community would come together and talk about it together would, I think, be pretty powerful.
00:34:23.043 --> 00:34:29.490
That's definitely an ongoing topic that I need to engage more in than I have thus far.
00:34:34.735 --> 00:34:37.601
I've been pretty light on my involvement with AI so far and at some point in the near future I need to address that.
00:34:37.601 --> 00:34:47.487
I get the sense that you and I, our careers are maybe not exactly the same length, but similarly long, and Sandy Metz always uses this phrase when she starts a talk.
00:34:47.487 --> 00:35:03.157
She says I'm an engineer of a certain age and I got to tell you, as an engineer of a certain age, I'm excited by AI, but also a little my career has moved into management and maybe I'm a little bit insulated.
00:35:03.157 --> 00:35:09.688
I don't know whether I am or not, but it's a whole nother wave of innovation that being close to retirement.
00:35:09.688 --> 00:35:11.695
Is that a wave I want to jump on?
00:35:11.695 --> 00:35:13.900
I don't know, we'll see Right.
00:35:14.702 --> 00:35:16.806
Well, thank you for joining me today, Alan.
00:35:16.806 --> 00:35:28.045
It's been great chatting with you and catching up, since it's been a few months since I saw you last and you are speaking at this upcoming RailsConf with Fito again, right yeah?
00:35:28.085 --> 00:35:28.768
we have a new talk.
00:35:28.768 --> 00:35:32.885
We're actually going to talk about that history of the app and what we're doing about it.
00:35:32.885 --> 00:35:34.514
I'm really looking forward to it.
00:35:34.514 --> 00:35:41.036
We've given it a couple of times at some meetups and the feedback's been really great, so hopefully people can come see it.
00:35:41.438 --> 00:35:42.661
I'm looking forward to being there.
00:35:42.661 --> 00:35:44.704
Thanks again for joining me today, Alan.
00:35:45.405 --> 00:35:49.474
Thank you, thanks for having me.