Masafumi Okura is a freelance software developer focusing on Ruby on Rails. He joined RubyKaigi 2022 as a helper staff and the chief organizer at Kaigi on Rails 2022 which took place last October. He joins the Rogues to share his experiences and some pointers on arranging a successful Conference amidst the pandemic. 

Hey there and welcome back to another episode of the RubyRogues Podcast. This week on our panel we have John Epperson.

 

Hello everyone.

 

Valentino stoll.

 

See you now.

 

I'm Charles Max Wood from Top End Devs and this week we have a special guest and that's Okura Masafumi. Did I get

 

Hello!

 

anywhere close on that?

 

Yeah, Masafumi is my fruit name. Okura

 

Right.

 

is my father name, yes!

 

Yeah, when I was a kid, we had Japanese foreign exchange students come stay with us. We had like four or five of them. And so yeah, in Japan, the family name is first and then the given name is second, so.

 

Yup.

 

Anyway, fun fact. Do you wanna introduce yourself, let people know who you are and why you're famous?

 

Sure, so my name is Masa Fumi. I'm working as a freelance software developer for a few years now. And mainly I focus on Ruby on Rails and I'm known as a chief organizer of Kaiji on Rails, which is a kind of new tech conference focusing on Ruby on Rails, of course. it does virtual. It happens October next month. And I'm also an author of Albert Jam, which is a JSON serializer jam. That's it.

 

Very cool. So, Kaigi on Rails, do you wanna tell us a little bit about that and what you're doing with it? And yeah, hopefully we can get some people to come or come virtually.

 

Sure. So, Kaigen on Rails was started at 2020. It was planned just before COVID, so it was meant to be in person. At that time, we didn't have a thought of in person because every event, every conference was in person. But COVID came, so we turned it into a virtual conference. Akira Matsuda as a keynote speaker at the very first event at 2020. And at 2021, we welcomed Kamippo Ryuta, Kamizono, our Rails Committer, and Rafael Franco, also from Rails School Team. And this year, we are welcoming だ発売されていないので、この日の撮影日なので、

 

Okay.

 

わないでいいと思います。 年は素晴らしい機能スピーカーです。

 

Awesome. And then you're also involved in RubyKaiGeek, correct?

 

Yes, so I joined Ruby Kaigi this year as a helper staff, which is not an organizer, but only staffs that work for three days at the event, at the venue.

 

Okay. Makes sense. So I'm a little curious, and I have to say, I've organized a few online conferences. Let me, what's kind of your process? Do you have all your talks figured out at this point, not lined up, or?

 

I see you mean the schedule of the event,

 

Yeah.

 

right? So actually I created a timetable spreadsheet like several hours ago. And so I just wanted to, one of my colleagues, my coworkers at conference to confirm that I didn't miss anyone.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Or I can just, them correctly.

 

Right.

 

So I think at the day of the release of this podcast, it should be already released.

 

Okay. Cool.

 

Yes.

 

So, are all your speakers virtual? I just, I'm fascinated because it's like, okay, what are you doing that I'm not? Or, you know, how do you do this? Are they virtual? Are they recorded talks? I mean, how do you approach all of that?

 

So we allow speakers to join both in live and in video submission. So

 

Mm-hmm.

 

we let people to select either live or recording. And

 

Right.

 

interestingly, last year and two years ago, the percentage of the recording and live are like 50-50.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

live. So many people are getting more and more confident to give a live talk during this COVID virtual era.

 

Right. So when you say a live talk, they're going to get on whatever streaming software you're using from wherever they are, right? They're not coming to Japan.

 

Yeah, so most speakers are from Japan this year. So

 

Okay.

 

yeah, so people will join our Zoom session.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

And so the video broadcast staff are considering now which software to use. Probably cloud. Like, I don't know. but a cloud software to record.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

And we will have a YouTube channel to broadcast talks live. And we decided it's free.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Yes.

 

Yeah, it makes sense. So, are you gonna have an in-person venue at all? Or?

 

So this year we don't have any in person venues at all. Maybe our staffs are gathering in one room.

 

Thanks for watching!

 

It makes it easy for us to communicate. But yes, this year is entirely virtual. I'm planning next year, maybe we're going to have it hybrid. It's hard to organize, but it's worth trying.

 

Yep.

 

So yeah, so maybe next year I will be able to talk more about having organizing all hybrid events.

 

That makes sense. I'm a little curious too, as far as speakers go, like how do you recruit your speakers? Did you just publish a CFP and people found it or did you reach out to people or how did that work?

 

So you might know this fact, but in Japan there are more than 20 local Ruby meetups. More than 20.

 

Uh huh.

 

There are a lot of local communities. In fact, there used to be more than 12 Ruby local meetups only in Tokyo.

 

Oh wow.

 

meetup, Ruby meetups, those

 

Mm-hmm.

 

kind of stuff. So, and, so now basically they're all virtual, but I go there and directly tell people about the conference. So, so, so for example, like 10, 10 times a month or something, I go to

 

Uh-huh.

 

Ruby meetups.

 

Oh cool.

 

Yeah, so it's manual work. Not

 

Yep.

 

like... Of course we tweet. And we have many followers. We have some friendly people who have many followers. So they all tweet and talk about... It's... CIP is open, so please submit or something like that, but...

 

Mm-hmm.

 

I heard that

 

No,

 

some

 

that makes

 

people,

 

sense.

 

some speakers before in the past told me that they submitted a proposal because of me, because I told them. So

 

Oh cool.

 

yeah, I believe manual works actually work.

 

Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, some of the ones that I've done in the past, yeah, I had a lot of people from Utah, right? I went to the meetups that are here

 

Hmm.

 

and invited people and yeah, that worked out pretty well. What topics are you seeing people submitting and what topics are you accepting for the conference?

 

So it's the same as RubyKaigi, but this year the talks about types were a lot.

 

Okay.

 

So people are really interested in types in Ruby. But in RubyKaigi, there were some talks about type tooling.

 

Uh huh.

 

But in Kaigi on Rails, people will talk about types usage. or more practical. I don't want to say it's practical, but it's more user stories of types.

 

So

 

And then-

 

I'm interested on what you came away with from watching that as far as the usage of types.

 

Peace.

 

Maybe just in a Rails context, since it was Kai-Yan Rails, do you see people trying to adopt typing system in a Rails context and having performance enhancements from it or something?

 

Yeah, so I'm looking... looking for current CFP. So we use the same app as RubyConf and RailsConf uses. It's CFP app. So now I'm looking at the app, which has actual information. So... For example, um, types. But there are actually a variety of talks like post-gress focus talks. Um, and, uh, as one speaker created his own Selenium, uh, to, to, to, to learn about Selenium or, uh, one speaker will talk about, uh, how to reduce a technical debt by two, 200 pull requests. Or. Yeah, so I found one talk about types, which will cover RBS. So there are two type system in Ruby. One is RBS and another is RBI from Sobe ecosystem. But this talk will focus on RBS and it introduces RBS into Rails application. and how to maintain because Maintaining RBS files by hand is hard So they will I believe they will tell us how to maintain it partially automatically Yeah.

 

So, I mean, super cool that you've kind of created this new Kaiki. What is something that you've kind of taken away as, because this is the third year you'll have it, right?

 

Yeah, 30 years.

 

So what are some things that maybe were hard at first but you're now getting used to now that it's become a more regular thing?

 

So you mean the things I learned or things I took away?

 

Yeah, running a conference has got to be tough.

 

Yes.

 

I only know sideways. I've never actually personally had to get my hands dirty running a conference. What are some of your biggest challenges running it?

 

Um

 

What's gotten easier now that you know how it all works?

 

So the most important thing for organizing a conference is building a team. So the first year I gathered seven people, eight people including me, myself, but we didn't have any experience of a huge conference like this. So first year it was kind of a challenge And so, but from second year, we did have some experience. So we were, we were focusing on increase our capacity by expanding a team. So, so that in the future, it gets much easier for us to have a conference. So recruiting, so both like speaker recruiting is hard, also hard.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

So yes, they really work hard and they work by themselves so I don't have to tell them everything. They just do what they want to do and it's good for the conference. So yeah, I really feel it's important.

 

So how do you find these team members? Because I mean, it seems like you found the right people, right? Because

 

Yes, yes,

 

it's

 

yes.

 

continued to work. How did you know that they were the right people when you met them?

 

So the right people for conference organization is community. So if they are engaged in communities, it's likely they have their own place in the conference organization. So as I said before, I join local meetups often. who are engaged enough, then I talk to them. Well, maybe you can help us. And it's interesting that we have one typical way of recruiting, and that is recruiting a speaker. So we already have two, I believe two, who used to be a speaker. So people who want to speak in a conference tend to be interested in conference itself. so it's easier for us to talk to.

 

Yeah, that makes

 

Does

 

a lot

 

it make

 

of

 

sense?

 

sense. Yeah. So how do you then, like, to me, it seems very hard to find people wanting to speak at a conference they don't know about, right? Like, how do you start setting that tone where, you know, people are like, oh, yeah, I'd like to give a talk about this thing I'm working on. Like, was there giving away prizes? Like, how are you trying to convince them, you know?

 

So, we started, when we started Kaigi on Rails, there was already Ruby Kaigi, right? Ruby Kaigi

 

Right.

 

started much much before. So Ruby Kaigi is kind of top notch, am I saying correct? focuses on technical and high-level talks, which is great. But, so we wanted to make ourselves be kind of contrast. Maybe I'm expressing wrong, but. So we were writing a note about our own event where we say we are lowering the barrier. We want to be an entrance of the conference, tech conferences. So there are many conferences, and not only in Japan, but also in the world, but we want to lower the barrier so that it's easy for people to join as a first conference. It's mainly for participants, but it's also for speakers. So I encourage people to become a conference speaker in Kaigen Reel. Because we're welcoming.

 

That's really great. And I mean, to be honest, I feel like that's I remember my first Rails conference. And even then, I would, you know I was new to Rails and I felt definitely like an outsider, even though the Ruby and Rails community is very welcoming. It's, you know, when you get into a room with a lot of people that are very familiar with something, you know, you quickly realize you don't know as much. Right. Or maybe it just feels that way. It's easy to, you know, feel less than maybe you are or I don't know. I feel like this is a great thing that should come out and I'm hoping it seems like with the new RailsConf that they're doing the RailsConf minis in the states. It seems very similar kind of in style to this. It's really great. Have you noticed that you're getting better audiences from making it a more accessible conference? Have you found a lot of maybe younger Rails or Ruby people coming to the conference?

 

At least I hope so. And in the demographic, there are young people, like a few, like 10, 20, 30% are 20s. And in Japan, there are so many, not only young, not necessarily young, but relatively young people and joined the IT programming industry. So, and they mostly they learn Rails at first, because programming school teach them how to program in Rails. So, I hope we're accessing to those audiences, like the people who learn Rails with like Rails tutorial, or in programming school, Koko School. So we call it programming school in Japan. So we haven't done this yet, but maybe we should talk to programming school directly and we'll advertise about our conference.

 

That's a great idea. I mean, to be honest, I wish that at my university they taught Ruby because I would have enjoyed it much more, I feel like. So that's interesting, is Rails or Ruby part of the academic programs at a lot of universities in Japan? Or is that a code school specific?

 

So it's quite interesting story that Ruby is from Japan, right? Ruby was born in

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Japan. But the Japanese government decided that Python is language for school. So no Ruby. And Matt said, so Ruby has ISO standard. right? Like at the age of 2.0 it got ISO standard, but like someone said to Matt that he should take, he should make Ruby standardized for the government so that the government can make it official. I heard that from someone.

 

That's really interesting.

 

So Ruby is not taught in public schools at all, not in university. I know some, in some school or in some seminar, like do you have any small group of people in universities? I mean, small group of people who read the same book together who works as a long-term professor.

 

Yeah, there's typically like clubs or organizations

 

Cool. Yeah,

 

Mm-hmm.

 

yeah,

 

within

 

yeah.

 

the university

 

Association, baby. Yeah.

 

association.

 

So.

 

Yep.

 

So there are fewer associations in Japan that are taught Ruby. but it's not that common.

 

So where do people mostly hear about Ruby? Is that like a post, you know, university thing or?

 

So mostly in because of Rails, I mean, I mean, I mean, we, I mean, they tell newcomers that you can learn Ruby and Rails to get job quickly. So that's the main purpose or main entrance for people to learn Ruby. I believe it's not an academic area. Yeah. Do you have any

 

you

 

free cold camp school or something like that in US or in other countries? I'm not so familiar with the situations in foreign countries.

 

Most of

 

Do

 

them

 

they

 

seem

 

teach

 

to be

 

Ruby?

 

pay for, but yeah.

 

Yeah, you have to pay for most of them.

 

I think there is one free code camp, maybe. There

 

that.

 

are a few, but I feel like typically the ones that guarantee employment kind

 

Mm.

 

of thing are paid for.

 

Yeah, Free Code Camp is more a website with tutorials.

 

Ah.

 

than anything else.

 

So

 

and

 

I guess...

 

they primarily teach JavaScript. So anyway.

 

Oh, right. React or Vue or

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Angular or... I

 

Yeah,

 

see.

 

they started with React and JavaScript, and then they've kind of expanded from there.

 

Mm-hmm. That's interesting. In Japan, they will mainly teach backend first.

 

Hmm.

 

It depends on where you

 

So

 

are, but...

 

Railsy is good for them.

 

Yep.

 

It depends on

 

because

 

where you

 

it's

 

are,

 

forced.

 

but JavaScript is the popular thing to tell. So over there, they're telling people, hey, if you want a good job, you know, quickly learn Ruby and Rails. Over here, it seems to be primarily, Oh, go learn JavaScript. You'll get a job.

 

Yeah,

 

Mm-hmm.

 

go learn JavaScript and react.

 

Thanks for watching!

 

So. So interesting. So the talks will be in English.

 

You mean the Kajin Rails?

 

Yeah.

 

No, so this year it's still... so last year it was domestic and this year it's also domestic conference mostly in Japanese but So we welcome two keynotes, one from Japan and one from foreign countries.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

So this year we will welcome one keynote speaker, who will have a presentation in English. So there will be only one English talk this year.

 

Right.

 

And I transcribe it and write. and subtitles.

 

Ha ha.

 

in Japanese. And the keynote is for

 

Wow.

 

40 minutes, but it's kind of tough.

 

That's incredible.

 

Yeah.

 

So personally I want Japanese developers to be accessible to

 

Right.

 

foreign English content. So maybe this one as well.

 

Hehehe

 

That's great. Have you thought about

 

Yeah.

 

using a translation service or something like that for future conferences?

 

Yeah, it's definitely helpful.

 

Yeah.

 

So this

 

Yep.

 

year it's domestic conference, so it's fine. Like only one talk, so manual work could be done. But if I make it international, there should be at least several English talks and I don't have time to translate them all. So...

 

Right.

 

I mean, the first few Ruby Kaigi's were not international.

 

first? Ruby Kaigi?

 

Were they always, uh, do they always offer like translation services at the Kai Yis?

 

So Ruby, RubyKaigi is interesting in terms of translation. So it says it's International conference or the Linga Flanka is English so when we talk when we give a talk in Japanese Then there are professional translators, interpreters who translate the whole talk live from Japanese to English but If we give a talk in English, then there's no translation at all. we need to listen to English because it's international.

 

Hmm.

 

So it's quite interesting, I think.

 

That is pretty neat. I will admit, maybe 10 years ago I went to Ruby Kaigi and

 

Hmm.

 

it was great because they gave little translator earpieces.

 

Yes, yes.

 

So I was able to enjoy all the talks. But I do wish for some of the lost in translation pieces, it's always better to if you can understand it, I'm sure.

 

Yep, go learn some Japanese, Valentino.

 

It's hard. Uh... Yeah, I don't know. I bet I really enjoyed RubyKaigi. I imagine, you know, Kaigi on Rails is at least at par with, you know, the level of community there. Because I know, like the how you were saying the Ruby communities are just everywhere over in Japan. You

 

Thanks for watching!

 

know, I can attest that I went I was at Tokyo for the one I was at and there were just Ruby meetups. and you could be a different place in Tokyo and there would be a different meetup happening. So

 

Yes.

 

I definitely kind of miss having that accessibility in the States because it's not nearly as condensed of a Ruby

 

Mmm.

 

community. But I used to run a Ruby group in a place where there weren't many Rubyists. People would travel an hour to get there.

 

Hmm.

 

It's still fun, running a little meetup and the quality of some of the talks that come out of there and content is just so much fun. It's really cool that you were able to put all this together as kind of like coming from all those meetups and meeting all those people and making, you know, some more quality content come out of that. Do you foresee like kind of translating this and integrating it more with meetups or how do you see yourselves kind of building up the Kaigi on Rails community?

 

So like you said, there are so many communities in Tokyo and Japan and they are so condensed. And people from each, not every, but people from some communities will join RubyKai as speakers for example. And people are proud of it. So if someone from that community they belong to. have one speaker or two speakers and it's great for the community. So it's kind of a huge reunion in Ruby's theory reunion That's part of portion of RubyKaihi and Kaihi on Rails wants to be like that so it's a it's a it's also a community for for Ruby communities as well, but In addition to that, there are so many people who haven't joined any Ruby Meetups or communities yet. So Kaigen Rails wants to be accessible for them. So it's a good thing of virtual because they can join it individually, right? when you don't have any friends, any known people in the conference room, then it's kind of sad and it feels kind of isolated, but in virtual, we don't have to feel like that. So it's easy, I believe it's easy for them to join us virtually. So I want Kangen Rails to be a kind of I mean it's not good to say like practice but the first experience of community So I hope they will expand their experience of community after joining Canyon Rails. But it's hard to encourage them to join after party stuff. I mean, when it's in person, when it's physical, when it's offline, people will love to join parties, right? But in virtual, they're just gone after the conference. They're

 

Hmm.

 

gone. they don't come to the party because it's not

 

Uh-uh.

 

a party

 

I will say my favorite part of RubyKaigi was the karaoke events.

 

Aha, Ruby Karoaki.

 

That's definitely how I met many of the people at the conference, was through the karaoke events. I don't know how well that translates virtually. I imagine you could host the karaoke event online. I've

 

Hahaha

 

never tried that.

 

Isn't karaoke

 

I haven't.

 

originally a Japanese word?

 

うです、カラオケ。日本語でカラオケと呼ばれるんです。 本語の原発のカラオケです。 本人がカラオケを作ってくれたんです。

 

Well, I. After my experience there, I believe it It's great it's such a fun time and you know, everybody gets really involved and you know, you know I didn't speak any Japanese when I went and you know, I was singing along in Japanese to some of the songs As

 

Hahaha

 

best I could, you know But it was definitely a lot of fun and what kind of Socialization have you tried like event wise easier for people to get together.

 

So last year we built an online booth. Is it correct word? A booth? So that's expo kind

 

Uh-huh.

 

of. So we have

 

Sure,

 

sponsors.

 

yep.

 

Last year we had 24 or 5 sponsors. So we let them have their own expo for free. have some small events in their own area and we encourage people to join them. And we used special chat, you know, do you know that? Special chat.

 

Now with special chat.

 

Not special, a spatial. It's hard

 

spatial

 

to pronounce.

 

chat.

 

Spatial chat, yeah. And so we can move around. It's not digital, it's kind of analog. So smoothly, we can move around smoothly and when we're close enough, then we can talk to each other. So we used

 

That's really cool.

 

it as a tool.

 

Did it work out well? Were people able to navigate it pretty easily?

 

So it's quite intuitive, so it's not hard to use. After they joined it and experienced it, they felt good. So it was a good choice for us as a communication tool for after party. After all, Zoom is not a good tool for it, right?

 

Yeah.

 

Not suitable.

 

I'm surprised how long Zoom has lasted, to be honest.

 

Hahaha.

 

Well, for recording, it's a great tool, but for socializing, it's just not good. But as I said, it's hard to let them in. They're in front of the computer during the conference. And after that, they don't move. They just, they need to be, stay there to join the party online. I know it's hard for them to do so. So people just want to relax, have some rest, I don't know. And when they're once gone, They won't come back. because they're in their home and there are so many things to do. It's different because when we join RubyKaigi in person, what we want to do is just join and enjoy the conference. But

 

Mm-hmm.

 

it's quite different in virtual.

 

They need like...

 

So after joining RubyKaigi, I really think in-person conference is great.

 

Yep.

 

We want to... we want to do karaoke again.

 

Hahaha.

 

Yeah.

 

Awesome, I was gonna say they need, if you're gonna have to like, one of the problems with like, being in front of your desk all day at a conference is you just want to do something active or whatever, but not everybody has, you know, a treadmill in front of their standing desk kind of thing or

 

Hehehehe

 

even that's,

 

Right.

 

even that's kind of not that interesting but.

 

So there is an idea that we have public viewing. Is it correct English? Public viewing, like sports event. So

 

Mm-hmm.

 

we are in the small room together and we have one big screen and we will watch the conference virtually. watching it alone.

 

I feel like the last RubyConf Home Edition had a similar format where there would be like main public channel that everybody could visit for

 

Mm-hmm.

 

the main keynotes. And I personally like that better. Although I did the very first, you know, Home Edition RubyConf, I did enjoy being able to just selectively watch whatever talk I wanted and then be able to chat with people as they're But there's something more about like everybody going to see the same thing at once it gives that in person, you know aspect to it It's hard. Virtual is hard.

 

Hahaha

 

I don't have any answers here.

 

Yep. Yeah, there are definitely

 

I like

 

some

 

them.

 

challenges. It just depends on what people expect.

 

I like that we're experimenting a little with it because, for example, the local Ruby meetup here, I helped to co-organize, we decided that we, regardless of COVID things, we're going to try to be hybrid going forward because by being virtual for a while, we allowed people that were a lot farther away to join. that would drive that hour or so, just because there wasn't another meetup any closer for them. But they were very rare comers and they've been able to come more often because it's virtual. But at the same time, you know, there is like the in-person value or whatever that you can't really replicate online. And you know, like our model right now is to try and accommodate both things. But it's, I mean, I know that like for us, like we're definitely like trying to find something better, right? And so it's just, it's nice that everyone is experimenting and trying to find other ways. But yeah, I mean, I definitely agree. Like I don't think that we've found the perfect thing yet for sure.

 

Yeah.

 

I know one interesting example of hybrid meetups. So there's one meetup called Fukuoka RB, which is namely a local Ruby meetups in Fukuoka Prefecture. So Fukuoka is a place where RubyKaigi 2019 happened. And so they have weekly meetups. And one time they had, they started kind of early to have an in-person meetup and it ends at 9 o'clock, 9 p.m. and after that it switches to virtual and it ends at 11 o'clock. So it has two parts. and the people who joined were totally different. So for example, people like me from Tokyo couldn't, of course, couldn't join in-person part. But people who joined in-person part needed to go home. And after going home, they want to have dinner. So they couldn't join in virtual part. I found it interesting because it can welcome both people from outside, far, and people from local. I heard that it's quite hard to organize. It's quite tough. I'm not so sure if it's the future of the hybrid.

 

Yeah.

 

It is kind of interesting though, right? Cause most of our discussions as a community happen on the internet, right? Like asynchronously, right? All these Ruby committers are around the world, even Rails committers, right? And they're all asynchronously discussing ideas and topics and all these talks are asynchronously made, right? Like everybody's not really happening all at once. So I'm kind of hoping what comes out of this a more asynchronous workflow where people can just take these discussions that they have offline to have them in a meeting space and talk about them with the actual people face to face. And it seems like that's kind of where we're getting. There's still something missing from that piece of the puzzle, right? Where, how do we get have back into the people that are missing them? How do you get the discussions in Fukuoka meetup for the people that missed the in-person to the people that attended in-person? Is there an email thread going after where people are like, oh, it was great to talk about this particular topic? Do conversations happen after that collaborate those two different you know, community members.

 

So in my experience, they are separate. So I couldn't see anyone who joined in person. And they were not, they don't appear in online. Like, I mean, we, so Fukuoka RB community has both like Discord and Slack workspace to communicate. But people who joined in person. came because it's Fukuoka's logo. So some of them don't join online community part. So we don't see them from Tokyo. So I feel it's separate.

 

Do you see that being an issue at all or is it kind of okay that everybody still gets the most out of the community,

 

So,

 

the group being there and active?

 

as you mentioned, we have asynchronous part of the community, right? And actually we have one huge online community, online Ruby community in Japan. It's called Ruby JP. There are more than 4,000 people in Slack community. are engaged enough, then they will surely join RubyJP as well to talk more about Ruby so that we can meet online. Then it's probably fine. I mean, we don't see each other in person, more local online. It's weird, local online part of the community. Does it make sense?

 

Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, it's hard to... I'm just thinking about... How do we make sure that we're including everybody's conversation?

 

Mm-hmm.

 

How do you know that maybe some things that people were talking about in the virtual aspect of it, maybe somebody would be interested in that discussion for the people that attended in person. I feel like we're just missing a piece that captures that aspect and dialogue, right? Like that they can capture in some way. I don't know if it's like, you know, maybe recording aspects of it, you know, or something like that. I don't know. It's something I see that's missing piece from that, you know, virtual hybrid combination. Because I will, I would love if, you know, even post pandemic and endemic, right? I hope that we can continue the virtual aspect because we do like, having that virtual conference, the attendance is still up there. There's a lot of people attending the virtual only aspects of it. Myself included, I can't make it to a lot of in-person ones with my young kids, but I would love to. The past few years I've been able to attend a lot of the conferences virtually, and I've talked to people that are in similar ways. How can we continue that going forward and make it so that I could still be in touch with people that attended the conference in person too and still feel part of the rest of the community? Versus, it seems like we're at a path where we could create two separate kinds of communities, the people that attend in-person conferences and the people that attend virtually. you know, truly hybrid.

 

Yeah, so as a helper staff of the Ruby Kai game this year, I felt it's hard to take care of online participants while being part of the in-person conference. As a human, we tend to focus on the things in front of us. And we, it's hard for us to take care of the things which is of us right and so we I believe we need to have some more experiences to just smoothly have hybrid experiences events but anyway we need to do I believe we need to do so because it revealed there are some people who cannot join in Like as you said, when bringing kids, when having small kids, we just can't leave home, for example. So there are hidden demands. There were hidden demands of online participation, which was revealed by COVID. we need to practice to organize hybrid conferences and meetups well. I mean, we cannot give

 

Yep.

 

up online.

 

You know, I'm just picturing a bunch of like drone floating heads, you know, with screens on them people can attend, you know, fly in.

 

hahahaha

 

I mean, it's very clearly an unsolved space, right? And it's not like we have, like the solutions that we have, right, are the ones that are like creating the split and we're like, oh, this is better than it was when we didn't have anything, but now we have this new problem of the split community, right, that we're like kind of at an impasse to solve at the moment, but.

 

Yeah. Well, this has been really interesting and really helpful. If people want to find out more about Kygianna Rails, how do they find it?

 

So the URL is kaigi on rails.org, which the website is partially in English but partially in Japanese only. Yeah, so for example, about, there's about page, but it's all written in Japanese. You can use deep L or translation service, other services to,

 

Mm-hmm.

 

to know more about Kajin Rails.

 

Right.

 

I will put link in the show.

 

Sounds good. All right, well, we've kind of used up, we were gonna talk a little bit about code as mental therapy, so we'll just have to schedule you to come back, but in the meantime, if people wanna connect with you directly, is there a way to do that?

 

Sure, so I use two main social services. One is Twitter, one is GitHub, and both are the same. Okuramasa will be my full name. So, twerid.com slash okuramasa, F-U-M-I. It's a little bit long, but it's inevitable name and Github is the same.

 

Yeah, we'll

 

Yeah,

 

put it in the show notes too though.

 

yeah, yeah, yeah, thank you. And so my Twitter is mostly in Japanese, but please send me a direct message in English. I can reply to you in English and also please find me on Github as well. Not only Alba, I mentioned it before, but several other small products I created so please find them as well.

 

All right, sounds good. Well, we're gonna go ahead and do the next segment of the show, which is picks. John, do you wanna start us off with our picks?

 

Yeah, I can definitely get us started off. So I have two picks today. So my first one that I just kind of recently used on a project, it's called YAF or Y-A-A-F or whatever. It's like yet another active form is what it is. It's just a gem that if you're familiar with kind of like the form object pattern, it's a gem that kind of tries to help make that pretty easy. It's a pretty small and light gem actually. It's not like it's like huge heavy lift or anything. And it's pretty nice to use. It's not, you know, I found I managed to find some corners but for the most part, like I felt really good about it. You know, just cleaned up like my form objects or whatever in this particular project. And so I was like pretty happy with it. So, that was good. other pick I have these really sweet leather coasters that we got not too long ago and they're awesome because you know my old coasters were collecting water and stuff and these are just absorbing the water which is great so anyway they're really awesome and I like them. Those are my picks.

 

Nice. Valentino, do you have some picks?

 

Sure, I only have one pick today. It's this Editor called LunarVim that basically uses Syntax trees and Treesitter and a number of language server related things to bring all of the language tools and Highlighting and instant feedback from a lot of common languages. It's been really great and The only downside is it uses Vim, which there aren't the same number of plugins available to it as traditional Vim. It is getting there, but I've been having a lot of fun playing around with language servers with it.

 

Awesome. I'm gonna jump in with a few picks. I think last week I picked Irish Gage, the train game. So if I didn't put it in the show notes, but yeah, it was a pretty fun game, pretty fun board game. I also ought to mention that we postponed Rails Remote Conf, so it'll be in January, so you can still submit CFPs. I'm gonna see if I can get that CFP app installed because I think that'll actually save me a bunch of effort. So thanks for that, Masa. That seems like it'll really help. Beyond that, I've just kind of been neck deep in working on top-end devs, so keep an eye out for some updates and changes there. I'm trying to think what else I have to pick. I've been listening to some books on Audible by Dan Wells. The first one is I Am Not a Serial Killer. I'm currently on the third book, which is I Don't Want to Kill You. I'm sure the names are really, really inspiring. They're good books. They don't top out the chart for me at all, but they're interesting enough for me to keep listening to them. So I'm going to pick that. Yeah, I'm gonna have to check out Kaigi on Rails and see what's going on there.

 

Could I share some picks as well?

 

Yes, yes.

 

I

 

We

 

like

 

usually

 

to...

 

make our guests go last, so go ahead.

 

Okay, thank you. So there are two picks. I have two picks. One is technical and one is conference. So the first pick is rspeccurrent.vim. So it's coincidence that I also pick things about vim. it's often the case that we miss the current subject. So when the RSpec lines are long, then there's no subject in the screen. So when we find it is expected to something, then what's this? What's the subject of this? So I create a solution for this. And so it's a Vim plugin, both for Vim and NeoVim. and it provides a few functions of them that shows you current effective, currently valid subject and context. So now it's easy to keep it up. So that's my first pick. And my second pick is an nRubyKaigi. slightly confusing but it's not RubyKaigi, it's mRubyKaigi. So mRuby is a embedding, a small Ruby implementation for embedding, both in hardware and in software. And this year, it's the 10th anniversary of mRuby. So mRubyKaigi takes place in this October. So if this podcast episode is released before that, then please consider joining. I believe it's free and it both has a Japanese and English translations so that you can enjoy many talks, including my talk in every Kairi. That's my fix.

 

Awesome. All right, we'll go ahead and wrap up. Thanks for coming. This was a lot of fun and I love kind of digging into how this stuff all comes together. And it'll be interesting to see, yeah, how our online get togethers, I guess, for lack of a better way of putting them evolve. But yeah, we'll wrap up. Until next time, folks, Max out.

 

Take care.