 Do a little fireside chat. What's really nice about this venue is they've got this display right here. So we can know where we are in our slides without having to look back at that wall. It's nice. We're at the fire part right now. It's where the wood is. Yeah, do you see that there's going to be a spark here in a second? That's how you know. Oh, there it was. You missed it. So we bended a lightning talk last year about the sort of genesis of Cascadia Ruby, our little origin story. And I wanted to sort of repeat that for those that missed it last year. We, Ben, used to live in Portland. I used to live here. And we eventually became friends and through Seattle RB. And we're both at Goga Ruko 2009. I think it had to be 2010, I think. It was the year after the incident that Ryan talked about, whatever the year that was. So that would have been 2010. And we were sitting next to each other. We were like, Josh and Leah, really put on a hell of a show. And we liked this, and they really did a good job of that. We started enumerating all these things. We've been to a ton of conferences, big and small, and like, oh, yeah, we hate it when this happens. And a lot of conferences do that. We're describing our dream conference. And I sort of confessed to having tried to sort of half start one in Seattle when I lived here. And he sort of confessed to having tried to half start one in Portland. And we're like, why don't we just like super friends this? And our power is combined. It's true. And then we didn't realize we were getting into it. Yeah. And so we did. And we set out to make a conference that was better than Goga Ruko, which, if you've been to Goga Ruko, is an extremely high bar. And I think we beat him in some ways and did the best we could in others. And that was last year. That's a nice way to say it. I know. Did the best we could. Yeah. We were better than them in some ways, and we were really not in others. But then we decided, after last year's success, why the hell not do it again? And so here we are. Thank you all for coming out for our year number two. I had a bit of trivia about the name. It was originally for a hot second called Pac Nord Dove. Pacific Northwest Ruby Conference. And then someone pointed out that our friends up north, it's not their north. So all of the Canadians, it's their southwest. So I think Ryan. Yeah, I remember Ryan coming up with the name. I think there was like a Cascadia freedom movement thing where they tried to secede from it. That's a good question. Generally, people familiar with what your Cascadia comes from. So Cascadia. Yeah, right. So the name Cascadia is typically associated with this idea of a region that starts in Northern California and goes up through BC. So if Cascadia were to secede from the Union and from Canada, however that works, I don't know, just I don't believe in the Queen anymore. Is there a Canadian here who can tell me if that's how it works? Talk to me later. So basically, from Northern California, and it's north of the Bay, but not very far, all the way up north of Vancouver, is like one big region called Cascadia. Yeah, right, and from the ocean to the Idaho border. No, it goes further than that. It goes all the way across. OK, whatever. Anyway, look it up. But we thought it was a really good. It's basically where there's trees growing. When you get to Eastern Oregon, there aren't trees. True. We thought it was a really good representation because we really set out to have this conference serve the Vancouver, Portland, and Seattle communities, which frankly is something that we've maybe not done a great job at. Yeah, we've been really good at Seattle and not so good at Portland and Vancouver. And even Seattle, I think we could have done better. It's an artifact of, has anyone organized a conference before? Crickets? OK, Kobe? Terence. Terence, yeah. It's non-trivial. And doing it whilst having a full-time job and something kind of resembling a life or a boyfriend or a girlfriend or whatever, it's taxing. And it takes a long time. And we drop the balls of things. Things that we really wanted to do for ourselves. And we kind of made some bold promises last year, this time, and that we didn't follow through on. Sorry for that, but say again. There's always citrus water. You had me at citrus water. You want to talk about that, Sher? Yeah, sure. So yeah, sorry, this turned out to be a little bit more of a real talk segment than I think some people were prepared for. But yeah, this thing that we do is really hard. And next year, in order to make it a little bit less hard, I think we're going to make some changes. One of those changes is we're planning on doing it in Portland next year. It was always our intention to move it city to city, to rotate through Portland and Seattle and Vancouver. We started here because I live here and because it's Seattle. It's Seattle RB. And this is where the community was born. Huh? Never forget. Right. Hashtag. And so we're going to kind of make good on that. We're going to try and do it in Portland next year. It's probably also going to be a little bit smaller of an event. So to give you a little insider info, another founding principle of Cascadia is radical openness. And we haven't been very proactive about this, but I think we're both perfectly happy to talk about any detail all the way down to financials if you're interested. I've certainly shown other conference organizers our budgets and stuff. And so I don't mind telling you that this room has a capacity of 350. There are 152 people here. We were really ambitious last year when we signed up for this room. We thought we were going to sell out. And it didn't happen. This year we've got more people than last year, which is great. But we still didn't sell out. And so I think instead of the other thing about it is that we pay about $30,000 for this venue. And so we want to try to make things easier on us by basically just having a smaller room. So when we move to Portland, we're going to be looking for a space that holds fewer people, this many people. We want to have 150 to 200 people there. Because I feel like I've been to enough conferences around that size now that I really feel like that's the sweet spot for this show. And 300 people here, huh? Yeah, 300 people would have been too big. And so I'm kind of glad that we never got there. So the size is still small enough to be high touch. I don't know that I actually met everyone, but I could have. Sagan? Just under what we're at now. I think final count in the door was 137. And that includes speakers and comps that we gave out to a handful of people who helped us out and everybody who comes from the sponsors. So that's not 137 tickets sold. Yeah, no, tickets sold. In both cases, we were below 100. And also with regards to budget, $30,000 is a gripped ton of money. And we did even more last year. That party last year was ridiculously priced, too. But we decided that was one of the things we wanted to do. A lot of regional comps, like no disrespect to them, we wanted to do something different. A lot of regional comps are very budget. They're a flat room in a hotel. They don't have awesome food if they have food at all, or whatever. So we wanted to at least try to level up, try to bring more money in and spend more money on the thing. And this year, there was a scary moment where we had the Google Docs spreadsheet, and there was this red number that we wanted to be black. And so no joke, it went from very seriously red to very slightly black in the course of one day. And that was the best day of the last 12 months leading up to this conference. Great hair stop growing up. I mean, it was five digits before the period, and then the next day it was a digit or two in the black. And that was just like a bunch of sponsor conversations that had been going on, sort of all came together at once. Yeah. Like, we're not joking when we say we couldn't do it without sponsors, because that day, our names are on our contract, and we've signed a deposit, or like we've given a deposit. It's like we're paying that money either way. Yeah, and actually, I don't want to get too sidetracked in this, but I'm happy to talk about it individually later. Steel City, RubyConf is going on right now. In fact, as they're three hours ahead, they just wrapped a little while ago. And that came as a surprise to both of us. We contracted for the same dates, and we just didn't know. And when it came up, it was kind of scary. And we went through a time where we were seriously thinking about canceling. And then I looked at the contract and realized, if we did, we were on the hook for a lot of money. And being on the hook for a lot of money isn't what kept us doing the conference. We did it because we wanted to, and we thought we could still do a good job. And we did. I mean, everyone I've talked to has told me it was good. So thanks. I hope. Thank you. I appreciate that. And this is just water, I promise. Yeah, this is, right. This is also just water. So there's another change happening next year. This is my last one. I'm not going to be, it's in very good hands. There's a giant pile of hugs coming your way, buddy. So this is also a segue into these other things. I don't live here anymore. And remote programming is some degrees of easy. Remote comfort organizing is a different kind of difficult. Like this space last year, we agreed upon. After he had seen it, I had come up here to see it, basically. And I was in town for a weekend. We ran around looking at spaces. And flying whatever, three or four hours, just to look at a building is sort of weird. And the party, I had nothing to do with that. It was all on them. And they did a great job with it. And I had a good time. I drank for free all night. Eliminate. Just like every night. And but doing it remotely is super hard. And I'm not moving back here. I mean, I like LA. And I also do another conference. We mentioned this yesterday. I do a farmhouse conf in my backyard at my house in Hollywood. And I've done two so far. And they were a year apart. And I've decided to move that schedule up to six months apart, two a year. So the last one was in May. Both have been in May. The next one's in November. And the one after it will also be in May. And I think two comps a year is sort of my capacity. And I think we've made a good thing. My voice is a part of what this has become. And I think it's in good hands. And I think Ben, and whoever he chooses to work with going forward, will do a good show. And I'll probably come to it. Unless it's scheduled against the farmhouse. Right, right. By the way, Shane's not going to pivot himself, so I will. I went to farmhouse in May this year. It was in May, right? Yeah, who else did? A couple. Yeah, so it was seriously a very different experience to anything that I have done. For one thing, it's not a nerd conference. There are nerds there. There are quite a lot of nerds there. A lot of people I knew. But it's, do you call it a storytelling conference? Yeah, it's a story. People hang out under the tree in his backyard, which is no joke. That tree is amazing. And they talk about stuff. And it's incredible. And if you get an opportunity, please go check it out. I'm going to make everyone that I possibly can from here on out. It's really, really cool. The website for the house, and then you can get to the conference there, is farmhouse.la, which is the Laos country code. But they bill it as a city. And in full disclosure, the next one is the same weekend as RubyConf. So if you're going to RubyConf, I'm sorry. I'm sorry you're going to RubyConf. I'm sorry that there's a scheduling conflict. If you're not going to RubyConf, I would love to have you. You should go. The last one had a theme of mapping. It's sort of like if you took this American life and then modeled a conference around that. There's a theme and then a wide variety of talks around that theme. So the last one was mapping with an M, knots, sleepy time. Although a mapping conflict would be awesome. That's what I'm doing tonight. So there was a talk about anarchist revolution and social media and not the way that you would expect. There was a talk about navigating the gender landscape and that gender is not a binary. By the way, that's the talk that everyone needs to watch. It was, yeah, I mean almost everything. I mean, I'll be honest, there were things I didn't particularly like at the last farmhouse as the way it goes, but they were all super high quality. I guess it's more that I would say that there's stuff I didn't agree with, but I learned a lot. There was a talk about the life cycle of someone in Skid Row. There was a talk about. Definitely, they're videos, right? Yeah. Yeah, please go watch them all. Start with the gender landscape one, though. That was Maggie Mayhem, who is a sex educator and pornographer from the Bay Area. Yeah, all the videos are on the website, farmhouse.la. Kobe has come down in both years. And seriously, Kobe's a powerhouse, man. Confreaks is not a little bit awesome. It's a lot of bit awesome. And it's overwhelmingly ruby stuff, but that he does things like farmhouse conf is a real testament to his character and his level of awesome-tude. So the last one, like I said, was mapping. The next one is November 3, which most places in the country will be chilly by then. We'll still be kind of warmish in LA. A couple, there were maybe 10 or 12 folks that camped in the backyard. You're welcome to do that, too. And there's a party afterward. And it's like a whole day that three meals catered. And some of our sponsors for this were also sponsors of that. The next one in November, the theme is disruption. I have four speakers lined up already. Andy Beyo, who is the most notably. He's the one that posted the video of the Star Wars kid years ago. He was also the CTO Kickstarter. And he's putting on XOXOConf in Portland, et cetera. Shepard Ferry, who's done a lot of things, but it's probably most known for the Obama Hope poster. Kate Darling, who works out of the MIT Media Lab. And Caroline Woolard, who does alternative economy stuff out in New York. And our gender balance here is very not great. And that's also true at tech comps in general. With FarmhouseConf, I tried an experiment of doing five women speakers and five male speakers. And so far, it's worked really well. And people have been responsive to that. And the female attendance is a little bit better, too. I think it was about a third, two-thirds split. So that's something. And so FarmhouseConf 4 is going to happen as well. Its theme is future. I don't have anyone lined up yet, but it'll be in next May. So yeah, this is my last one. So I'm spending more time focusing on FarmhouseConf. And if any of you sincerely, if any of you ever come through LA and you want to hang out or hack or whatever, I sometimes have a couch that you can sleep on. I have a dog. Drop a line. Yeah, so I'm sticking around. This is, I like doing this. I like being part of this. I want to keep doing it. It was really, really hard to do this year with three organizers, effectively. Me and Shane working on program, working on sponsors, dealing with venue logistics and speakers and stuff. And Karn working on the party and providing a lot of logistical support as well. And losing Shane is going to make it quite a lot harder. It's part of the reason why I want to kind of simplify a little bit next year. But yeah, I'm going to stick around. I'm going to keep doing Cascadia. Oh, go on, you shots. No, sincerely, it's sort of awkward, tough, sometimes to take praise and especially sitting on the stage doing it. I think we want to open up to speakers' questions for anyone. If anybody wants to know anything, I mean, we're really happy to talk about pretty much anything. I think we probably need house lights, though. Also, while people queue up their questions, and Cindy's going to run around with the mic like we did earlier. Wow, that's quite a bit different. So this time last year, I went out to a bar with some of the folks that were attending Blue Box and Matt Kern and Mike Tauss and whatever. We came up with this idea and then proceeded to not execute on it for a year. And I really need help. So Mitch talked about open source as people. I totally agree. That's one of the things I've realized more and more. I spent a year at Ingeniard as an evangelist for open source. And I did basically like no code and no design. It's like developed relationships. And I'll get real dynamic for Jessica's picture right now. So we want to start an organization called Open Source Offsets, the idea being instead of, you know, so Aaron Patterson works at AT&T on rails full time. And that's sort of an exception. There's not a lot of people that are paid full time at a place to work on a thing that's open source. And most places can't afford to have someone on payroll full time. So most places could probably give a little bit of money. It's like the age old, like we used to contribute code a lot. And then we got busy and we're doing better as a business. But now we have less time. But we do have more money. So maybe we could throw 10 grand out of pool or a grand a month or some fun for open source. The idea of being open source offsets would be this sort of receivership for tax write off donations to a nonprofit. Then we would turn around and hire people full time. And honestly, my biggest hurdle right now is I don't want to fuck up the 501c3 paperwork because it's not like, oh, I just don't want to pay my taxes for this nonprofit. It's like, I'm going to be taking other people's money. And so I don't want to fuck that up. And I really need a lawyer to help me out. If any of you are lawyers or, OK, let's talk. Nice, awesome. I need like a community. Yeah, really, having a stage and a public address system. So any questions? Yeah. Any suggestions for next year? R. Davis. No, this guy first. Ryan? Other Ryan? Hold on a second. The mic isn't so necessary in the room. It helps a lot with the videos. Have you scoped out any places in Portland yet? I have not started to look. No. That's cool. I mean, I grew up in Portland. I've only lived in Seattle for three years. So I have some thoughts. But the venue so much shapes what the conference feels like. We go to RubyConf, and RubyConf is almost always held at a hotel in a ballroom. And it feels very different than this. This space, even though it's actually really big and you sit really far apart from each other, it feels really close and really intimate in here, in this room. And so trying to find something that replicates that, because I feel like that's part of this. But at the same time, is smaller and less expensive and not here will be a challenge. And then in two years' time, we're likely to be back here again. So yeah, I haven't looked yet. Is the very short answer to that question. Was there more to that? Sorry. I have a sort of straw poll. If there was Cascadia across the border, how many of you have passports? How many of you would go across the border for a cove? OK, that's helpful data. That is helpful. Yeah, we would love to do it. So much like Shane says, he doesn't want to screw up his 501C3. The reason we're doing Seattle and then Portland is to get to the point where we're making enough money to pay a lawyer to help us start a business in Canada. So yeah. So this is your second year doing this. And I just want to say that I think the one place where you could really improve is if you would communicate and delegate more. Yeah, I agree. Especially with Shane leaving, I think that if we're going to continue calling this Cascadia, I would really like to see you pick up a partner from Portland and a partner from Vancouver to help you. Yeah, totally. And you have all of our resources at CLRB to help you as well. And I don't hear from you until CFP, and then I don't hear from you again until it's time to judge the papers. And you could use us, especially considering how stressed you get from this. It's not worth it. Yeah, well, so the fuck you aren't. No, no, I am. But let me attempt to explain but not justify why it is that we don't seek help. Some of you may remember when we first started talking about this, we set up a mailing list and we kind of had this plan where we were going to kind of try to create this conference. We're going to basically ask people to help us plan it and to take feedback from the community and basically plan the whole thing in the open and get people's input and all that stuff. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Cindy. I took it. And we started that process and very quickly decided that that was a really good way to never get a conference done. And again, I'm not saying this is good and correct. This is just what happened. We never revisited that idea and looked at ways that we could make some of the concepts work. And we should have. And I think that's a really good idea. And maybe, Ryan, we can talk later about the specific things we can do to implement that. And Geoffrey McPeepe code, too, did that mean today that a lot of people wanted to be here or are seeing it now for the first time and we didn't do a good job sort of marketing. And that's totally true. And I think having, if not a partner, at least a liaison or ambassador in those two places is a really good idea. We did. And also, is there anyone here who's from Vancouver who's, OK, are you guys part of the Vancouver Meetup Group? OK. Does it ever meet up? No, so here's the thing. We have made a tremendous amount of effort over the last two years to reach Vancouver. And the organizers of that group don't want to hear it. They reject our messages from the mailing list. Yeah, we've had to, like, I sent messages to the Vancouver list both last year and this year that were rejected by some moderator. Could you say all that again in the mic? The person who runs that group has been trying to pass it off for the last two years. He doesn't want to do it anymore. Right. Yeah, I mean, I know that. So if he's getting emails from anyone, that is most likely why he's just ignoring them. Yeah, so that's what I heard. Miles Forrest, who is not here, is a good pal of the Seattle R.B. And he's kind of been my guy to try and sneak stuff in. But it's been very, very difficult to reach Vancouver. So maybe we can talk later, and we can try and figure out ways to do that. Because Vancouver is a black box to me. I was a PDX R.B. member forever, and a Seattle R.B. member for, well, Seattle R.B. Hanger on the last three years. But Vancouver, I got nothing. And all of our efforts have been fruitless. We're going to definitely work with you for that. Awesome. Thank you. I appreciate it. No problem. Here. Hashtag. Never forget. Here's a fun piece of trivia. Today, at this conf alone, I've walked four miles. And yesterday, I did six miles. I don't know about miles, but I have 8,500 steps. And oh, 3.96 miles. If that's accurate, then yesterday I did twice that. Because I had 17,000 miles when I went to bed last night. Or steps. Steps. 17,000 steps. I walk really fast, you guys. Um, Ryan again. I really liked Ryan Davis' comment. And I just wanted to elaborate on that. I think what the difference of trying to organize a conference by committee is versus delegating and communicating, that's the difference between push and pull. So figure out what the fuck you want, and then tell us what you need. Yeah. I appreciate that you translated that to nerd so we can understand it. Yeah. No, that's, yeah, that's, I had not thought of it that way. And I think that's a really, really good point. Thank you. Wilson, do you have any questions? That's unusual. Did you, where did you fly in from? From Portland? Are you out of Florida? Who traveled the farthest? Where did you come from, Ro? No, not even close. Okay. Katrina came from Oslo. Okay. Who bought a ticket that traveled the farthest? Yeah. Okay, so outside of speakers, who traveled the farthest? What do you got? Oh, but outside speakers though. Aside from speakers. So we have like the West Coast represented well. Is there any inland? Cool. All right. Well, I mean it's. Portland, Seattle, everybody? And two from Vancouver? And a bunch of San Francisco. Oh yeah, whatever. And San Francisco by proxy? Hi, thanks. I love these kids. All right. Okay, nice. Sweet. What do you got? I don't know. Awesome. Cool. You had to cross mountains to get to us. Anything else? Anybody else? I'm gonna double check my list here. We're also, I mean, of course, perfectly happy to talk about this stuff, not while we're sitting on stage and you're on a mic. So, Coby. Hold on. Microphone check. Okay. Yeah, I do organize a couple of conferences. So I know what these guys go through to make this happen. But one of the keys is, and Ryan hit it, and the other Ryan hit it. Delegate tasks, not decisions. But other than that, I think we should all give them another round of applause for the effort that they've done and for the commitment it takes to make it happen. That's probably a good place to end. I mean. Yeah. So the last song on Nervon Unplugged, you can't encore better than that. So, sponsors, speakers, attendees. Like, we've thanked you, not enough times. But I wanna put it like this. You'll never get these two days back. Your time is precious and dear and you gave it to us and not just us but us, royal us or collective us. The collective royal us. And that really means a lot. That means more than your money and your software and your everything else that you gave us your time and you participated in this as well. So thank you so much. Yeah. Let's get out of here. Yeah, so. All right. Thank you everybody for coming. Thank you.