 Alright, so I'm going to have a little bit of time at the end for some questions. Seattle RB folks, we got some guys up here. Any other Seattle RB folks? Oh gosh, we got a bunch of them. That's good. So at the question time, I'd actually also like to invite any of the Seattle RB folks if they have their opinions also to share them as well. So before I begin, I would actually like to say thank you to Ben and Karen and Jonan for the tremendous effort that they've done to put this together. Thank you guys so much for taking the financial risk to put it together. I also want to thank the Seattle Ruby Brigade who made my club viable when possible. Thank you guys for the over a dozen years that you guys have been doing the work that you do. Really appreciate it. So in particular I want to thank also Ryan and Eric and Aja. These three in particular are supportive and gave me the tools and everything to succeed in my club. They've always been so welcoming. Also there was this one other guy who attends there. I've tried to talk to him over the years, but whenever I see him he just runs away. So I don't know, I think it's because he's kind of shy. Yeah, he's definitely shy. By the way, Erin, when I was putting these slides together I found you with this huge skillet. What on earth are you cooking that thing? Anyway so my name is Miles Forrest and this presentation started as a lightning talk back in RailsConf in Portland. Did anybody see that lightning talk? Okay, a couple people. So when I gave that talk, it was a structured talk and I got it down to six and a half minutes and as I'm going on stage Chad Fowler says, Miles you got five minutes and we're going to cut you off. So when I gave the talk I'm going like ridiculously fast so that was the reason why. So this talk that I'm giving is actually the talk that I wanted to give. Unfortunately for those of you who've seen that other talk I'm not really funny so I'm going to reuse some of the jokes that I had so I'm sorry about that. So earlier this year Ryan Davis gave a talk at Mountain S RubyConf which I think is the definitive talk frankly on building a successful Ruby Brigade. It's entitled NerdParty version 3.1 and if you go to bit.ly slash nerdparty 3.1 it'll take you to the conference talk on that. Frankly I think if you have any work to do to get done during the conference just go ahead and do that right now and then later go back and watch this talk. Ryan's insights are excellent and very insightful and that's where I direct people when they want to learn how to run a Ruby Brigade or any technical club for that matter. So a quick show of hands, how many of you attend any sort of Ruby Brigade? Okay and out of those folks how many of you help out in any small way can you stand up please? Can you stand up? Those of you who in any small way run or help out. Can we give these guys applause? If you see these people during the conference I'm serious go and thank them because doing this sort of thing can be a bit difficult and it can be a bit thankless but really it's the Ruby Brigades that have a lot to do with our culture. How many of you live in rural areas? Rural areas like how many of you live like with a couple hours that you really don't go out to Ruby Brigade? So yeah there's a few. How many of you don't like your local Ruby Brigade and don't go out to it? Eric back there. Anyway I want to start with a story before I jump into my talk. So in World War 2 the Allies relied heavily on bombing the enemy to try and turn the tide of the war. However they were losing a lot of planes from ground fire and from air combat. When many of the planes returned they were often shot up so badly that it was a wonder they could fly at all. We need to reinforce these planes with armor, said the leaders in charge. But the engineers had a problem. If we put too much armor on them then the planes will either be too heavy to fly or they'll burn too much fuel to be able to make the trip. So there was this massive mathematician named Abraham Wald who was asked to catalogue where all the bullet holes had torn through the planes. He produced a diagram that reflects something similar to this. The plane on the left represented the undamaged plane and the plane on the right showed where the planes were taking most of the damage. So the superior said ah we need to reinforce the wings and the nose and the tail because that's where the damage is occurring. As everyone nodded in agreement at the obviously sage display of wisdom from their superiors a lone voice spoke up. Sir said Wald. I'd reinforce the areas where there are no bullets. What? They said incredulously. But that's where all the damage is. But sir said Wald. These are the planes that came back. So as the obviousness of Wald's observation sunk in the engineers began the task of reinforcing the planes. So there is a lesson to be learned here. Sometimes it's not about reinforcing the problem areas. Sometimes it's about reinforcing the things that we need to protect the most. So I want to come back to that point later but first let's talk about Ruby and Ruby on Rails. We are extremely blessed to have a rich and vibrant choice of conferences that you can attend. You've got big multi-track events like RailsConf and RubyConf to smaller regional conferences like this one and they all work to support the community and that is awesome. But the real strength of our community lies at the local level or what we like to call our gates. Other names include Ruby user groups or rugs or nerd club or geekouts or whatever. It doesn't matter really what you call it. This is where people get together in person to help each other. You want to learn to code? Need help hacking on a project? Do you dream of earning a living, running your own business, living the life of a digital Bedouin where you can work where you want or when you want and for who you want? So I just want to stop my talk here for a second and let you on an awesome Ruby Brigade club hack. Be nice to sponsors. Mention them in your talks and do things like retweet their tweets during conferences. In fact if everyone could go to bit.ly Cascadia sponsors and download there's a little text file, a little gist file. It's a list of the conference sponsors here at Cascadia. I'm personally keeping a running tally of how many times I've retweeted the sponsors tweet so by the end of the conference I will have retweeted every company at least once. Now why do this? See companies are cool. They have these things called marketing budgets. Which means folks like you and me can get stuff for free. So the gist is just a text file and anyway so let's go back to the talk here. Ruby Brigades exists to help you and more importantly for you to help others. But there's a big problem with Ruby Brigades right now. If you happen to live near a large metropolitan area like San Francisco or Portland or Seattle then there's probably a really Ruby Brigade near you that really really rocks. But me I don't live near a big city. The nearest city for me is in Vancouver British Columbia which is 90 minutes away. I live in Chilliwack British Columbia which is a little town way out in the sticks and yes it's as po-dunk as it sounds. But hey Chilliwack we have all kinds of resources for aspiring web developers like cows and corn. So undeterred I decided to be positive and take the advice of Seth Godin that the way to get unstuck is to start down the wrong path right now. So when I was going to start my very own Ruby Brigade I went in and boy did I ever go down some wrong paths. I tried to build a group three times but no matter how much work and planning I did it just kept failing and failing and failing and that made me sad because you know you put all this effort in and nobody shows up. So there was no hope of me being in a Ruby Brigade anywhere near me. So in desperation I decided that after work I would leave immediately at 4 p.m. and drive well over 200 kilometers from Chilliwack British Columbia across the border into the United States and into Washington State. Drive all the way to Seattle to the Seattle Ruby Brigade and who meets every Tuesday night at 7 p.m. in Capitol Hill District in the best coffee shop, Vivachi. I'd stay there for a couple hours. I'd pretend that I was a local. I would barely talk to anyone. And then it was all over and I would drive all the way back. Now I know this seems crazy and I suppose it is but at the time the Ruby community in Vancouver was languishing. Yes, the internet was there and that's, you know, that works if you know what questions to ask but can anybody relate to the fact that sometimes you don't know the questions to ask? Can anybody relate to that? Yeah, yeah exactly. There's a lot of you I know because I've talked to many and in fact I've talked to hundreds of people over the last six or seven years that this is the case. So not only do you need to know what the right questions are to ask, you really need to know how to ask them the right way on the internet. And heaven helped the poor soul that doesn't do that right. But I was struggling so much I didn't even know what to do so the cool thing is those crazy trips turned everything around for me and made all the difference. The Seattle Ruby Brigade was the first Ruby group in the world. For over a decade these folks have created and maintained over 350 projects from just 19 people. Every single one of us in this room rely on the work that they do. We literally own our livelihoods to these men and women. Who here is from the Seattle Ruby Brigade? Stand up guys, come on, let everybody see you. It's Aaron, even you. I love how only two people stood. So the first few months that I attended Seattle RB, I hardly talked to anyone but then I finally mustered up the courage and I talked to Ryan Davis. Yes, that's right, Zen Spider, a man who loves to hurt code because people are terrified of this guy. But it turns out that Ryan actually is a heck of a nice guy. He offered on more than one occasion for me to let me crash at his place. And if I was too tired to drive home, you said, yeah, I just crashed in my place. I told Ryan about my three failed attempts to start a group. So he shared with me the secret of Seattle RB. And it worked. I started what was called the Fraser Valley Ruby Brigade on January 10th, 2009. And we specified instead of the city, we specified the region, which is east of Vancouver because the towns out in the valley are just too small to maintain a group. So we are in our sixth year as a Ruby Club. We're not that big. But for a rural club, we have over 80 members. We average three to five people out every single week hacking on projects. So now that we know it's possible to clone the Seattle Ruby Brigade, even in rural areas, I want to share with you what Ryan taught me. So now remember what I was saying earlier that the things that need protecting most? Oddly enough, the things that we think need reinforcing, like presentations or food or membership, those things actually really don't matter as much. What really, really matters to reinforce a club are three things. Number one, hack nights. Most clubs do focus on presentations, but those are a lot of work to prepare. If you're trying to build a Ruby Brigade, you seem to be endlessly chasing people to do a talk. With hack nights, only one person has to show up. There's no work, there's no pizzas, there's no incentives, you just hack on code. Also presentations can actually work against you. When you watch a presentation, generally people have sort of an arms cross consumption mentality, which leads to point number two, bring a project. If members are encouraged to bring a project they work on, the arms are now unfolded, and now we're talking about hands on the keyboard. People show up wanting to create something rather than consume what others have worked hard to prepare. This attention shift from being a consumer to a creator has an interesting side effect of repelling recruiters. People who are there to look for someone to build their next awesome idea. When people show up and they want to build the next Facebook or Google will help you with your project, but we're not going to do it for you. Number three, meet every week. If you want to be successful at a project and you aren't working at it at least once a week, your enthusiasm and your momentum on that project fades. If you want to start a Ruby Brigade especially in a rural area, or you want to start a different Ruby Brigade that maybe isn't meeting your particular needs just set aside two hours a week, once a week and that's it. No really, that's it. You can meet just about anywhere, a local coffee shop, someone's house, a high school, anywhere with free Wi-Fi. If you end up being the only one there after a week so what? You're there to hack on a project. So you're still there, you're still working pushing your idea forward and you never have to chase people down to put on a presentation or you don't have to chase people asking them to attend every week. The fact is people are busy. They have lives outside of Ruby and people will actually find comfort in the fact that they know of at least one person meeting in one location every week to geek out and hack on stuff. So when it's convenient for people to come they just show up and I'm amazed how many people come and they say oh I'm so sorry I haven't been here for weeks and we literally say dude it's totally fine we're here every week. So now we have folks, some will come like once every three months or sometimes they'll come for a spurt, they'll come for like three months straight and then they just stop coming and it's really fine. There's no guilt, there's no shame about it and the likelihood if you're showing up in one location hacking on a project the likelihood that you'll grow from one person into a full fledged club is actually very high. So also there's tons of perks running your own club. Remember earlier I talked about the free stuff from sponsors? Well for starters you don't have to buy books anymore all the major technical book publishers have user group programs so here's the library for the Fraser Valley Ruby Brigade, we have over 90 books, they're all paper, they're not e-books, this is actually the paper books, members in our club they come to me and they just simply ask can I get a copy of such and such book and I order it for them and it's free I live in Canada shipping anything in Canada is ridiculously expensive but I get all these free, the companies cover all that. There's no shipping costs at all. So how do you do this? How do you get free books? Just do a Google search for the book publishers name and user group program. And that's it generally all they ask you for is can somebody, either you or somebody in the club, can you write a review on Amazon? That's all they want. So you can start building a library, hey if it's just you a one man club and you can show on meetup.com or however you promote your group that you actually have people coming out, these companies are more than happy to give you free books. The biggest two publishers by the way that we use are O'Reilly and Pearson. So just O'Reilly user book program, Pearson user book program or user group program and that's all you need to do. Other free stuff that you can get includes things like swag and t-shirts and conference tickets and promotional cost. For example, our club happens to use meetup.com which seems to work well for us. We try different things but meetup.com works well. I asked a local company, well actually it's not even a local company, we're in Chellowac they're down in San Francisco. I asked them if they would be willing to pick up our meetup.com dues which are like 72 bucks twice a year. And all I do is have a little promotion of them. I talk about them in the club if they have something that's new. And they've been supporting us like four bucks for like half a decade now. So if there are any expenses that you incur for running a user group don't just reach for your wallet or your purse, just ask a company if they'll cover the cost for you in exchange for some sort of promotion or whatever it is that they ask, just ask them. So that's how you can clone the Seattle Ruby Brigade or the Fraser Valley Ruby Brigade or actually there's several other Ruby Brigades that are doing this model. If you need any help with anything that I've talked to you about today just hit me up on Twitter. If you're a company looking for someone to promote Ruby user groups and would be willing to pay me to do it full time for remote locations like some companies are doing, just hit me up as well. The beautiful part about the kind of job that I do is that not only are you building goodwill in the community but you get to meet everybody. You build relationships with people in the Ruby world. So when that company is looking to hire you can find potential hires without being this scummy recruiter. It's just a natural conversation. So get out there find a project that you're passionate about, that you want to build commit yourself to work on it for at least two hours a week in one location and invite others to come and join you. So let's all continue to work to make the Ruby programming language community the best tech community on the planet and because I like to recycle my jokes here's my dog Bailey and one time he got a purse stuck around his neck. Is there any questions? Has anybody tried to start a group and it's either I know some of you are, I was talking to you at lunch, come on put a hand up. Yes, give me a question. No, no. No questions at all. Yes, it's actually not. Yes, I'm sorry. The question was when you are, let me see if I said this right, if you are there every week how hard is it to keep the momentum going? If you're the only one. Well, I would assume that most people who are getting into programming or something like that a lot of people have like this idea of burning in their gut. Something that they want to build something that's interesting. So if you're going to build that anyway just make that commitment. Two hours a week I'm going to get out of the house I'm going to go to coffee shop or whatever and you sit down and you work on your project. If you're going to do that anyway as DHH a lot of times says stop watching TV and take that time that you would normally watch TV and work on a project. You can build stuff. He built base camp in 10 hours a week. So does that answer your question? No, it doesn't. No, let's dialogue here. What's sort of bugging you there? Oh, well don't do a communal space. Go to a coffee shop. No, no. That's the point. You don't have to prepare anything. I used to have like a little paper thing. I had a little logo, Fraser Valley Rubricade. I would sit there I put it just on the coffee shop. People we use meetup.com. So some people with RSVP others didn't and because I'm going there anyway to work on a project when somebody shows up hey how you doing? Oh good. What are you working on? Oh I'm working on this. What are you working on? Oh really cool. Week after week it's very common where we don't even do any coding. We will talk about tech related things but because the focus is on projects as opposed to going out for beer or some other social thing it always ends up coming back to working on a project and because you're working on a project you don't have other people coming in hey can you build this for me? Hey can you build this for me? You just simply say well hey I'll help you build that. Why don't you get started? And people that aren't willing to do the work, they leave. Well that's what we want. Does that make sense? I don't think you're totally on the next question. Anybody else got a question or concern? No? Yes. By the way how close are you to Myrtle Creek? No I5 if you go down I5 you said Central Oregon. So halfway in there is a little place called Myrtle Creek. Are you anywhere near there at all? No? Okay. Oh you're on the other side of the mountains. Okay. If anybody happens to be near there I'm going to visit a friend who appeared about a year ago. You would all know the name. I'm not going to say his name but I'm going to visit him tomorrow and see how he's doing. And he lives near Myrtle Creek. Any other questions? Yes. Of course you do. Let's go back to the question that I awkwardly didn't answer properly. Go ahead. Brian. So to summarize he was answering the very first question and he said don't worry about it. Actually now Brian is amazing Brian you graduated from where? No. No no no no. You were valedictorian at where? The guy was like an art major. He graduated valedictorian and decided I don't want to do this. And he drove from like I mentioned not wanting to go to Vancouver. He lives in downtown Vancouver. So he would drive all the way to our club because the Vancouver scene was dead and he would come visit us. We got him interested in Ruby. I hooked him up with one of the members of our club which is Dan Cubb. He's the maintainer or data mapper and they got talking and now you're working at where? Unbounce. Unbounce. You guys looking to hire anybody? Always go talk to the guys if you want to go work in downtown Vancouver at Unbounce. So I got just a couple minutes here on the end. I wanted to kind of run an idea by you guys. You know the whole idea of RB or Ruby Brigade came from the fact that you've got .rb. Who made that up? Was it Ryan or you Eric? No? Probably Ryan. So I have this sort of thing when you talk about a Ruby Brigade. I mean a brigade is a big bunch of people so for years I've been kind of thinking micro brigade or something like that which doesn't make sense. So I've been checking around all these things like Ruby Bratz or Boneheads or I don't know. I could never think about something. So we all know what a hashtag is. What about if instead of having a hashtag you have a tag hash and you go and you sit down wherever computer and you just when you normally tweet about something or use any Facebook you just put that RB hash out there which is kind of a signal saying hey I'm here and I'm hacking on stuff. Like if you're at this conference today you're working on something RB hash. I'm over at whatever and that kind of opens the door to anybody who wants to come and sit down with you. Are you all familiar with the Dreyfus model? Has anybody not seen this? Alright great so most people have seen this. The Dreyfus model could even actually kind of map to this where you could say you know I'm working on such and such project RB hash which means you see yourself as an expert or a master as opposed to RB1 or something. And the other reason I kind of like this is because then you can talk like a pirate. What? I didn't hear you sorry. You can have lots of fun. Help me RB1. But the other thing is RB hash in on code. So I don't know what do you think? For those of you who are it's just kind of an idea I don't know. The idea is to try and get individuals who need help because I remember coming to these conferences and not knowing anybody but wanting to get help and so you put the Cascadia hash tag and I'm sitting in such and such working on stuff. If I threw something like RB hash or RB hash 1 then it kind of gets an indication to people. So what do you think about it? If you think it's a cruddy idea too bad but that's the end of it.