Garden City Ruby 2014 - A Bit of History by Coby Randquist

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.