SPEAKER: We have Mister Coby Randquist on stage.
COBY RANDQUIST: Thank you. Sorry about that.
Like he said, I do organize a couple conferences,
so the in-between time is the time
I'm used to getting up here and talking.
Doing more of the introductions and not so much the presentations.
This is actually my second non-lightning talk presentation at a Ruby conference.
So I guess we'll start here, if I can figure out the clicker.
I wanted to thank the organizers for inviting me.
Like I said, I operate behind the scenes
a whole lot more than I do on stage,
so I appreciate the invitation to come out.
Prakash had mentioned that the community here in India
had benefited particularly from the
accessibility that Confreaks has been able to make available
to all the various conferences around mostly the United States.
A large part of that is due in part to Chad Fowler's support.
When we first started Confreaks and approached him in 2007
about recording the events, he was open to it and
actually worked with Microsoft to get sponsorship.
Microsoft was the primary video sponsor
in 2007 and helped make this whole thing happen.
Let me junp back to my slides for a minute.
So who am I?
My name's Coby Randquist.
I've been doing software development
and managing teams and building teams for
about twenty-five years or so now.
I started off back working with Basic in business Basic
in a language called Thoroughbred Basic on Unix,
originally writing in software to run
construction account- or, construction companies.
I migrated to Visual Basic, did a lot of work with Microsoft tools.
I was a Microsoft guy for a good sixteen,
seventeen years, migrated to C sharp
and then I discovered Ruby.
One of the other things is I like doing community building.
I like getting groups of people like this together
and finding the things that you care about
and then finding ways to make it more realistic for you to pursue those passions.
I do that with Ruby.
In the last year and a half I've started getting involved
with the OpenStack community.
If you're not familiar with OpenStack,
it is a platform for building cloud computering meet-ups, user groups.
You know I'm very excited.
This is the first regional conference in India.
It's been, you know at first when I got involved
with the Ruby community it was like,
oh this is really neat.
We've got these regional conferences.
All communities should have this and they don't.
If you look at Python, Python has PyCon,
which is their big national conference,
or their big conference,
but there's not a Python conference every time you turn around.
There is a Ruby conference just about every weekend.
Somewhere in the world there is a Ruby conference going on.
Let's see, oh so you'll notice the picture of the truck.
One of my other passions is rock crawling.
That's just a really beefed up truck that you go out
and you go really slow over really nasty obstacles.
Another community.
So in this talk, if you looked at the abstract is says
nothing because I didn't actually provide one to your organizers.
So what I wanted to kind of do was go back
and talk a little bit about my beginnings in the Ruby community,
how Confreaks got started,
and then a little bit about the different conferences that I do,
and then we'll spend a couple minutes just on
the topic about Open Source software and why we do,
or why we should care about this,
and how we could help spread really the passion for what we do.
Because, well and I will get to that part a few slides down the road.
So, how did I get started?
Like I said, I was working in a Microsoft shop.
I worked for a company called Vehix dot com.
We did consumer automatic research. It was a dot net shop.
And I'd found Ruby, I don't honestly remember why I found it,
but I looked at it, played around with it,
really liked it, but decided there was no way I was
gonna be able to convince our management to make the talent switch,
and there was no way I was gonna be able
to convince all the people on the team that we should be changing,
because we had just gone through a switch from
Visual Basic to the dot net framework in C sharp.
So we'd just gone through that,
there was no way we were getting another switch through management,
so I kind of put Ruby away.
And then about six or eight months later
I got to the point where I wanted to teach my kids
a little more about programming,
and if you open up a Windows machine today
it doesn't come with a programming language,
or if it does it's very varied.
When I got into computers I started out on a Commodore 64
for a Vic 20, the basic language was there.
In fact that was the interface to the computer.
You didn't have an operating system.
You booted right into the language,
which provided everything.
So lacking that I went looking for a language.
I found Ruby, I found Chris Pine's book Learn to Program.
You can't really tell from this photo here,
but the computer there is actually a Sun Sparkstation 10
because I have a lot of kids.
I've got six girls, now they range from-
my youngest set of twins are seventeen,
my oldest set of twins just turned twenty-one,
and my oldest daughter is twenty-three,
and there's one in the middle.
I wanted a way to teach them so I actually built a little lab,
and the cheapest way to do it at the time
was I picked up a bunch of used Sparkstations,
got them running Linux, got Ruby installed on it,
and sat down and away we went.
Ultimately it got me involved with Ruby.
None of my kids really got into software development, but.
Can't win all the battles.
All right, so that was in early 2006
when I was trying to teach my kids how to do Ruby,
and about that time I started to evaluate
what I was doing with my professional life and at Vehix dot com,
and it really got to the point where I wanted to try to do Ruby.
I wanted to figure out how I could utilize it.
So at that point my options, you know,
in 2006 I basically decided to quit my job
to open up a consulting shop and build software solutions
for people who didn't care about the technology I implemented it in,
which gave me the ability to code in Ruby and in Rails
without having to justify the technology choices I was making.
I just had to provide a solution.
So after doing that,
I'd been on my own for about two months or so
and heard about RubyConf through the local users group in Utah at the time.
So heard about RubyConf. I was in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Denver is literally a jump over the mountains,
so you hop on a plane, forty-five minutes you're there.
So I went to RubyConf in 2006 and Chad presented,
and all these guys are presenting and they're just blowing my mind.
And at the end, I think the format was a little bit different
cause I think Matz actually did his keynotes at the end of one of the days.
So he did his keynote speech,
but he went through 400 slides and talked about a topic.
One of the topics was bike shedding.
But he went through so many slides,
and I was already so brain fried at that point
from all this new material that
I wanted to go back and watch it again and it wasn't an option.
You know I think there were some,
somebody who had a their Mac Pro turned around
and aimed at the stage, so there were bits and pieces
of the talk available, but there wasn't a whole lot available,
so that kind of set the seed for Confreaks.
So we went home from the conference,
started talking about a little bit-
I don't know if you know, there's a guy named Mike Moore.
He runs the MountWest Ruby Conference in Salt Lake City.
So he started, he actually had a number of co-organizers
the first couple of years.
In 2007, he felt, I don't know if it was...
Were there regional conferences before '06?
So, OK.
So Mike started organizing Mountain West RubyConf in 2007
and he said, we should record this,
and I got together with my partner at the time,
a guy named Carl Youngblood, and we figured,
you know, Mike was organizing the conference.
The two of us said all right, we'll go figure out how to record it.
So we borrowed some cameras and got a frame grabber and set up,
and we recorded to tape,
because at the time cameras weren't what they are today.
So we recorded everything to tape.
We recorded the event,
we did post-production on it, we came up with-
Oh, yes, we basically said, how hard can this be?
After recording the tape and then spending like,
I think it took us like sixty hours to take the data
from tape and get it converted into a digital format
to where we could then do post-production on it,
and it was horrible, but we got it done.
Later that year we talked with-
Ruby Ho-Down was another regional conference
that happened that year, and they signed up
and said yeah, let's record is.
So we started to make that one happen.
Carl and I went out and bought
all new equipment and basically
created Confreaks at that point.
So the company, we set up a company,
we went out and bought these cameras
and they set up on tripods
and we had all this wiring in place.
And we'd run all the wires to the back of the room,
and one guy sitting at the back of the room
can remote-control three cameras and do all the switching.
And it was great, and it was hard,
and in 2007 we recorded Mountain West.
We recorded Ruby Hoedown. We recorded RubyConf.
And then through these connections we recorded
a conference called SmigDig which is a Agile developer conference.
It's held every year in Oslo, Norway.
So we did our first international conference
our first year and that was an adventure.
But the set-up that we were using at the time,
if you can see at the bottom of the slide here,
we'd used a double-wide format.
So we recorded the video
and we recorded the slides
and we put them together.
And they were in the incredible high definition
of 960 pixels wide, because both frames were standard definition.
So that was the first year.
One of the things I learned out of the year-
Actually this quote came about between my wife
and I as we were raising five kids under five-
"No matter how hard you think it is going to be-"
and this applies to just about any endeavor-
"you end up wishing it was that easy."
And part of that falls into the OpenSource
and the passion and the,
all of the efforts that we undertake
or all of the things that you look at in life.
Yes, they're hard, but they're worth it.
All right, so 2008, we recorded seven conferences.
I won't go through them individually.
The O'Reilly's Tools for Change for Publishers
was interesting because it was our first deviation
from software development and Ruby Conferences.
But if you notice, we haven't done a lot of those.
There's reasons for that.
We like, I like the community and the spirit that we have here.
So that was 2008. But, so that year was seven.
Also in 2008 I'd been doing the independent contractor stuff
for about two years, and in the United States,
at the end of 2008, the economy was getting a little...
a little wonky, and I'd wrapped up a major contract
that had been a large part of keeping my business going.
And I'd gotten to the stage where I was going around and doing-
A lot of the work that we were doing at that point
was smaller project work and constantly dealing with,
where's the next check coming from,
and started having some checks bounce here and there
and decided that really wasn't where I wanted to go.
So I wanted a regular income rather than
the feast and famine that you get in consulting work.
So I ended up joining yellowpages dot com.
Yellowpages at the time was a wholly-owned subsidiary of AT&T.
They are no longer owned by AT&T.
So that was also a transition in 2008,
where I went from running my own company, joined yellowpages,
moved to southern California,
and started running a development team there.
But when I got there, there was no meet-up.
There was no regional meet-up and that just
blew my mind because I came from Salt Lake City, Utah,
which has a population probably one-third
or less of what the LA area has,
and yet we had Ruby meet-ups about every thirty or forty miles
along the major interstate,
cause people didn't want to drive more than 30 or 40 miles.
So they just set up their own meet-up.
So when I got to LA there wasn't one,
so we created a local meet-up and got that going.
And, I'll tell you, the biggest thing about running a meet-up
and having them work is pick a date, pick a time, and be there.
Be there consistently, whether you have presentations or you just hack.
Make it a staple that people can count on and it will grow.
Just getting the ability to get people together on a regular basis
and something predictable that they can put on their calendars
and know that this is gonna be there and it's gonna be at that time and place.
All right, so that takes us into 2009. Our big change in 2009-
And this generally came-
A lot of the progress that we've had with Confreaks dot com
over the years has actually came from MountWest RubyConf,
when Mike Moore says, hey, I really liked what you did last year,
but let's try this.
So we switched to doing high-definition slides.
So instead of capturing them and scaling the slides
from your poor resolution output to TV quality output -
which is a lot worse, or at least was at the time -
we started capturing them at full resolution and just,
we continued that year in 2009 to capture
the speakers with standard definition cameras.
Let's see, new conferences that year...
Acts as Conference.
There's not actually too many regional events
in this community that have started and then stopped.
There's been a couple. Acts as Conference happened once.
Parallels and Convergences is actually not a Ruby conference.
And then we also did a Agile conference that year.
In 2010, Mike say, hey, this stuff's really nice,
but can't we get high definition cameras now?
The other thing that happened at the end of 2009 that had
a major impact on Confreaks is, in both '07 and '08
we recorded the conference SmigDig in Oslo, and Carl,
who is my partner in Confreaks, had been talking with a company in Norway,
and we met up with them both years we were there.
And at the end of 2009 they offered him a job,
so Carl moved to Oslo, Norway, at which point I bought him out of Confreaks.
So 2010 started my first solo year running Confreaks,
and in that year, Mike pushed me,
wanted high definition cameras,
so I changed from these robotic-controlled cameras
that we had to something very similar to what
we're using today, as far as the cameras go.
But in 2010 we recorded LA, MountainWest.
Oh, 2009 was the year I launched
the Los Angeles Ruby Conferences.
I'm gonna back-res there for just a second
because I launched the LA Ruby Conference
for a very specific reason,
and I think it's one of the very similar reasons
that Prakash has helped launch Garden City Ruby, which was-
At the time in Los Angeles, I had an engineering team, we had a lot-
I actually had thirty or forty people working in Ruby
and I knew there was no way I would ever get the budget approved
to send thirty people over the period of a year traveling
to different conferences, to get them to have the experience
that you all get to have by being here today,
and as much as people can benefit from the content
that we record at these events,
that's half or less of what you get out of a conference.
The benefit of attending a conference is not just your relationship
listening to speakers up here broadcasting at you,
but it's the value you get out of talking to people next to you.
It's the hallway track. It's the time that you spend actually discussing
your coding issues, your office issues with other people in similar environments
that can help influence your culture,
and there's where a lot of the benefit of all this comes from.
So I started LA RubyConf in 2009 because
it was the best way to A) get all of my people to have
that experience and B) we were looking for a way to
introduce Ruby to more developers
because we needed more people who could work in Ruby,
and in the LA area, there's a huge amount of software development going on,
but a lot of it's dot net, a lot of it is Java.
So we needed a way to introduce those people-
To this day almost every year at the Los Angeles Ruby Conference,
when I ask how many people get paid to work in Ruby today,
only about sixty percent of the audience gets paid to do Ruby.
The other forty percent are there to learn about Ruby.
All right, so 2010, I just got through talking
about changes with Los Angeles and now I'm leaving.
So in the end of 2010, I decided that it was time for a change.
Yellowpages was a fantasy company and a really great opportunity for me,
and working for AT&T was an interesting set of dynamics,
but I wanted to move some place where-
My wife has two daughters,
and one of her daughters lives on the Oregon coast,
and we have grandkids up there,
so we wanted to be closer to them
so it wasn't a sixteen hour trip to go visit them.
SO I looked for a job doing Ruby,
running a Ruby shop, found one, and that's all it took.
So I went to work for a company called G5.
When I moved to Bend, Oregon, I figured small company,
seven executive te- or seven members on the executive team.
We're gonna have less dysfunction and more ability
to get things done than dealing with the hundreds of people
involved with the bureaucracy,
or thousands of people in the bureaucracy at AT&T.
Lesson learned.
You can be just as function- dysfunctional
with five or seven people as you can with hundreds.
So in 2011, we did more conferences,
more conferences started showing up.
The list of conferences that you see up here
are events we actually went to and recorded.
It's by no means a list of all the conferences
that were going on in the Ruby community,
because there are a lot of events that happen every year
that we don't record, and if you go to our site we actually
do a lot of work now to aggregate videos from other conferences
and not just stuff that we produce.
So 2011, Mike came to me and said, hey,
loved the way the high definition stuff worked out last year -
let's live stream.
So we started live streaming.
Also in 2011, after moving up to Bend-
Bend, Oregon is a community of about 85,000 people,
so I now have a small development shop working for G5 in Bend.
I want to hire Ruby talent.
How do I get people to come to work for me?
So, we decided that-
The Bend area is known for a couple of things.
One: there are several ski resorts;
and two: we have twelve micro breweries.
With a population of 85,000 people.
So the community is known for good beer.
So we decided that we wanted to do a Ruby conference,
and in this case, the focus was a little different.
The, so we started Ruby on Ales.
The focus for Ruby on Ales wasn't so much about
getting all the local developers to learn about Ruby,
because quite frankly there weren't any, or,
the local developers we knew of.
It's a small community.
We pretty much knew everybody that was writing code.
What we wanted to do was put our city on the map
in the Ruby community, so that when we talked to people
we were trying to hire, trying to get people to work with us,
that they would know where we were at,
and having a conference did that.
That was the primary reason that started Ruby on Ales in 2011.
2012, so 2010 and '11,
I was basically running Confreaks solo.
That got a bit arduous and a bit time-stretching,
because I still had a day job as well.
So in 2010, or 2012,
I had my first full-time person come on that I trained,
and she now actually goes out and records conferences solo,
and I've got a second person that'll start
recording conferences solo in 2014.
Mike didn't have actually any technology changes in 2012,
so adding staff and getting our response times-
One thing that some of the community experienced
in 2010 and a bit in '11, is I'd go record a conference
and then it would take six, eight,
and in some cases twelve weeks before you saw the videos.
Adding staff has fixed that. All of the-
we recorded RubyConf this year in November, 8th through the 10th,
and all of the videos were online by
December 4th or 5th I believe, and that was,
you know, that's sixty some-odd videos.
2013. Now that I had full-time staff
and other people working on it
and wasn't marred with doing all of the production,
post-production work myself, we expanded.
So we actually recorded twenty- looks like I missed one,
we recorded twenty-three events in 2013.
Got out of the country again
and recorded Arrr Camp and Git Belgiam this year in 2013.
The exciting thing is,
I've now been doing the conferences
and recording them, producing them for you know six years,
and in 2013 we saw a ton of new regional conferences occur in the community.
Berlington Ruby, which is probably the- actually,
it wasn't their first year,
they'd been doing it for a couple of years,
but Berlington, Vermont is a city of about 45,000 people.
Berlington holds a lot of statistical records for things -
like they have the biggest shortest building in the country,
things of that nature, where, you know, they have the tallest,
tallest building in the state of Vermont,
is the shortest building of all the other states that have tall buildings.
So Vermont's a very small community,
and Berlington was the, is the capitol of Vermont,
it's the largest city and it has a population base of 45,000.
So it's fun to see even small communities,
out in the middle of- I won't say out in the middle of nowhere,
but smaller communities can do this too.
Conferences are something that can be done
and can be done by a group of committed people.
One of the other things that we did in 2013 is,
in addition to Ruby on Ales, which is our Ruby Conference-
Oh, also in 2012, yeah, in 2012,
I left G5 and went back to work for the Deathstar at AT&T,
only now I'm working at AT&T corporate,
and we build cloud computing stuff,
and that's where the OpenStack influence comes in.
But the OpenStack community is very,
it's different than the Ruby community,
because if you look in the Ruby community,
if you look at our list of sponsors,
our sponsors are generally small to medium-sized companies
that are working on creating products
and creating themselves
and building a marketplace and making things happen with technology.
In the OpenStack community,
the sponsors are folks like AT&T, IBM, CISCO, Hewlett Packard.
They're huge corporations who are involved
with being able to build and utilize cloud platforms,
and OpenStack itself is a project that came out of
a joint effort between NASA, which is the
National Aeronautics and Space Association
in the United States and another company
that built OpenStack together,
and then they released it.
I wanted to bring this feel of community to OpenStack,
so we started OpenStack on Ales,
and the small tech there is we had thirty-five attendees.
It's a new concept.
But even with thirty-five people are the conference,
and I think that's about what you had at RubyConf in 2001,
isn't it Chad? Thirty-four people at RubyConf in 2001-
So we're spreading the idea of
small intimate gatherings and meet-ups in conferences.
So that was 2013.
2014, this is where we stand now.
The first even we're recording this year is Garden City RubyConf.
Thank you for having us.
We will be, the conferences that are listed,
there are ones that we are relatively
confident we will be recording and/or producing this year.
So with that, I've got three or four minutes left.
I want to get real quick, OpenSource and the enterprise.
I worked for AT&T today
and I've been there for about two years,
and in my previous stints-
So we're doing things, we're using OpenStack,
we're using Python, we're using Ruby, the way-
I just have a couple points I want to sum up here.
The important thing is, if you work for large companies
that are starting to utilize OpenSource,
one of the things is, at least within AT&T which is
where most of my experience with this is,
they want to know who's the vendor that's going
to be responsible for this.
If we use Rails, who are we going to call when there's a problem?
My solution to that was we hired four developers.
So part of my pitch that I've done within AT&T
for using OpenSource software is, we may not get a vendor,
but the problem as a company, even if we're your biggest purchases,
we can't dictate what there,
how you respond to this problem that we have.
We can put pressure on you
and we can put pressure on vendors to do things, but we can't control it as concisely.
With OpenSource, if I have an issue on Rails,
if we have an issue on any of our applications,
with Activerecord or whatever,
I can get a person who is a core contributor to
Activerecord to fix the problem,
because we've been able to convince management that,
ok, so we don't have a vendor,
so we need to put money into OpenSource.
We need to hire people
and we need to pay them to work on OpenSource full time.
You're not gonna be able to do this
with smaller companies because it just doesn't work out.
With larger companies,
where you'd normally be spending hundreds of thousands of dollars
a year with an organization to support you otherwise,
you can make the argument to spend the money on staff,
and we've done that.
And, so Erin Patterson works for me at AT&T,
so if I have an Activerecord issue,
I've got the Activerecord guy that we can,
that I can have him fix it.
Now luckily I don't have to do that very often,
because it's a pretty solid platform.
So in the, if you're in bigger companies
and they're utilizing OpenSource,
don't be afraid to make that argument,
that instead of paying for support to a vendor,
we should be investing in our own people to make the product better,
and we go through that with OpenStack as well as Ruby and Python.
OK, OpenSource and you.
One of the reasons I started Confreaks
back when I did is I'm what I call a glue coder.
I take disparate systems, I put them together.
I write code that gets them to talk to each other
and make things work, and that's what I do,
and that creates a lot of code that generally needs better tests,
a lot of code that doesn't have any tests at all,
or a lot of code that runs inefficiently,
because I don't have the patience to optimize code.
So, when I, as I got involved with Ruby,
I looked at Confreaks, I looked at what was available
and I said, one of the ways that I can give back to the community
is by taking this non-obvious route of creating these videos
and making this content available to help build the community,
and that's the way I'm gonna give back,
because that's what I'm good at,
is organization and community and people.
I'm not as good at code,
but I love what we create here, so that's where I focus.
So as you think about what you're doing with OpenSource,
think about what, how you can contribute
and what you can do that takes advantage of your unique skill set,
not about making the next project that everybody's gonna use,
because there's so many supporting roles that need to be done,
so keep that in mind as you're looking at it.
And in the next section, real quick,
I'm gonna go through it a little bit quicker, is just,
it's a couple things to think about in both your professional and personal lives.
So my first question for you to ponder is,
why are you doing what you're doing today?
And when I wrote that I was looking not so much as you,
as why you are at this conference as I was,
why are you doing what you spend forty plus hours a week on?
Understand why you're doing it. What are you trying to accomplish by doing it?
So, like I said, I've got six kids.
So one of the reasons I work every day
and do what it is I do is to generate the money
to give me a certain lifestyle
and allow my kids to have a certain lifestyle
and to be able to go to college
and to be able to learn and do things.
That's one of the reasons I do what it is that I do.
Is what you're doing today what
you would be doing if you knew you could not fail?
So if you knew you couldn't fail at what you're gonna be doing,
would you do something differently than what you're doing today?
And it's OK if what you're doing facilitates your passions,
meaning, sometimes you work a job that is not
the thing that you care the most about,
but it gives you the resources
and the liberty to pursue the things that you care about,
and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
I mean that's crucial.
It also makes it so that you can care more about your day job,
or that thing you're doing that's not your passion.
You can care a whole lot more about it
and be a whole lot more excited about it if you understand
why you're doing it and that you're doing it
to drive something else in your life.
It makes it much less monotonous
or much less tedious if you know that,
because I do X, I may be able to do Y.
So the last slide.
You owe it to yourself to understand
why you're doing it and what you expect out of it.
Yeah, another, just see where my slide is,
I'm almost done. Yup, lost that thought.
OK, last quote, this is one of my favorite quotes.
It says, "In the information age, the barriers just aren't there.
The barriers are self-imposed.
If you want to set off and go develop some grand new thing,
you don't need millions of dollars of capitalization.
You need enough pizza and Diet Coke to stick in your refrigerator,
a cheap PC to work on,
and the dedication to go through with it."
This is a quote from John Carmack,
who is the- one of the founders of id,
created many of the first-person shooter games
and the graphic engines that were behind them.
The key to this, though, in my opinion,
is not the - I can't see my capitalization, anyway -
the key to it is this:
"...and the dedication to go through with it."
So the effort that it takes to put on a conference,
the effort it takes to attend, not even organization,
but to attend a meet-up is just
the dedication to go through with it.
The commitment to say hey,
I'm gonna take one evening a month,
or one evening every other month,
and go to this meet-up
and participate and work on building my own skills.
It's all about the dedication to go through with it. And with that, thank you.