 Okay, so, welcome to something brand new. In this slot, as you've seen the last couple of days, we've tried to do something different, and what we decided to do for the last day is a sort of Ignite-style set of talks. Ignite-style talks are basically where the presenters have given 20 slides and they auto-advanced. There's no ability for them to control the slides. They're just along for the ride, so they better keep going. And in this particular instance, rather than give them open frame to talk about whatever they wanted, we asked them to sort of talk a little bit about RubyConf and the Ruby community specifically. This works better in the morning, but I'll sort of, well, I'll just talk about it in the morning. As you've seen, and a lot of you are experiencing, this is your first RubyConf, and so there's a lot of history of RubyConf and what it used to do and where it is now and how it's gotten to the point that it is, that it gets lost in the day-to-day of just everyone having a good time at RubyConf. So we asked the presenters to basically speak on that topic a little bit about a different part of it, so. Yeah, I don't think I need to set it up anymore in that. So without further ado, I would remind all of the presenters to state their name at the beginning of this. Don't get lost. Like, oh, I got slides, remember to say who you are. So, but I will start off with the first one with Rich Kilmer. Thank you. All right, so we all have our own emoji. This is mine, Evan chose them for us, so I'm about to start. So I am Rich Kilmer. I'm gonna be talking to you about the foundations of our community and RubyConf. You know, in the early days of Ruby, you know, as Matt's talked about, beginning of Ruby in 1993, when it started coming over to the United States, we had our Ruby talk list, which was primarily an English list. The early part of Ruby talk was still in Japanese, but a lot of it was in English. We had the Ruby application archive, which was basically an index of libraries you could download. And, but then we moved over in our first conference into Tampa. And, Tampa's conference was the first Ruby conference. It had, I believe, around 40 people there. What's that? 34 people. It coincided with Upsala, which was a total nerd conference, right? And, matter of fact, the first two years coincided with Upsala. And, people were there for Upsala, but they started, they went to this RubyConf thing. And I got to go to this. One of the things presented to us at that Ruby conference was our doc, which Dave Thomas created to help create the pickaxe book, which I had read to learn about Ruby. But what was great about that conference is we were really trying to understand what Ruby was and what it was going to be. And so the last session we had, we got into these little teams and we tried to figure out what Ruby was going to be used for. Was it going to be used to test other applications or document other applications? It was just this very interesting little thing of what would Ruby be used for? It would be to help other things. The next conference was Seattle in 2002. We decided that conferences were going to move to different cities every year and we'd never repeat them, we failed at that. But still, we'd never repeat them and we try and bounce them around. And so we went to Seattle, again, with Upsala. This is the first Ruby Central talk, or sorry, conference. So Ruby Central was formed by Chad Fowler myself, Dave Thomas and David Allen Black. We were the original directors of that. And a couple of things from this conference which were interesting is we had this guy show up, name Y, and that was his name. And he had this thing called the AML. And I loved the AML so much that I converted my project before my talk to AML. My project was on Freebase. That was the actual library name. I didn't know what Freebase was. Dave Thomas talked about Dave's vacation. What he did on his vacation, he wrote a 25,000 line Ruby system. It was an accounting system. And we were like, you actually wrote an application in Ruby, 25,000 lines, who on earth would write that much Ruby? Then we moved over to Austin the next year. And Austin was a big year. In 2003 was a really, really big year for us. Austin, I don't believe, was an Upsala conference. So it was the first time we weren't with Upsala. This environment came over, not the Ruby application archive, but Ruby Forge. This was the first place where code could actually be uploaded and version controlled. And so our community started having shared libraries there. Jim Wyrick was one of the speakers there who introduced this concept of rake. And so rake was first introduced at this conference in 2003. This was something that Jim started writing in the morning, proving the fact that he could do it in the afternoon, demoed it. And then, not to be over-outdone, but that night, we all decided that we needed a package manager and spent the evening writing RubyGems, the first RubyGems. And we didn't have version control, we didn't have Wi-Fi, so we actually passed a USB stick around and committed code all night. And RubyGems was born. The next year was in Virginia in Chantilly, outside of DC. And this was interesting because this was the first year that Ruby Central ever had an official sponsor for anything. So the sponsorship thing, we can't really do these conferences without it, but we hadn't had it then. And the sponsorship was for the dinner. And my company happened to sponsor the dinner. So we were the first sponsors of a RubyConf. We paid for dinner for that night. There was this thing, YARV introduced there. And three years later, got committed into trunk. But it was gonna be this great new way of high-speed Ruby. And it came in, I think it was in 1.9, right? YARV was introduced. And then this Danish guy came and spoke about this framework, Ruby on Rails, and we were like, web stuff, whatever. But this ended up becoming, you know, this question of what will be the killer app for Ruby and Rails was and is still the kind of killer app for Ruby. But the community is the foundation for Ruby. The community is what we are. And certain people are no longer with us. And so I just wanna recognize that those who are here today for the first time, and those that have left us some permanently, they're all part of who we are. I just want everyone to remember that. You make this community and you are its foundation. Okay, so that's my emoji, geeky face. And I'm Nadia. I'm from London, UK. And I'm going to be speaking about community. So how you can get involved in the Ruby Central conferences and the community. I don't know when it's gonna advance to my next slide, this is fun. So, everyone enjoying the conference so far? So, Matt asked us all at the beginning of the conference, raise your hand if it was your first time here and raise your hand if you're a first time speaker. And for me, I didn't raise my hand for either of these things. But if it had been two years ago at RailsConf, I would have raised my hand for both of those things. So since first speaking at RailsConf in 2015, I went on to speak again in the following year. And I've also been on committee twice for RubyConf once in 2015. And again, for this conference. So, hope you're all enjoying the talks, because if not, sorry. But a year before my first speaking experience, I was not even in the tech community yet. I was learning to code in 12 weeks. And so I want to show with my story how easy it is to get stuck in straight away irrespective of your level of experience. So a lot of people who are into speaking, they come to me and they say, how did you get started? I really want to get into speaking, but I can't possibly start at somewhere like RailsConf or RubyConf because they're so big. I probably need something a lot smaller. When I say that's not true, you can get started because that's what I did. And here's the thing, we need new speakers. We've got a lot of slots to fill and it's boring if we have the same faces and the same ideas being discussed each time. So to keep us extending, to keep the conferences interesting, we need a healthy pipeline of people coming through. So what do we do? First of all, we have blind reviews on the CFP. So you could have never spoken before, nobody knows who you are. But if you submit a great idea, you have a very high chance of making the cut because we don't deselect when it becomes non-blind and go, we don't know who that person is, so no, you're not speaking. So you might think that's great, I can submit an idea and there won't be any bias towards who I am, but what do I talk about? I don't know what's interesting to the Ruby community or there are so many things or I'm not sure. Well, speaking at these conferences are a great opportunity to talk about Ruby, something you know about or something you want an opportunity to level up in, but it's also a great chance to talk about something completely different that you're interested in because we're open and interested in hearing new ideas. For example, my first talk was about game theory and the Nash bargaining solution and it was in the general track at RailsConf and I remember I'd given this lightning talk at work and my boss had come up to me and said, this was great, I wanna introduce you to my friend who's gonna encourage you and help you, encourage you to make a full length talk and so I met my boss's friend and I explained the idea to them and I was like, could this be a full length talk and they listened intently and they were like, this is great, you should submit this to RailsConf and I looked at this person and thought, they don't know what they're talking about because this is game theory and they're telling me to submit to Rails. Turns out that person was Sarah May so she didn't know what she was talking about and it's good I listened to her because I ended up speaking at RailsConf so it worked out very well for me. But what I would say is you might be thinking, that's cool if I wanna do talks but what if I don't want to speak? Are there any other ways I can get involved? And it turns out that there are a load of ways that you can get stuck in. So I mentioned earlier that I've been on committee so we're always looking for new people to help select talks for us. Maybe you want to mentor a conference newbie if you've been coming regularly, we've got the Scholar Guide Program or a lightweight way to facilitate a discussion is to take part in Birds of a Feather. I remember when I was asked to be on committee I was really scared because I thought, what do I know? I've only spoken once at one of these things and I didn't even talk about Ruby or Rails but in the same way that we want new speakers we're also really open to a range of perspectives on committee, we're always looking for new people. I've been so fortunate to be able to run the Beyond Ruby track twice. So in 2015 we had talks on the game go, wrestling, math, the Mandelbrot set and this year we've had amazing talks on music board games and after this in Salon A we've got an improv workshop, I'm very excited. I hope to see you all there. So you might be thinking, okay, this is all great Nadia but I don't have a boss who knows Sarah May who's gonna hook me up and I don't know anyone who can help me so this is all well and good for you. Well, if you told me that I would look at you and I would say that that is a big fat lie because you know that the Ruby Central staff are walking around in blue shirts. You've seen all the directors on stage and you know all the speakers. I'm here and we know maths is nice so when you go and speak to these people they are inevitably going to be nice to you. AJ Simmons gave a great talk yesterday about how we're a great community but we need to take it one step further and weaponize our niceness and help others by lending our privilege so if you can help people do that and you're gonna find out more about how you can do that in Alison's talk later but in the meantime I am gonna raise my hand and say come to me, I really wanna help everyone so if you've got a proposal you want someone to look at if you want me to introduce you to somebody that you really wanna meet if you want me to put your name forward for the review committee or discuss ways to get involved that can suit you I'm really, really happy to help so I hope I've shown you that this community is wonderful well, you knew that already but that the barriers to entry are low particularly if you're already here it's very easy for you to get stuck in and be a big contributor at the next conference so yeah, I hope you get stuck in, thanks. I'm waiting for my actual slide to appear. How y'all doing? Good afternoon, I'm Michael Hartle I'd like to thank Sarah May for inviting me to give this talk today it's good to be here. Ruby started in 1993 created by Yukihiro Matamoto better known as Matt's that was first publicly released in 1995 but it started in Japan and so a lot of the early discussion was in Japanese but the language itself is in English and the comments and documentation is largely in English so that gave an opportunity which was seized by Dave Thomas who wrote a book for the English speaking world called Programming Ruby but it's more affectionately known as the Pickaxe so I read the Pickaxe sometime around 2005, 2006 and then I took a Ruby on Rails course that Dave Thomas and Mike Clark taught together and that started me on a path that led through sort of a circuitous route but eventually ended up with the Ruby on Rails tutorial which I wrote, I published first in 2010 and a few years before that I had attended my first RubyConf which was in 2007 in Charlotte, North Carolina so it had already been going on for a few years since 2001 but 2007's a while ago now I think this qualifies me as an old timer it was great to go to RubyConf I'd been to RailsConf but RubyConf is different it's smaller, it's more intimate it has a different vibe and so I had a chance to get to know some of my fellow Rubyists and it was really a great opportunity and among other things I had a chance to meet Matt's and a few years after that we were doing the RubyFriends hashtag you may have seen on Twitter so Matt's came up to me and asked me if I wanted to take a picture with him so I thought, hmm, thinking emoji like do I wanna have a picture with the creator of Ruby? Like, yes I do so Matt's incredibly friendly I know he's embarrassed by Miniswan Matt's nice and so we are nice but Matt's really does set the tone for the Ruby community and I think that's a really important part of what we do here so that's how it began Ruby started mainly in Japan and the United States but over the years it's really gone global and so I'd like to talk a little bit about a lens that I have into this ongoing development and evolution a couple years ago a couple of friends and I started a company called Learn Enough which is now sort of the parent organization for the Rails tutorial and so among other things Learn Enough includes a series of introductory tutorials starting right at the foundations with the most fundamental computing skill for this sort of work which is Learn Enough command line to be dangerous and then going through a series of tutorials ending with Learn Enough Ruby to be dangerous which is currently in preparation so you see it goes into Ruby and then it leads into the Ruby on Rails tutorial which among other things is now available as part of a subscription service we call the Learn Enough Society so when we put this out there a lot of people came to us and said we wanna take your course but we can't afford it so we had students, people in the international community who maybe because of the exchange rate it was just cost prohibitive so we thought we should offer a scholarship for people and so we decided to run an experiment it was we didn't really know how to run a scholarship so we thought well what if we just put a text area on the internet what happens if you put a text area on the internet and ask people to share in confidence their story why they want a scholarship and one of the things you find out when you do this is that people are incredibly honest not only do they not abuse the privilege but they tell you about what's going on in their lives and it's really inspiring people are determined to learn now as part of this we started asking people if they were comfortable with it to share a picture of themselves in their home in their town with their computer someplace that was meaningful to them so we could put a face and a place to the name and story and we've got a great response a lot of people have shared pictures and it's important to note I think that these images you're seeing are not cherry picked these are just the last ones that have come through so this is a real cross section of people who are coming into the Ruby community it's just an incredible variety of people across the country, across the world and I think this is something that we can really be proud of in the Ruby community we've created a place where people want to be part of and I also think it's good to cultivate a sense of responsibility like what we do here has a global impact and it's good we should keep doing what we've been doing and also be inspired to keep getting better so whether you're an old timer like me or an old, old timer like Matt's or whether this is your first RubyConf welcome to the Ruby community, we're glad you're here thank you I feel underdressed with a monocle emoticon I'm gonna take this open, what? Okay, fair enough take this opening slide to tell you that I attended two funerals on Saturday it's awkward because they only intended to attend one they both had the same name just different addresses on the same street so my first day of work as a Ruby developer was at the same conference that Michael just mentioned it's RubyConf 2007 in Charlotte, North Carolina it was during that conference that I heard about the general idea that they didn't want just one really large international conference they wanted regional conferences I had the luxury of working for a company, hash rocket that to this day still values conference participation I applied for and spoke at Scotland on Rails and met Graham and Paul and Allen watched them put on a conference I said, if they can do it, I can do it so in 2010 my wife and I decided to show off in Madison, Wisconsin we set up a budget based on sponsorship and ticket sales, we had a wonderful venue we put up a registration page and waited we had a delightful event that everyone loved we also lost about $10,000 on that conference largely that's because we could afford to we couldn't really afford to but we had credit cards so conferences are exhausting and I'm trying to front load all the terrible stuff conferences are exhausting we had a pretty regular regimen of water I'd be proven water, food, water but when we went to plan the next year we realized that we had to be a little bit more careful because in the first year we accidentally scheduled the same time as Winnie City Rails as I left a scrambling for a new venue, et cetera so if you're gonna plan a conference look about a year out for a first year event six, nine months if you already know the venue really well or if the event is running like clockwork for you and don't forget that regardless of who you are it takes effort to get people to spend money on your thing people who know they want to come generally require two to three mentions before they'll buy that ticket they know they're coming, they wanna come and yet you still don't sell tickets invest in your venue, both in time selecting the venue and understanding what's included, what's not that barn might be free all you have to do is add electrical, AV, bathrooms it doesn't have to be expensive but be aware of what you're spending and if your audience isn't a group that you know well get somebody who does on your team maybe you only do open source get somebody who does it as a corporate job they're gonna have different thoughts and feelings about what's successful so low points, not raising enough money and sponsorship and ticket sales getting sick while hosting having to go to urgent care looking at your choice of clothing while going through pictures years later budget for our two track conference ran 40 to 65,000 and that includes a lot, a lot, a lot of bells and whistles another conference runs a similar event in that same venue and their conference runs about 25,000 how do I know? I asked talk to people who are putting on conferences and they'll be happy to share all the details we don't have a lot of people to share with do the math like you're gonna sell out run the revenue like nobody's gonna show up and you have to give away a lot of free tickets for people to be there your first year especially and it's not possible to put on an event like this without a lot of volunteers and help you're gonna ask your network you're gonna spend some capital do it remember nobody is above approaching to speak or sponsor at your event be prepared for the conversation we had Clyde Stubblefield who's James Brown's drummer and we got him because I went and looked at Wikipedia for famous people that lived in my town it worked try new things, keep what works if they don't, now you know try new formats, talk lengths maybe a walking conference or lazy river conference just like Kickstarter, set a goal that you know that you can achieve and then set stretch goals all right we know this much is covered all right now we had more ticket sales what how can we extend the conference if you want to et cetera just keep in mind that this is absolutely something that any of you could do and creating an event gives you the opportunity to put something new into the world meet people, affect people and after six years of running a conference that is absolutely felt I have so many people I've met and I consider friends these days that I would not otherwise so high points in putting on our events we had folks from attendees just attending a conference from India, Australia, Chile, Spain Nevins, Germany as well as all throughout the US just make sure that you set expectations reset them as you need but make sure that people always see what they expect from you and make sure that they can trust you thanks hello now it's my turn to wait for the long 15 second transition slide I'm talking about encouragement I'm Allison I'm from just outside of Washington DC any DC folks here? all right great okay this is a story about the land of Ruby a lot now you might be asking yourself what is this land of Ruby a lot sounds interesting and mysterious well the land of Ruby a lot is just like the Care Bears home care a lot how many people here know the Care Bears? okay good that's a lot of hands I was like are people gonna be like the care what? in the land of Ruby a lot there are a lot of people who care a lot about Ruby and a lot about each other in Ruby a lot you can see Aaron Patterson making puns and talking about Ruby internals Sarah May mentoring Sandy Metz encouraging us to be more confident in our abilities Matt's reminding us to be nice Adam being a welcoming face and many many others the Ruby community is filled with people who are supportive, encouraging and inclusive who actually want to see others succeed and grow after all Matt's is nice and so we are nice my first experience in the land of Ruby a lot is in Miami in 2013 I was excited to be a part of the Scholar Program and lucky that I was coming to RubyConf knowing a whole bunch of DC based Rubyists about a month before the conference I got a message from one of them saying did you know that there are lightning talks in this land of Ruby a lot? You're doing one right? And every day thereafter for an entire month someone from our local group pinged me to ask if I was doing a lightning talk at first I said no I mean what could I even speak about at my first conference I wasn't a full-time developer yet but by the time that I got to Ruby a lot it was like I didn't even have to think about it sign ups were open and of course I was doing a lightning talk and it was a really great experience I felt super welcomed and encouraged it helped me start some really great conversations with lots of different people that year a few years and many conference talks later I started totally along my own little bear this is Devin's fifth tech conference he's two and a half and I was asked to be on the RailsConf program committee and going through every proposal I really tried my hardest to help folks shape theirs give feedback when possible encourage new folks to submit conference talks because as Nadia said it's important that we continue to hear from new voices in the community in addition to the ones that we know and love in helping to organize RailsConf I saw that the role was not only helping to craft an interesting conference that people would attend but also when people entered this land of Ruby a lot they felt welcomed and included and that last piece though that isn't up to the conference organizers that last piece is up to every individual that's here so as you end your experience in this wonderful land of Ruby a lot before you head home I encourage you all to take three steps first reach out to someone to reach out to someone to encourage them to do something that they might not otherwise do whether this is walking up to someone they wanna meet to say hi attending a talk that they think might be over their head or telling lightning talk speakers that their talk was really great second find the folks who are different than you are who have a different perspective and say hi there are lots of different perspectives here there are people who come to the industry from traditional backgrounds and from non-traditional ones or those who have really varied experiences in the industry you never know what you're going to learn when you start talking to someone new and third make sure that the others around you feel included leave space if you're talking in a group or in a circle so that others can join welcome people who might stand next to you or sit next to you say hi to somebody who's standing alone how many people here feel like they've accomplished at least one of those three things at this conference so far okay good I could have my hands I hope that by the end of the day you can all raise your hands knowing that you helped build this community that you said or did something encouraging to help boost someone else up because RubyConf and the land of Ruby a lot doesn't just happen it's imagined, it's created and it's built by all of us thank you here's some various places on the internet where you can find me I also want to mention that I work at Collective Idea which is an awesome consultancy and you should come and talk to me about working with us and have a great remainder of your conference thank you