Dari Goldman is the Technical Support Engineer at ViaEurope. Myriam Graïne is a full-stack developer. They both hosted the Rails World Conference in October 2023. They join the show to talk about their Rails World experience, things they have learned, and much more!

Valentino (00:01.413)

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of the Ruby Rogues podcast. I'm your host today, Valentino Stoll. I'm joined by two very special guests today, hailing from the recent Rails world, Dari Goldman and Miriam Gren. Did I say that right? Yep.

 

Myriam graïne (00:19.045)

most.

 

Dari Goldman (00:19.367)

I would say dairy like legendary. That's for the podcast. I usually say something different. Dairy like dairy products.

 

Myriam graïne (00:22.678)

Hahaha

 

Valentino (00:27.993)

I gotcha, Derry. All right, well, welcome, Derry, and welcome, Miriam. Do you both wanna maybe give a little introduction what brings you here today, and what got you to Railsworld, really? I'm curious to find out. So, Dara, do you wanna go first?

 

Myriam graïne (00:30.78)

Mm-hmm.

 

Myriam graïne (00:42.914)

Uh huh.

 

Dari Goldman (00:46.702)

Okay, so I recently graduated from the Loagon Bootcamp, which does web development bootcamps, which just primarily Ruby on Rails. And through that bootcamp, because I was a recent graduate, as Miriam was as well, we were able to audition to become emcees for the Rails World Conference. And that was pretty exciting. It's the first Rails World, so being able to be a part of that was pretty amazing.

 

I come to Rails from the bootcamp, but also having studied computer science before, and I was looking to like build like a or like have more practical experience, which you don't really get with a degree, it's more theoretical. So coming to Rails and actually finding that and being able to build apps after the bootcamp was really valuable to me. And the conference was really cool because you're actually surrounded by other people who kind of have that same mindset. So.

 

Myriam graïne (01:45.62)

Uh huh.

 

Dari Goldman (01:46.39)

Yeah, that's a little bit about me.

 

Valentino (01:52.269)

Awesome and Miriam, what about yourself?

 

Myriam graïne (01:55.021)

Yeah, so kind of the same experience with Rails. I attend the web development bootcamp, le wagon, and I like to say I've always been hands-on with computers for almost ever because my dad was a tech guy, so I've always had computers so it was not something new, but I had a totally different career. I was a lawyer.

 

And sometimes it was there, it has always been there, and I had like same opportunity as Derry to take the chance to audition for being an MC at the Rails conference. And you understand my English by the way? Yeah. And yes, so yeah, it was amazing. Like to have the chance and opportunity to meet people from different part of the world and with different experience with Rails, that was...

 

Dari Goldman (02:33.349)

Yes, yes.

 

Valentino (02:33.854)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

 

Myriam graïne (02:47.853)

unique chance. And it was the first like they said, so basically pretty much.

 

Valentino (02:57.089)

Yeah, I was watching Rails World from afar and the Twitter is, I guess, X, whatever you want to call it now. On social media, there was a lot of people and a lot of presence of career switchers or maybe late career, early Rails. Did you find that was true at the conference? Were there a lot of other newer people to Rails?

 

Dari Goldman (03:03.222)

the Twitters.

 

Myriam graïne (03:04.922)

Hehehe

 

Dari Goldman (03:07.603)

Yeah.

 

Myriam graïne (03:17.221)

Uh huh.

 

Valentino (03:28.684)

I'm curious, how many attendees would you say were new versus new to just career-wise?

 

Dari Goldman (03:39.39)

I would say that I met maybe a few other junior developers. Um, it wasn't like the majority of the people that I met, a lot of people that I met had been working with Rails for a long time, even if it wasn't their primary framework, they told me that they had been dabbling on and off with Rails. And, um, this was perhaps their first conference or they'd been to a few, but this was like the first one where they were like, Oh, wow. It's like, just like all of this excitement.

 

Myriam graïne (03:39.745)

hard to say.

 

Myriam graïne (03:43.599)

Mm-hmm.

 

Dari Goldman (04:08.014)

around the framework because you had the Rails core and everything. So I think, I don't know if there's so many juniors, because I think if you were able to get a ticket, because they're sold out in 45 minutes, you had to be really, really enthusiastic about the conference. And I think those were primarily, yeah, primarily the decades long users.

 

Myriam graïne (04:11.625)

Exactly.

 

Myriam graïne (04:22.83)

Hmm.

 

Yeah, I shouldn't.

 

Dari Goldman (04:34.294)

But yeah, I think that there were a few like us who were able to make it in.

 

Myriam graïne (04:39.705)

Oh

 

Valentino (04:42.845)

Yeah, I heard it was like getting tickets to a Taylor Swift concert, right? So excited Yeah, I mean sadly I couldn't go either yeah, I mean it was It's interesting to watch. I didn't expect kind of the response to be as you know It I guess quick to action. I know conferences can you know fill up fast, but pretty wild to see that

 

Dari Goldman (04:46.43)

Yeah, people are so upset. They're like, what happened? They're going to see live nation.

 

Myriam graïne (04:46.817)

Yeah, exactly, yeah.

 

Myriam graïne (04:52.982)

Mm.

 

Myriam graïne (05:06.327)

Mmm.

 

Valentino (05:11.565)

blow up like it did. So that's really cool. So you both are in Europe, right? And so how was, I heard the venue was just incredible. It was held in Amsterdam, right? So what was that experience like? I'm curious, like, yeah. So what was it like? I'm just curious.

 

Dari Goldman (05:14.679)

Yeah.

 

Dari Goldman (05:27.219)

young.

 

Myriam graïne (05:29.293)

Yeah.

 

No, that was amazing, yeah.

 

Myriam graïne (05:41.421)

Yeah, like you said. Cool.

 

Dari Goldman (05:41.662)

So the building was in kind of like the center of Amsterdam. Oh, you go ahead, Miriam, you go ahead. I think there's just a slight delay. All right. So there's like, you arrive sort of like in the center of Amsterdam where you have the canals and it's right next to the water. You have all of these like.

 

Myriam graïne (05:47.169)

No, no, you started, don't worry. Yeah, there's a little gap, no worries.

 

Dari Goldman (06:08.266)

You're really in like an old part of town. It's not like going to a new recent conference center. It did have like this historic aspect to it. And the building that we were in was just incredible. When you enter into it, it's a full brick building and the spaces where the talks were held were in these two huge rooms. And in terms of acoustics, it was just chef's kiss.

 

Myriam graïne (06:34.661)

Mm-hmm

 

Dari Goldman (06:34.706)

because you couldn't hear the other talks, you couldn't hear really other noise from the sponsor lounge where a lot of people were kind of mingling. And I think oftentimes that can be an issue with conferences is that they can just be really noisy in general. And in this case, that was, that's not what happened. It was just really, really well done. And I think everyone kind of felt like they were a part of a sort of grandiose event and the location really lent itself to that.

 

Valentino (07:05.217)

Yeah, that's awesome.

 

Dari Goldman (07:05.362)

If you see the pictures, definitely check them out.

 

Valentino (07:10.834)

I was watching, I saw like everything was very meticulously laid out and you know all the product placement of everything as far as swag or like banners and everything. It was just so well done. It made it like I know a lot of people were saying like Instagram worthy photos from the conference.

 

Myriam graïne (07:20.151)

Yeah.

 

Yeah.

 

Myriam graïne (07:28.259)

Yeah, actually.

 

Dari Goldman (07:28.927)

I would say thanks to Amanda Carino, the executive director for that. I think she has a particular eye for these kinds of things. And also the, I guess, event team and the tech team behind everything. They just made everything look really cool on stage as well. So we are quite lucky.

 

Myriam graïne (07:31.705)

Hmm... yeah.

 

Myriam graïne (07:48.737)

Yeah, did you get a chance to take a look? Sorry.

 

Valentino (07:49.581)

Yeah, that's awesome. So who is your favorite talk? Go ahead, gotta get a chance to look at what.

 

Myriam graïne (07:56.197)

Yeah, no worries. No, yeah, too, because the opening keynote is already online. So I don't know if you get a chance to watch it yet or not. To have an idea of how it looks.

 

Valentino (08:07.965)

I did. I, uh, yeah, I mean, it was like, it reminded me of like an Apple event. And it's funny because, you know, DHH gives talks, uh, in a similar fashion. I wouldn't say exactly quite like Steve Jobs did, but, uh, in a very like, you know, grand was like, Hey, this is, we're excited about these things and here's what we're doing. And, uh, you know, is, he has a

 

Myriam graïne (08:16.201)

Exactly, yeah.

 

Dari Goldman (08:16.787)

Hahaha

 

Myriam graïne (08:30.773)

Mm.

 

Myriam graïne (08:35.211)

so lucky.

 

Valentino (08:36.693)

you know, a more comedic approach to it.

 

Myriam graïne (08:39.446)

Hehehe

 

Dari Goldman (08:39.622)

It felt very much like the prophet speaking, and then afterwards his disciples would come after and then speak a little bit more about what he had just said. It was quite interesting. I really liked that approach, but it was kind of funny a little bit where he would introduce something and then someone would have to follow up and actually explain that in their talk.

 

Valentino (08:48.025)

Alright.

 

Myriam graïne (08:50.709)

Hehehe

 

Dari Goldman (09:04.766)

And DHH made it sound so exciting. So it was kind of like who I would, I hope that they can, I hope they can follow up, live up to the hype.

 

Valentino (09:05.11)

Right.

 

Myriam graïne (09:11.685)

Mm-hmm

 

Valentino (09:13.133)

Now I'm curious because historically I've noticed that Aaron Patterson likes to pick apart DHH's keynote and make fun of something that he had said. Did that happen?

 

Myriam graïne (09:26.977)

Yeah, the Renaissance part.

 

Dari Goldman (09:27.954)

I think that his talk or his closing keynote was quite funny. Yeah.

 

Valentino (09:33.805)

It's definitely been the highlight for me. I remember, yeah.

 

Dari Goldman (09:36.834)

Hopefully, they post the closing keynote quite soon because they've been kind of trickling out the talk. So I hope we get to see that by the time this podcast goes out.

 

Valentino (09:47.917)

I do too. Yeah, I mean, I remember one time, you know, DHH had made a statement of, we don't want as many computer scientists and get the science out of the software world. And, you know, Aaron Patterson just completely, you know, showed how science is used in almost every aspect of software. So it was really funny. Right.

 

Myriam graïne (09:59.373)

Hehehehe

 

Hmm.

 

Myriam graïne (10:09.846)

Hehehehe

 

Dari Goldman (10:11.597)

Yeah, it's quite, I would say like, I don't know if you can do that. I think that the language is based in science in some way. But I like the sentiment.

 

Myriam graïne (10:17.997)

Hehehe

 

Valentino (10:28.069)

So I mean, it's exciting. I was really excited watching the keynote. I haven't even been involved in Turbo that much lately, but hearing all the new features and stuff, I definitely am getting more excited for. I'm curious what your takeaways from it were. Are you as excited about kind of new things coming to Rails, or is it kind of just more features, I guess?

 

Myriam graïne (10:43.617)

but it was still very exciting to see that ecosystem that is growing and growing. Because, for example, some people here would say, hmm, rails, not that much, it's kind of dying. And for me, it was the case in points that it is absolutely not dying. And there is so much and so many people being part of it. And I really had an example, I have 700 people attending a rail car at the same time, at the same place to talk about that.

 

Dari Goldman (10:58.338)

You can go marry him if you should like.

 

Myriam graïne (11:10.665)

and more and more features. So even though I couldn't understand everything because I'm still junior, it was still super exciting.

 

Dari Goldman (11:51.678)

Yeah, I will say that it makes you really, really motivated to continue your learning. We're both teachers at our bootcamp as well. And sometimes you can kind of get into a rut where you're teaching the same thing and it kind of feels a bit repetitive and you don't end up going out and learning new things yourself because it takes up time and you're already trying to teach this. But for the first time in a few months, for me, at least,

 

I really wanted to go back to my old apps and like see, okay, if I upgrade Rails and if I use Turbomorphing or if I use some of the stimulus stuff, Marco Roth was talking about, what can I do with my apps now? How can I improve my own apps and then implement that in my actual job? And I think a lot of people came away thinking, you know what, let's start using some of these new features. Let's stop like trying to...

 

work with what we have and they're actually building things that we need. So let's go ahead and use them. I think there's a lot of excitement around that.

 

Valentino (13:00.961)

Yeah, that's pretty neat. I just remember watching the keynote where a couple features were introduced where there's already significant gems used for that purpose. And it's always fun to watch as Rails builds up something that it said it wouldn't do. And now enough people are saying, well, we need this.

 

Myriam graïne (13:03.329)

Yeah. Okay.

 

Dari Goldman (13:22.187)

Yes.

 

Dari Goldman (13:26.542)

Bye.

 

Valentino (13:27.511)

and the core members are like, okay, yeah, maybe we should have a feature like this.

 

Dari Goldman (13:30.866)

Yeah, well, they did talk about that during their AMA is that they're saying, you know, if enough people are building something and enough people find a use out of it, why not integrate that into the actual framework? It just makes sense. So hopefully, the community keeps doing that so you can get more features just automatically coming with Rails and the next versions.

 

Myriam graïne (13:38.914)

Yeah.

 

Myriam graïne (13:42.838)

Mm.

 

Myriam graïne (13:56.505)

Hehehe

 

Valentino (13:59.573)

Yeah, I'm still swapping some pieces out of various apps in favor of the core features. But I love it. I love to see a more standard way to do it rather than a million ways to do it and trying to pick the right one that could go stale, right? It's hard to pick and choose.

 

Myriam graïne (14:02.613)

Okay.

 

Dari Goldman (14:03.495)

Hahaha

 

Myriam graïne (14:11.261)

Mmm...

 

Dari Goldman (14:15.966)

Yeah, exactly. That's kind of always the right. That's always the worry is that, okay, if I choose this gym, how long is it going to be maintained if it's not already in the framework? Will I have to maintain it? We're just getting started, so we don't have to worry about that just yet. That'll be a problem for you.

 

Myriam graïne (14:23.333)

Hmm... Yeah... I must have had one bad experience like... Yeah, I think I had like one bad experience, not a virus, but just it was not... You know, I was very new, but trying to act like someone who knows. So I would search for a gem, I don't remember which one it was. And like, it was... No, it's not maintained anymore. So I was a bit embarrassed, ashamed, like, you know, because you feel...

 

Valentino (14:24.865)

Right.

 

Valentino (14:34.017)

Yeah, lucky you. You did miss a lot of big switches. So good time to join. So I'm curious, so you MC'd Railsworld. What's involved with it and how did you get there? Maybe if you want to go first, what were you doing for MCing and what even got you to that point?

 

Dari Goldman (14:42.873)

Yeah.

 

Myriam graïne (14:50.713)

really happy and excited and like, yes, I'm a big girl. I found my jam and it's, no, it's not maintained. So this kind of experience, but other than that, no, it was, I think like we, I got well, I've been taught well, like how to use jam. And like you said, you check in the documentary. So usually so far, so far so good apart for these bad experiments.

 

Dari Goldman (15:10.334)

I don't know if she's breaking up. Can you hear her?

 

Dari Goldman (15:16.651)

It's good now.

 

Myriam graïne (15:17.267)

Hahaha.

 

Myriam graïne (15:33.036)

Mmm.

 

Myriam graïne (15:40.235)

Bye.

 

Myriam graïne (15:45.567)

Mmm. Hehehe.

 

Myriam graïne (15:58.742)

Mm-hmm

 

Myriam graïne (16:03.706)

Hmm.

 

Dari Goldman (16:11.166)

So I had worked in hospitality before, and sometimes you did kind of have to be on stage or in front of people explaining things. So it wasn't like a totally new experience. And I felt sort of comfortable on stage being in front of 700 people is still kind of nerve wracking, but luckily we have a teleprompter. But we did have to prepare our own scripts that meant finding out a bit more about the speakers themselves, not just their...

 

Myriam graïne (16:16.569)

Right. Hahaha.

 

Dari Goldman (16:39.266)

their bio or their talk description that was included on the conference website or on the app. But sometimes I went and actually searched to see if they had done anything else. Because that's always interesting. You wanna see and like kind of boost them up so that they sound really important and actually like really highlight what they've done for the community. So I think the coolest part was actually preparing the scripts because you're really kind of, you feel...

 

much more a part of the conference itself, because you're already getting to know the people who will be involved. And then afterwards, I don't think that there is too much preparation. We rehearsed together on video calls. And then afterwards, we rehearsed when we actually arrived in Amsterdam, the day before the conference when everything was set up. So that was quite cool because we got to see kind of like the behind the scenes look.

 

Myriam graïne (17:27.309)

Mm-hmm

 

Dari Goldman (17:36.73)

at how Reel's world was being organized.

 

Valentino (17:42.45)

That's awesome. Yeah, I can't imagine getting up in front of that many people. That sounds terrifying.

 

Dari Goldman (17:47.106)

Ha ha!

 

Sometimes it really is, but the room is big enough so that you don't see everyone, especially in the back, so that kind of helps.

 

Valentino (17:57.829)

Okay.

 

Valentino (18:01.857)

Yeah, I've submitted talks before and only got the

 

Yes, of course.

 

Dari Goldman (18:07.786)

Yeah, it's true. It lets you do it once you kind of get used to it.

 

Myriam graïne (18:10.607)

If

 

Valentino (18:13.785)

That's okay. We'll get it worked out. But yeah, I've submitted talks before and then, you know, I worry and like get huge dread that it would get approved. And it's maybe, no, I've given them at work. And even that is like too much for me. I feel like I'm just not meant to speak in front of an audience. But.

 

Myriam graïne (18:14.357)

I'm sorry.

 

Dari Goldman (18:16.983)

Hehehe

 

Myriam graïne (18:19.162)

Right.

 

Dari Goldman (18:28.15)

So you haven't given any talks before.

 

Dari Goldman (18:36.514)

Hahaha

 

Dari Goldman (18:41.202)

You know what I found is that a lot of people start giving their talks, obviously, a little bit ahead. Well, not everyone, actually, but some people give their talks in kind of like smaller groups, like with the Ruby meetups and stuff like that. And that actually seems quite interesting, especially, I can think a technical talk is quite difficult to do. We had the easy job. We were just introducing people clapping and then heading off stage.

 

Myriam graïne (18:44.641)

with AI, you said?

 

Yeah, I... Yeah.

 

Myriam graïne (18:56.126)

No, um...

 

Myriam graïne (19:03.621)

I think at first I was very... not scary, but it's a big word, but I was like, no, I should not. And then I felt like, okay, it is here, it is powerful, like let's face it, it is powerful, but you have to be able to use it the right way. So not, hey, hi, Chagipiti, how are you today? Please do this for me. No, it doesn't work, you know, but more like, okay, like now I don't see...

 

Valentino (19:08.345)

Ha ha ha!

 

Dari Goldman (19:08.818)

they had to beat up there for 30 minutes talking about a particular subject.

 

Valentino (19:13.461)

Right, right. That's true.

 

Dari Goldman (19:15.878)

I think our job descriptions are slightly different. Ha ha ha.

 

Valentino (19:21.761)

So what were your maybe two or three favorite talks that you've watched?

 

Dari Goldman (19:28.418)

I'll let you go marry him.

 

Myriam graïne (19:31.789)

what is happening, I don't understand, for example, my code or whatever. And okay, it's been like too many times. I don't feel like asking again to senior. I will try by myself. And so like this way, I think it can be useful, you know, but I'm pretty sure that you really need to have like a minimum basic knowledge and to know, you know, things and same with copilot. I really like it, honestly, but don't use it too much because sometimes like it goes crazy. Like you just.

 

write one letter and it goes like that big stuff and you're like, whoa, calm down. But yeah, you just have to know your direction, at least a minimum, and then it can be like, very cool, I think.

 

Dari Goldman (20:14.318)

Yeah.

 

Valentino (20:16.941)

Yeah, I'm pretty excited to watch a lot of the Turbo Native stuff. I'm hoping we can get Joe on at some point to talk more about it too, because it's pretty exciting. I mean, I used to do React Native stuff a long time ago, and I hated it. And I'm excited to see how, you know, maybe some of the HTML generated aspects of it, you know, can help ease that pain because...

 

Dari Goldman (20:35.251)

Oh!

 

Dari Goldman (20:42.25)

Mm-hmm.

 

Valentino (20:47.041)

It's hard. It's hard to make something like that where it feels fast. Yeah. So we'll see how it goes. Yeah, I'm excited to hear about the encryption talk too.

 

Dari Goldman (20:51.654)

I hope it does exactly.

 

Valentino (21:05.829)

Kylie's, I like the description of it, yeah.

 

Myriam graïne (21:07.221)

Mm.

 

Valentino (21:24.302)

Ha ha ha!

 

We knew who you were talking about. I am also terrible. But yeah, thank you for that correction. I only know because I was looking up a few of his articles earlier and happened to remember.

 

Dari Goldman (21:28.58)

Yeah, we got it.

 

Dari Goldman (21:37.308)

Hahaha!

 

Dari Goldman (21:45.79)

Apparently he's coming out with a full course. Uh, I saw it on, on the Reddit today. I was like, wow, he's quick.

 

Myriam graïne (21:46.969)

Mm. Hahaha.

 

Valentino (21:52.393)

Yep. Yeah, he has an intro which looks pretty interesting, but I was going to wait till he had his Android one as well. So I could just do both. Yeah. Because I think it was iOS only was the first one, but it was pretty cool, you know, still cool. So more to come, I hope, from Joe. So what about you, Derry? What were your favorites?

 

Myriam graïne (21:56.802)

Yeah, that's true.

 

Mm.

 

Dari Goldman (22:03.891)

Okay, that makes sense.

 

Dari Goldman (22:10.233)

Hahaha

 

Myriam graïne (22:19.173)

Hahaha

 

Dari Goldman (22:19.946)

My favorite talks. So I would say one of my favorites was from Peter Zui. He works at Shopify. And his talk was on the Ruby garbage collector. And I will preface this with after the talk, someone behind me, or during the talk, someone behind me was saying, this guy is just like Steve Jobs. Because his presentation was so just exciting. The.

 

Myriam graïne (22:34.263)

Uh...

 

Myriam graïne (22:38.668)

Yeah.

 

Dari Goldman (22:48.466)

slides were absolutely boring. The most basic slides you could get just white and then black aerial or Helvetica font. But the way that he gave the talk was so interesting. And at the very end, he was like, you guys can forget about everything I've said about the Ruby garbage collector. And I'm now introducing the new Jim, the auto tuner. He's like, this is the first

 

Myriam graïne (22:52.645)

I'm sorry.

 

Myriam graïne (22:57.221)

more. Yeah, no, there was really... yeah, it gave me like more, more. Yeah. No, so, okay, this one was huge and amazing and like really cool, but it was a very nice first introduction, so it gave me the envy to continue and see more, like if all the planets are...

 

Dari Goldman (23:15.986)

You guys are the first people in the world who are going to get to see this gym. Da da da. And just like the unveiling of this new gym was insane. I said it's insane. Like we're all like, it feels like computer geeks, but I was just like, wow, this guy, he made me want to buy this app or like buy this gym right now. So I liked him for his showmanship. It was, he was quite, quite good.

 

Myriam graïne (23:19.801)

I would go to more and even like the just the Ruby not necessarily rails but even the Ruby conferences and these kind of things Yeah, I would like to see more

 

Not every day it burns.

 

Myriam graïne (23:38.753)

I'm sorry.

 

Valentino (23:39.237)

That's really funny.

 

Dari Goldman (23:45.758)

And then afterwards, I also really enjoyed Marco Roth's talk about the future of the Rails framework. And so we kind of went through how we can build a bigger community around hot wire and stimulus. And that was actually pretty cool as well. And what I liked about this as well is that it's another person who's contributing outside of the Rails framework, but still kind of very close to it.

 

Myriam graïne (24:15.649)

Uh...

 

Dari Goldman (24:15.838)

Um, and, um, yeah, so I highly recommend checking out his talk as well. Uh, and of course, I also want to say, um, Eileen, you should tell, uh, she had a great closing keynote on the first day about the magic of Rails. And I thought, um, it's important. Yeah. It was just really like, um, really made you recognize how, how great Rails is as a framework and how we can move forward as well.

 

Myriam graïne (24:31.365)

Bye.

 

Valentino (24:33.858)

I love her talks.

 

Myriam graïne (24:34.54)

Hahaha

 

Myriam graïne (24:44.703)

Uh...

 

Dari Goldman (24:46.034)

But yeah, those are the three talks I think I mentioned that I really liked, but they were all really great and I couldn't see all of them. So I'm excited for these videos to come out as well.

 

Myriam graïne (24:53.535)

Mm-hmm.

 

Valentino (25:01.561)

It's funny you mention Peter's, Zoo's, Steve Jobs-like talk. In RailsConf 2016, I think maybe the first time DHH wasn't at a RailsConf, and Jeremy Dyer from Basecamp gave the keynote instead. It was very deadpan.

 

Dari Goldman (25:10.232)

You can.

 

Myriam graïne (25:12.521)

Yeah.

 

Myriam graïne (25:19.503)

Hmm... Yeah... It works.

 

Dari Goldman (25:20.undefined)

Mm-hmm.

 

Myriam graïne (25:28.851)

Mm-hmm

 

Valentino (25:30.785)

one or three words per slide. Like in an Apple, it's if you haven't seen it, it's entertaining to watch.

 

Dari Goldman (25:33.223)

Oh no.

 

Myriam graïne (25:33.334)

Yeah.

 

Dari Goldman (25:39.638)

I'm actually going to check this out. If not tonight, tomorrow. Ha ha ha.

 

Myriam graïne (25:43.03)

Yeah.

 

Valentino (25:46.636)

Uh, but yeah, that's one of those. Uh, and I just love Peter's who's, uh, he has this blog series on, uh, a walk along the seaside of Ruby's walk along the seaside and he just goes through, uh, you know, how to basically program C with Ruby and Ruby C extensions. And if you're curious on speeding things up or need optimal performance of stuff, uh, I, I haven't.

 

Dari Goldman (25:55.937)

Thanks.

 

Myriam graïne (26:00.301)

Hehehe

 

Valentino (26:11.937)

been really entertained by that. So I'll be excited to watch his talk as well. Oh.

 

Dari Goldman (26:13.546)

Haha, nice!

 

Valentino (26:21.785)

So I'm curious, it seems like it was a very exciting event. Even for early career, you're still excited about the Rails framework, I hope, right? How did you come away from it? I hope that you met a lot of people and the community was welcoming. Is that still the case kind of at these conferences?

 

Dari Goldman (26:36.078)

Yeah, absolutely.

 

Dari Goldman (26:48.694)

Yeah, it was actually quite nice to not feel, I don't know, awkward. Sometimes you can definitely feel awkward in certain places. I know that can be my thing, I'm an introvert. But at some meetups I've been to, tech meetups we'll say, you actually walk in and you just feel like, wow, this doesn't really feel like my place. This doesn't feel like my people. They don't seem very sociable, it's very clique-ish.

 

Myriam graïne (27:12.022)

Mm-hmm.

 

Dari Goldman (27:16.514)

And what was nice at this conference was that everyone's really open and welcoming. They came up to you to say hello, like, can I learn a bit more about you? They were totally okay with you walking up to them and being like, hey, how's it going? Who are you? What do you do? And everyone seemed like really excited to like meet other people and make those connections. So yeah, I...

 

Myriam graïne (27:29.005)

Mm-hmm.

 

Dari Goldman (27:41.81)

All Rails conferences and Ruby conferences are like this. I'm totally trying to go to more.

 

Myriam graïne (27:46.277)

Cool.

 

Valentino (27:48.185)

That's awesome, that's great to hear. Did you have the same experience, Miriam?

 

Myriam graïne (27:53.335)

Mm.

 

Myriam graïne (27:57.169)

Yeah.

 

Valentino (28:06.469)

That's awesome to hear. Yeah, I mean, I haven't been to a RailsConf in quite a long time, unfortunately. So I'm hopeful that it continues to be a better experience every time. So, you know. Oh, really? Oh, that's exciting. Maybe I'll go to that one. Yeah.

 

Myriam graïne (28:08.037)

Hmm.

 

Not much more, not much more to add. I would just say that hopefully next year in Toronto I will see more ladies at the Rio Conference but that's pretty much it. Yeah we could tell by the... Yeah, yeah, true. But we could tell by the line, you know, at the restroom that's... Way more men.

 

Dari Goldman (28:22.638)

So it'll be closer to you. Just make sure you get to the tickets in time. Yeah.

 

Valentino (28:28.669)

Yeah, I'll keep refreshing, you know.

 

Valentino (28:34.989)

Well, super cool. So I'm super curious about, you know, Lil Wagone to begin, but more about, you know, how is your like, how is it starting Rails? You know, it's been a long time for me. I've been, you know, doing Rails for maybe 10 years now or so, maybe more, I don't know. Stop giving track. But you know, it's been a long time since I've had to like, you know, get set up with something new and.

 

Myriam graïne (28:40.729)

for once. Yeah, that was good for us too.

 

Myriam graïne (28:54.71)

Yeah.

 

Dari Goldman (28:57.646)

I'm going to go to bed.

 

Myriam graïne (29:01.065)

Yeah.

 

Valentino (29:03.553)

you know, learn something that's missing. It's you know, there's so many features now. I definitely don't know them all. So I'm still learning, right? But I don't know what is like point blank now. Did you have an easy time with that or what were the what were the challenges?

 

Dari Goldman (29:11.214)

Great.

 

Myriam graïne (29:19.001)

Hmm.

 

Yeah.

 

Dari Goldman (29:25.198)

All of them, no. I feel like I was a bit lucky because I came from a computer science background. So like learning Ruby itself wasn't too difficult. I had learned Python and Java and like coming to Ruby, I was like, yeah, this is perfect. I love this. Going into Rails after that and like understanding how to build an app, I think is a bit...

 

Valentino (29:26.485)

All of them.

 

Myriam graïne (29:37.797)

Yeah.

 

Dari Goldman (29:54.878)

It's difficult, but what I think is a bit harder is that once you are able to build something quite basic, and we'll say that's your MVP, I think that unfortunately boot camps make it, they don't teach you the next step. And I think that's where Rails gets very difficult is how do you get this basic app into an actual product that people can use. And there's a whole lot of things that come afterwards.

 

Myriam graïne (30:07.193)

Hmm... I don't know.

 

Myriam graïne (30:22.785)

I don't know, maybe.

 

Dari Goldman (30:24.314)

that are built into Rails, thankfully, but you don't really learn about them. And I think that that's where the real learning begins. That's the hard part.

 

Dari Goldman (30:36.062)

I don't know how you felt, Miriam, about that, about learning Rails.

 

Valentino (30:36.322)

Yum.

 

Myriam graïne (30:59.353)

Boo.

 

Myriam graïne (31:03.244)

Hehehe

 

Myriam graïne (31:06.894)

Yeah.

 

Dari Goldman (31:38.954)

Yeah, I don't ever want to move away from else or something else. I mean, careers might make that a necessity, but like, I really like learning this particular framework and I like what comes with it and I like the gems that are built for it as well. So yeah.

 

Myriam graïne (31:46.629)

So...

 

Valentino (31:57.237)

Yeah, originally it was meant for product-driven development, where you have a product or a SaaS or something that you wanted to sell. And I think that's what's gotten it so much support over the years, right, is people can just build something with it and sell it, right? And so I'm interested to see where that leads, because there's a new framework on top of Rails called Bullet Train.

 

Myriam graïne (32:04.441)

Mm-hmm.

 

Myriam graïne (32:09.497)

haha

 

Dari Goldman (32:14.222)

Great.

 

Myriam graïne (32:15.356)

No, no, actually that was good because I don't have one.

 

Myriam graïne (32:26.149)

True, yes, absolutely, yeah. Yeah, the woman in non-binary rubies.

 

Valentino (32:27.41)

that's come out recently. That's interesting, that lets you just build products and do less of rails with more of the magic behind the scenes. Which I'm interested to see where that leads to.

 

Dari Goldman (32:43.538)

Actually, I haven't heard of that before, and I'm going to search for it so I can.

 

Valentino (32:47.533)

Yeah, it is really neat. It has like, if you're familiar with Chris Oliver's Go Rails. So it's a simp. Well, no, no. So somebody else has. But it's similar to that Go Rails framework or Jumpstart Rails, where you have some app already built. And this comes more from the generator side. So basically, generating everything that you would need, like an admin page.

 

Dari Goldman (32:56.51)

Ah, yes, so Chris has built this. Oh no. Okay, okay, okay.

 

Myriam graïne (33:00.165)

I'm gonna go to bed.

 

Dari Goldman (33:06.33)

Right, he has jump start.

 

Dari Goldman (33:12.588)

Nice.

 

Valentino (33:16.921)

things like that already set up so you can just focus specifically on the product that you want to build. And it's pretty cool. And I always think of that anytime that I think about Rails, that they're kind of synonymous, that you're trying to build something. But it's still like the Rails new is missing so much, right? Especially

 

Dari Goldman (33:40.954)

Yeah, just like setting up the app, it's like, okay, we've got the bare minimum. That's great. What comes after that? And when you see like, okay, Rails new, and then you hear, okay, GitHub uses Ruby on Rails, you're like, you don't know where that comes from. How do we make that connection?

 

Valentino (33:48.822)

Right.

 

Myriam graïne (33:54.181)

Come on.

 

Myriam graïne (33:58.662)

Uh...

 

Valentino (34:00.45)

Right.

 

Myriam graïne (34:03.639)

Yeah.

 

Valentino (34:04.754)

Right, where is it drawn? Yeah, you got a great point there. I know there's been a lot of talk of making the landing page when you're done with the reels new, right? Have other stuff and information, right? Which I don't know why they haven't done that. Seems like a great place to start, but.

 

Myriam graïne (34:09.213)

Gemini, but...

 

Myriam graïne (34:22.913)

Um...

 

Dari Goldman (34:23.218)

Right. I don't know. It makes it easier for sure, but I think there's value in being like, at some point, look at the documentation.

 

Valentino (34:33.137)

Right, right. Yeah, I mean, even just embedding the guides, the Rails guides, which are fantastic, you know, resource for picking up everything. Yeah, I don't know, I feel like, I feel like if I had first started again, I would want more of like a coached experience. And maybe it's like a not one size fits all kind of answer there. But definitely in a boot camp scenario, I would imagine, you know,

 

Myriam graïne (34:35.025)

Yeah.

 

Myriam graïne (34:54.589)

Yeah. We'll see.

 

Valentino (35:00.877)

Just having a bunch of stuff like already made could help like draw a lot of those connections.

 

Myriam graïne (35:01.534)

Yeah.

 

Dari Goldman (35:07.198)

Yeah, it's true. Like we have a lot of exercises that have some things that are, you know, examples that you're working towards or things that are already done for you. Even our boot camp that has some templates that you can use to get started with just like having a simple site or having a site with users using device. So it's there are some ways that you can have like a minimum to get started.

 

Myriam graïne (35:08.82)

Mm.

 

Myriam graïne (35:13.781)

Yeah.

 

Valentino (35:15.854)

Okay.

 

Myriam graïne (35:18.558)

Nyaaah

 

Myriam graïne (35:23.576)

Mm-hmm

 

Myriam graïne (35:26.992)

Hahaha

 

Myriam graïne (35:32.429)

Yeah.

 

Dari Goldman (35:37.414)

without thinking about, okay, what database do I use? Or how am I going to add device? Or what am I gonna do? Am I gonna add Bootstrap or anything like that? Luckily with those templates it's already done, but there always is going to be the after that we don't really learn, like how am I gonna add my service workers? What am I going to use for app security? What do I use for my testing? And that's not something that we cover in depth.

 

Myriam graïne (35:40.869)

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

 

Thank you. Yeah, that was cool.

 

Myriam graïne (36:00.692)

Thank you so much.

 

Dari Goldman (36:06.306)

during the bootcamp.

 

Valentino (36:11.321)

That's interesting. Yeah. I'm curious, you know, how did the wagon like kind of help guide that process for you? Like outside of just like the exercises, like is there like a step or after you've hit this exercise, you can like get to this exercise? Was it chained or was it more of like, oh, well, we have these topics we want to cover and they're specific to that.

 

Myriam graïne (36:22.644)

Yeah.

 

Myriam graïne (36:31.577)

Hahaha

 

Dari Goldman (36:36.266)

I'll let you take the Submarium.

 

Myriam graïne (36:38.453)

nice at least

 

Valentino (36:49.953)

Yeah, I mean, was it a?

 

Dari Goldman (36:50.358)

Yeah.

 

Valentino (36:53.985)

Yeah, like the example, like a. So you have an example to work toward where you learned a specific thing. You know, do they? How do boot camps kind of help guide you through that process?

 

Dari Goldman (37:12.642)

You can add surf you want.

 

Dari Goldman (37:23.998)

Oh, yeah, I wasn't sure if he said for me to take it over or not then. Um, I'll answer a quick response. Uh, so, um, you have kind of like your dashboard and you have your exercises that are given to you each day. Well, you kind of have them set up by lecture. Uh, so you can move forward if you want to, but most of the time you don't really have.

 

Valentino (37:27.182)

That's okay

 

Dari Goldman (37:52.822)

that much time in your day. So you're probably going to go day by day through your lectures and through your exercises. I did the part-time boot camp, so we watched our lectures before we came into our class. But if you do full-time, someone is going to be there to give you the lecture that day. And then afterwards, you're going to work on those exercises. And normally, once you first start, you're going to go through simple like

 

Ruby coding exercises, kind of similar to Leet code. And then you build upon that with different stuff and we're able to rake those exercises and see compared to their testing file, if we've done them correctly or not. So it does kind of help us kind of get into the flow of what programming is or what coding would be. So we are kind of familiar with coding and then testing.

 

But we don't actually kind of learn that testing part, like how to write our own test, for example. Then afterwards, you kind of build that up. For example, when you start writing websites or web pages rather, later on you'll write websites. But like I said before, you're going to be working toward an example. Maybe that's an example of the page that they've given you.

 

Valentino (38:56.869)

I gotcha.

 

Dari Goldman (39:16.606)

Maybe that's going to be an example of another website. We like to use recipe websites a lot. So you're going to be trying to build that or replicate the kind of logic that they have told you to use. And there is, we do incorporate more and more of like the Ruby on Rails patterns.

 

and coding logic as we move forward. And then afterwards, once you arrive at your project weeks, you're kind of a little bit on your own. So we do get those templates, but afterwards it's up to us to like build our idea out. We do have our teachers that help us with that, but afterwards it's kind of like we have to make that our own.

 

Valentino (40:05.569)

Yeah, that's super cool. I wish I had boot camps when I was learning, because I just picked up a book and tried to run the examples. And yeah, OK. Well, it brings me. That's funny. It does bring me to a question I have in that, what were your gotchas? There are.

 

Dari Goldman (40:09.387)

Ha ha!

 

Dari Goldman (40:16.886)

Well, that's what I'm doing now, so don't worry. We all come back to the book.

 

Valentino (40:32.373)

Our Rails gotchas, there's so much magic happens, right? That you'll hit a point where the exercise may say to do something and then something else happens that different than you might expect, which is just kind of part of learning a framework in general, I think, is all of the hidden things that you just need to know that maybe aren't documented or aren't straightforward as far as what they're doing, right, because you're not familiar with it. So.

 

Dari Goldman (40:58.862)

All right. Yes, you go first.

 

Valentino (40:59.205)

I have an example from when I was learning that I just remembered, yeah, where, you know, in Rails you can create, it has generators and you generate a scaffold and it makes views for you. But in the controller, you can, you know, say, I wanted to serve JSON instead of HTML. And if you wanted to customize that, then you had to create, you know, a special view that had a special extension.

 

And for the life of me, I swear I was trying to get this page to render in a different format than HTML and I just, I didn't have the file that exists. And I must've spent a week trying to figure out how to get it to work.

 

Dari Goldman (41:35.188)

Hahaha.

 

Dari Goldman (41:40.451)

What did you end up doing in the end?

 

Valentino (41:43.617)

In the end, I just made a new controller. I used the generator again and I said, okay, I want JSON this time. I generated the right thing. I don't even know that I learned anything from that other than how to use the generator a different way. But right.

 

Dari Goldman (41:46.851)

It's like I'm not going to generate anything.

 

Dari Goldman (41:53.698)

Hahaha.

 

Dari Goldman (42:02.996)

We kind of hacked your way to your answer, which I think is what happens most of the time. I'll say my gotcha. It was during our project weeks and we had created this form that was going to create an alert object that should have had multiple images. And when you created the alert...

 

it had the images, but if you ever wanted to edit it and you wanted to add a new image, it would delete all of the images that you had before. And I was just like, this does not feel very magical. Why can't I just select like what's going on with these images? I don't, I don't understand. I don't know what to do. So I probably spent like two, three days on this way too long. I'd asked one of the teacher assistants and they were

 

they spent probably an hour or so with this on me. And they were like, maybe you should just do it in JavaScript. And I was like, no, this is the way we use Rails so we don't have to use JavaScript. And I can't remember what I did now. I think after the bootcamp, I went back and went into the Rails guides in depth and found this method that I could add to that particular line that would keep.

 

my images and it wouldn't erase everything each time. But of course it was after the project. So I felt a little less happy about it because no one knew that me that I had committed this new change to our app.

 

Valentino (43:40.97)

At least you found it though, right?

 

Dari Goldman (43:42.09)

At least I found an answer at some point, yeah. What was your gotcha, Miriam?

 

Dari Goldman (44:28.334)

I shouldn't have scaffolded.

 

Dari Goldman (45:02.923)

Hahaha

 

Valentino (45:06.869)

Yeah, I totally sympathize with the, it works locally on my machine. Yeah, it's working for me. That is a hard thing to digest working with Rails is all the different environments and they can all have different configurations. And I'm hopeful that all this Dockerization stuff can help solve some of those issues. But.

 

Dari Goldman (45:13.402)

It's working for me!

 

Valentino (45:36.398)

Uh...

 

Dari Goldman (45:37.598)

It's funny is that I've heard other Rails developers who are like, I hate Docker. And I'm like, well, I have no opinions.

 

Valentino (45:45.534)

I am one of those. It's a love-hate relationship. I don't like setting up new apps that have a lot of dependencies, you know, across app dependencies. Those are the worst ones, getting those working locally. So it's a, you know, once you have the apps running though, it's smooth sailing until you go to Docker and then the problems come back.

 

Dari Goldman (46:01.994)

Yeah.

 

Dari Goldman (46:10.126)

Hahaha

 

Valentino (46:13.937)

Uh, but I would say overall I enjoy Docker. I feel like, uh, you know, outside of rails, it also is a common pattern, right? So if I wanted to try out WordPress as an example, uh, you know, which is written in PHP, I could just run the Docker container for it and there it's working. I don't have to figure out how to install PHP or all the dependencies that maybe are there for that, right? Or any of this AI stuff.

 

Dari Goldman (46:37.24)

Right.

 

Valentino (46:42.785)

I can set up a llama model in a Docker container and not have to worry about making sure all the dependencies for Python and PyTorch and all that stuff are set up. So yeah, I mean, having a standardized way to just orchestrate a ton of interdependencies, Docker is great, you know? But anytime something goes wrong, which when you're learning, it's not a...

 

Dari Goldman (46:53.358)

computer.

 

Valentino (47:10.741)

necessarily a great exit. Do you then have to like learn Docker just so you can figure out maybe where the issue is like stemming from?

 

Dari Goldman (47:18.142)

Yeah, that's always the problem is that the less, yeah, exactly the less apps interdependency you have, the simpler it is, at least on your end. Once things start getting bigger and you get a bigger team, it's no longer that simple, is it?

 

Valentino (47:34.059)

Right.

 

Which I guess, you know, from DHA's keynote on, as an example, the, was it the static cash stores or solid cash or whatever it was, solid cash. You know, that makes a lot of sense. Get rid of Redis for a simple use case, right? I forget what Shopify called their framework. They have like a light rails.

 

Dari Goldman (47:50.466)

Solid cash, yeah.

 

Valentino (48:06.189)

where it uses SQLite and everything is just a single stack. You just, you don't have almost any dependencies, which is really nice, right? All you need is Ruby to get started. So.

 

Valentino (48:24.794)

I'm hopeful that there are more lighter stacks that help people learn faster. But like you're saying, it's not what you would see in production as a product, right? So it's a hard jump to make.

 

Dari Goldman (48:37.246)

Yeah.

 

Dari Goldman (48:41.258)

And I do wonder like in his keynote, he did speak about the one person framework. And I think that really caught a lot of people's attention. What does that actually mean in practice? And for an actual app that's a product, does the one person framework also, is that also going to extend to those bigger apps?

 

I wonder because yeah, the one person framework for junior developers, that sounds great. Like we wanna know everything, we wanna know the backend, we wanna know the front end, we wanna be able to do both and we wanna be able to carry that over to our careers. Hopefully that'll catch on a bit more instead of having to choose. But is that going to be the case once you go over to a company like Shopify or Airbnb or Gaff?

 

I mean, the one person framework can't really work in those instances, I think. Or perhaps, we'll see.

 

Valentino (49:43.021)

It may. I think back to, I would say, the first time I started at a company that was like legit like Rails development. And I was coming from an advertising agency where I had like been using Spree, which was an e-commerce, popular e-commerce choice at the time. And I didn't know what I was doing. I was just using the framework to get a shopping cart up, right?

 

Dari Goldman (49:55.906)

Mm-hmm.

 

Dari Goldman (50:05.444)

Mm-hmm.

 

Valentino (50:12.501)

And then as soon as I joined this consultancy, and they seemed to know everything. They used Vim and they wrote tests. I didn't know what tests were. I'm glad they keep tests out of the boot camps to start, because it definitely is, it takes some time to understand why you even need them. Yeah, well, a couple of bugs and...

 

Dari Goldman (50:18.93)

Hahaha

 

Dari Goldman (50:34.422)

Right. It doesn't take too much time, but... Right, you're like, I wish I had a test.

 

Valentino (50:41.269)

Banging your head against it. You're like, right? Okay, now I get it But you know, you almost need to go through that pain of having the bug and figuring it out, right before you're like Oh like this test would have been great, right? But I just think like I remember just feeling like well I am nothing like compared to these people that know what they're doing like and it was like a hard on-ramp from being a junior to like even just getting to like

 

Dari Goldman (50:54.445)

Right.

 

Valentino (51:11.209)

mid-junior. It must have been a full year of pairing with somebody to feel at all comfortable. I'm hopeful. Have you noticed maybe that transition being different or better? No.

 

Dari Goldman (51:12.723)

Hehehe

 

Dari Goldman (51:29.994)

No, I feel the same. I've just started a role with Viya Europe, who is one of the sponsors at Rails World as a technical support engineer. So I'm one of the more junior members on the team and it's quite a learning curve as well because you do feel like everyone around you knows so much about the framework, about the app itself.

 

and you constantly feel like you're trying to catch up. One of the particularities of my job is that you have to sort of fix like the small, maybe not even small, but fix some of the issues or singularities that happen that aren't normally supposed to happen. And oftentimes that means like, trying to navigate the code base. And that can be...

 

quite difficult sometimes and overwhelming. And I think that it's the same thing where you feel like, I feel like I always need to pair with someone or have someone explain like, did I get this right? Did I look in the right place? Oftentimes they're like, you can also look here. And they know it in five minutes. I have to look for like 30 minutes to an hour. It's getting a little bit faster now, thank goodness. I've looked at enough files daily to...

 

Valentino (52:38.125)

Right.

 

Dari Goldman (52:56.202)

kind of now have a better feeling. I'm now groping my way around the code base instead of like looking in the darkness. I can kind of see what's going on now, but it is quite tough starting out with so many knowledgeable people around you. At the same time, you have to kind of see it as an advantage as well that you have so many people who can help. And luckily on my team, they are willing to help. So at least there's no one who's trying to block that knowledge.

 

Valentino (53:27.469)

What's your perspective on Miriam? Is it similar or are you feeling confident?

 

Dari Goldman (54:07.434)

Legitimating.

 

Valentino (54:29.061)

That's great. Yeah, you know, the light does come. It may be, yeah. You know, yeah. I mean, you'll always feel like you don't know about something, you know, and that is normal. So I don't think that ever goes away. I still will go into meetings and be like, I don't know what they're talking about, you know. But just like you were saying, you know, you look it up and then you know, right? So

 

Dari Goldman (54:32.598)

Thank you. Speaking from experience, I hope.

 

Dari Goldman (54:52.705)

Hahaha

 

Dari Goldman (54:57.362)

Right, you look it up enough times, it's memory.

 

Valentino (54:58.773)

Um, right. And there's a lot of stuff that you just won't remember. You know, you can't memorize everything. Uh, at least I can't. So, uh, you know, I'm always looking, I'm still to this day, looking stuff up, you know, how, how does, uh, you know, even the most simple stuff, like how does the router work, right? Like, how do I add a route for this specific thing? Uh, I don't memorize that. So.

 

Dari Goldman (55:08.978)

I can't either, don't worry.

 

Dari Goldman (55:25.351)

Hahaha

 

Valentino (55:29.225)

Yeah, there's just too much, you know?

 

Dari Goldman (55:31.182)

Do you have any tips for junior developers, Valentino, as someone as a veteran developer speaking to junior developers? I'm now on the interviewing side.

 

Valentino (55:44.702)

I mean, for me, I tried to learn too much at once and thought I just need to know everything like in this moment, right? You don't need to do that. I would say focus on the task at hand. I have a problem of just getting sidetracked all the time. And so too many unknowns is very unhelpful to me for that reason, right? Because then I'll just get sidetracked on everything.

 

learn very little over that period of time. So yeah, I would say just small pieces, right? Like little bit at a time, baby steps, and you'll make it just the same. Cause you can't, you're not gonna read the entire Rails guides and then digest it all, right? Like you're not gonna know it all. And you can reread the same guide a million times and still not, you know.

 

Dari Goldman (56:14.598)

Right.

 

Dari Goldman (56:32.256)

Right.

 

Valentino (56:38.953)

understand everything that's happening. It's talking about, right?

 

Dari Goldman (56:42.718)

Yeah, and even if you use it once, you have to be using it over and over, waiting for the updates, reading the new updates, and then using those updates.

 

Valentino (56:51.669)

Right. Yeah, I would say the overwhelming aspect of it, you know, let it just wash away because, you know, nobody knows it all and there's no need to learn everything, right? So it's kind of like the magic of Rails. You know, I'm looking forward to hearing Eileen talk about it because, you know, there's so much that happens that...

 

You don't necessarily need to know about, but you know, until an issue happens, right? And so I'm happy that that's there, you know, that I don't have to know it all. And so as a junior, you also don't need to know it all. Right. Let let reals do its magic.

 

Dari Goldman (57:30.939)

Great. Agreed.

 

Dari Goldman (57:39.422)

Hahaha.

 

Valentino (57:45.433)

So yeah, I mean, just, I wish I had stuck more to, you know, the core features of Rails. When I started, instead of like trying out a new gem or whatever new things somebody had recommended, right? It's very easy to fall into that trap of, oh, this is really cool new shiny toy, you know? But Rails has this duller knife over here that cuts the cake the same way, you know? And sometimes it's just worth using that, you know, until.

 

Dari Goldman (58:05.299)

Right.

 

Dari Goldman (58:09.863)

Hahaha

 

Valentino (58:15.586)

you feel comfortable with that particular feature.

 

Dari Goldman (58:20.146)

Yeah, that's so true. And I think that it is important to kind of understand what Rails provides to you, just as like, that's what the framework is. And then afterwards, if there's really nothing that actually does the job you're looking for, then look for a gym. But you're right, like I think as juniors, sometimes we are really quick to be like, okay, is there a gym that can do this for me?

 

We don't actually look at what Rails can do for us. We're just like, I just need someone else to do this for me really quick. That's kind of the double-edged sword of the boot camp is that you learn really quickly, but you also are trying to do things very quickly. So the learning process is shortened, whereas you probably need to take a little bit more time on the basics.

 

Valentino (58:54.382)

Right.

 

Valentino (59:03.937)

Yeah, I could see that.

 

Valentino (59:13.817)

So I'm curious, what is... Yeah, go ahead, Miriam.

 

Valentino (59:59.105)

Yeah, that's a great point. I didn't even think about chat GPT being in existence. Or even write like a GitHub's copilot. I wrote in TypeScript with a copilot. Yeah, and they fill in the whole function for you if you just write a sentence and it's wild. But then they have a tiny little bug in there that it doesn't do what you want it to. And if I didn't...

 

Dari Goldman (01:00:21.122)

Haha!

 

Dari Goldman (01:00:27.39)

Maybe they like made up a method.

 

Valentino (01:00:29.949)

Right. If I didn't know what I was looking at, I'd have a hard time learning, that's for sure.

 

Dari Goldman (01:00:37.77)

Yeah, I mean, I actually like co-pilot, but I definitely cannot do the majority of what I'm trying to do. At least maybe I haven't prompted it correctly. I don't know the ins and outs of prompting co-pilot yet, which is probably a good thing. So.

 

Valentino (01:00:57.413)

So I'm curious what your experiences are like, when you did reach out for a gem or something like that, was that like a familiar experience? Was it hard to get, to integrate something external to Rails as a newcomer or was it fairly straightforward? What was your overall experience with that?

 

Dari Goldman (01:01:22.25)

Unfortunately, for me, most of the times it was pretty easy to integrate a gym as long as the documentation was clear. The only problem, I think, was that finding a well-known gym can be quite difficult sometimes using the RubyGym.org website, because you can't always search by, like, okay.

 

this is the gem that I need. Now I need to find like this downloads. I mean, they might've changed that sense, but when I was using it, it was hard to search for something that was reputable. So you'd end up trying to Google. And I think searching for gems could get pretty difficult. Jenny should actually did a talk on this about where.

 

She said, you know, pay attention to what gyms you're installing because not all of them have, what is it, good intentions. And she did like a kind of joke on that, that I'll leave the surprise for you guys for her talk when it does come out. But that was kind of my worry was like, okay, if I integrate this gym into my app, is it going to be okay? Is it going to break it? Is it going to install some virus and destroy it? What am I getting myself into?

 

Valentino (01:02:42.021)

That's a good point.

 

Dari Goldman (01:02:44.451)

But for the most part, getting the gym was quite easy as long as it was well known and maintained.

 

Valentino (01:02:56.257)

Yeah, what about you Miriam?

 

Dari Goldman (01:03:24.69)

Hahaha.

 

Dari Goldman (01:03:40.798)

Hahaha.

 

Ha ha ha.

 

Valentino (01:03:45.285)

Well, that's good to hear. Yeah, there is a site, Ruby Toolbox. I don't know if it's maintained anymore. That historically was like the place you go, oh, like you get to see all the stats on GitHub, like when was the last commit, you know, when was the last published. And it tries to grade it a little bit, like, you know, A through F or whatever. You know, how good, what's the quality of this gem, right? I would like to see that, you know, if you're doing like,

 

Dari Goldman (01:04:12.48)

Exactly.

 

Valentino (01:04:15.537)

If you're adding something to your gem file, I would like something to just run against it and be like, are these good? Is this the right thing? There's something missing there, I agree. How do you know? Even just Googling, you don't know.

 

Dari Goldman (01:04:25.577)

Yeah.

 

Dari Goldman (01:04:31.938)

Yeah, I think there are like other package, like package websites where they do have like this sort of rating like a grade where people are able to say like, this is really well maintained. This is not well maintained. I will never use this again. But yeah, I feel like Ruby should have that. I do think that with Chris Oliver's hackathon that happened this year, there might have been a site that was created to kind of

 

better organized Ruby gems, but I'm wondering, I don't remember the name of it is, so I'll have to check it out. But I'll put that plug in there for them if anyone wants to search for their site.

 

Valentino (01:05:18.829)

Yeah, I'm gonna have to look that up too. I'm curious now.

 

Dari Goldman (01:05:22.166)

Yeah, now I have to look at, let's say, the entries. Cause I looked at the projects, like some of them were pretty interesting, but I was like, oh, I really like this one.

 

Valentino (01:05:41.989)

There's a lot of gem related ones.

 

Valentino (01:05:47.301)

Cool. Man, I haven't looked at the hackathons in a while. These are pretty great.

 

Dari Goldman (01:05:56.614)

I was pretty impressed with what they came up with.

 

Valentino (01:06:04.225)

Was it Gem Insight?

 

Dari Goldman (01:06:06.774)

Maybe that's what it is. I'm still looking at the, okay, entries. There we go.

 

Dari Goldman (01:06:23.403)

I can't find it. I don't know where it is.

 

Valentino (01:06:27.961)

Wow, there are a lot of entries here.

 

Valentino (01:06:32.973)

Well, we'll have to have another show. We'll have you guys come back on and we'll go through the Reels hackathons. Ha ha ha.

 

Dari Goldman (01:06:39.579)

So I can give a proper plague.

 

Valentino (01:06:44.184)

Because these are pretty cool.

 

of the better errors gem with AISys looks interesting too. So I'm curious like as newbies, now that AI is rampant, right? Do you find yourself using it a lot more or is it not helpful? You know, where are you with that?

 

Dari Goldman (01:06:51.987)

I'm sorry.

 

Dari Goldman (01:07:11.879)

Using what, more?

 

Valentino (01:07:13.769)

Like chat GPT as it or co-pilot. Like, do you have do you have ones that you like over others or do you just like avoid them?

 

Dari Goldman (01:07:15.287)

Alright.

 

Dari Goldman (01:07:24.822)

Uh, I am... You go, I'm Maria, yeah.

 

Valentino (01:08:46.297)

Yeah, that's a great point.

 

Dari Goldman (01:08:49.158)

I use both as well for the same reasons. Sometimes it's sort of like having a senior developer who can kind of guide you in the right direction if you're ever stuck on something. And then, well, for Copilot, I use it a lot less. It's kind of like Microsoft for like autocomplete. Or I guess it's not a word. It's more so like in Gmail, if you have an email that you're writing and you want to say sincerely, it'll finish that for you. Or like.

 

please let me know if you have any other questions. So it's like the code equivalent where it just kind of completes what I wanted to write. Not often it's the exact thing that I wanted, but it gets me close enough to where I can just kind of correct it. Maybe I've saved a little bit of time. I'm not sure how much time I'm saving when I have to backspace a lot, but it feels like it.

 

Valentino (01:09:42.349)

Yeah, it's funny you mentioned the conversational question, what am I doing missing here? I definitely use it like that a lot. I do. It's not quite there, though. I've definitely started a more advanced conversation with it. And it just makes stuff up. So if you ask it something, am I doing this right? Or is this in a performant way?

 

Dari Goldman (01:09:50.274)

Yeah.

 

Dari Goldman (01:10:04.257)

Yeah.

 

Valentino (01:10:12.077)

You know, it could just say, yeah, it's a performant way. You know, sure. And I'll give an example even, you know? And then you're like, but that example, you know, it points out this, and then it's like, oh yeah, you don't wanna do that. Yeah.

 

Dari Goldman (01:10:13.89)

Sure it is. Yeah.

 

Dari Goldman (01:10:21.986)

Sorry about that. That's the worst is that I'm like, what you just wrote is not right. Or maybe they might give me the exact same code block that I gave them. And I'm like, nothing's changed here. Thanks for nothing. And then you have to go back on your own. You're on your own.

 

Valentino (01:10:38.99)

Right.

 

Valentino (01:10:42.305)

I know at that point you just start entering random characters and hope that randomness like adjusted its output.

 

Dari Goldman (01:10:46.215)

I'm sorry.

 

HNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN

 

It never does.

 

Valentino (01:10:53.365)

No, it doesn't. Hopefully it gets better. I mean, thankfully somebody else is working on those problems, you know? And we could just keep trying, you know? That's right.

 

Dari Goldman (01:10:59.254)

Right. We're just so working with the magic of Rails. You guys work with the magic of machine learning.

 

Valentino (01:11:09.169)

So I'm curious now that you've been to like a big major conference Are you looking forward to more conferences in the future or do you think one is like a good for a few years? Kind of thing. Where do you stand there?

 

Dari Goldman (01:11:24.651)

You go first, Miriam.

 

Valentino (01:11:28.846)

More.

 

Dari Goldman (01:12:03.969)

No, not every day.

 

Dari Goldman (01:12:08.778)

Same, absolutely the same. I want to participate more in the Rails community and obviously conferences are a part of that, but I hope that it gets more people excited to host local events. I would think about having a more active and new presence. We already have a wagon campus, but why not have more Rails coders and developers who get together and speak about

 

Different Rails topics are just different things happening in web development. I think that would be really cool. Yeah.

 

Valentino (01:12:47.085)

Yeah, I totally agree with that sentiment. There's been a few new Ruby conferences that have popped up across the US that I've been really excited about, right? Or have almost gone. I was, yeah, they get, it's hard once you get a family and then you got a break from the family. But like, even when they're really close,

 

But even still, just having them closer makes it more possible. So the more that there can be, the better for sure. So I do. I'm with you. I hope more people take on to that and start creating. Because it doesn't take much. Pay for some pizza and have people talk about whatever they want, really. You line up two or three people and you know.

 

Dari Goldman (01:13:20.927)

Right.

 

Dari Goldman (01:13:24.609)

Exactly.

 

Valentino (01:13:43.213)

That's a little mini conference, you know? Right. That's okay. You know, the next year, you never know. You might get a sponsor, right? Like, luckily, there are lots of Ruby and Rails organizations out there, like companies that use it, right? So there's always somebody looking to put their name on something.

 

Dari Goldman (01:13:45.53)

Exactly! No swag, but that's okay. We got free pizza.

 

Dari Goldman (01:13:55.082)

I'm sorry.

 

Dari Goldman (01:14:02.615)

You're right.

 

Dari Goldman (01:14:08.802)

That's true.

 

Valentino (01:14:13.017)

Well, we're kind of getting to the end of time here. I wanted to leave some time for You know pics or whatever you wanted to talk about That's maybe not rails or Ruby or is rails and Ruby, you know Well, why don't you go first Derry?

 

Dari Goldman (01:14:32.509)

Um, hey.

 

Valentino (01:14:33.701)

Is there anything you wanted to share?

 

Dari Goldman (01:14:36.302)

don't have any picks because I don't know, myself just kind of going through the startings of my developer career. But I will say that I have found this Willco kind of platform, which can be great for other junior developers. Let me just try and find the link so that I can share that with you Valentino.

 

And it's sort of like a game, but it puts you in the workplace of like a, it's like you're starting your first day as a developer and they're giving you all these challenges, which are kind of like kind of simple web development exercises. And you get to do this in the framework of like, okay, so you're going to use GitHub, you're using Docker.

 

you can choose your framework so you can have Rails as your backend and React as your frontend. And then afterwards you just go through these challenges one by one and afterwards you just feel a bit more confident about actually working in a similar environment in case you ever get that first job. I'm going through it just because I want to solidify certain skills for myself. And I think that if anyone else who is starting out or just wants to review some of their own skills, even if they've been...

 

going through or they've been working for a few years or even several years, I highly recommend it. I think it's a really great app.

 

Dari Goldman (01:16:18.335)

I think you're on mute, Valentino.

 

Valentino (01:16:20.653)

Yeah, super cool. I was just saying, I'm gonna check that out. I always love a good tutorial site, just to know what to send people to, you know. That's awesome. What about you, Miriam? Do you have a pick for today? Or two, or three? It's up to you.

 

Dari Goldman (01:16:21.955)

I don't know.

 

Dari Goldman (01:16:30.658)

Yeah.

 

Dari Goldman (01:16:54.05)

We were a pretty big group last time though.

 

Valentino (01:16:54.276)

Yeah.

 

Valentino (01:17:05.145)

Hahaha

 

Dari Goldman (01:17:08.345)

That's good for us though.

 

Valentino (01:17:12.181)

Yeah, I too hope that there are more women at the conferences, more diversity in general. Yeah, my first RoastConf, it was pretty bleak. But that was many years ago, and I'm hopeful that it's not so bad.

 

Dari Goldman (01:17:27.955)

Hahaha

 

Dari Goldman (01:17:36.286)

It was nice at this Rails conference is that there was quite a bit of diversity. There could be more women for sure, but there's people from all around the world. You don't have just like ethnic or gender diversity. There's just a lot of different people in general, people from the States, people from Europe, people coming from Africa, from Asia. And it was like really cool to get all those people in one place.

 

So yeah, I hope there's as much enthusiasm for Toronto, mostly the same type of mix.

 

Valentino (01:18:16.321)

I was just thinking about, well, I have a pick, I guess, but I don't want to take Miriam's spot here. But Women on Rails. I know that Women on Rails is semi-based in France, right?

 

Dari Goldman (01:18:24.433)

Miriam didn't give a peck.

 

Dari Goldman (01:18:36.822)

I do know of some rails, women on rails, what do I say, organizations, but I don't know if that one is semi-based in France.

 

Valentino (01:18:49.677)

I know there's a-

 

Dari Goldman (01:18:51.262)

Ah, yes. Okay, yes. The newsletter. Yes, there are. Yeah, exactly. There are. Actually, I think the French woman started it. She's based in Paris, I believe. And she runs a Paris Ruby on Rails group. And yeah, she has that newsletter. And then she actually translates it into other different languages. Yeah.

 

Valentino (01:18:53.913)

The newsletter.

 

Valentino (01:19:13.193)

I really love that newsletter. It's really great. And I'm always looking for more women programmers because there aren't really that many. And I like to have the extra insight from somebody that's not what I am because you get more perspective about things. Different people think differently. And so the more you can get, the better. And so it's really nice, like very well curated and...

 

Dari Goldman (01:19:33.3)

Exactly.

 

Valentino (01:19:41.625)

They're very passionate about sharing what other women developers are speaking about and writing about. And I really love following along. So if you're not familiar, womenonreals.com, I think, has the newsletter.

 

Dari Goldman (01:19:59.454)

Yeah, I've subscribed to it, but I think I subscribed a little too late so I didn't get the latest one. Let's see.

 

Dari Goldman (01:20:17.398)

Yes, we did get the last one on September 26th.

 

Valentino (01:20:22.721)

You know, they break for the summer, right?

 

Dari Goldman (01:20:26.106)

Yeah, I mean, good for them. This is the you take a proper European vacation and take August off and then come back to work.

 

Valentino (01:20:33.045)

I really wish the states had the summer off. I would love that. So sorry, Miriam, did you have a pic? I didn't mean to snowball into yours.

 

That's okay.

 

Dari Goldman (01:20:49.235)

Oh, let's go ahead and promote WNB.rb if you want.

 

Valentino (01:20:55.014)

Oh, I also love them as well.

 

Valentino (01:21:00.665)

So the...

 

Did they have a good presence at a Rails world? I know that, what is her name?

 

Dari Goldman (01:21:10.75)

Adriana Chang, I think that she's one of the, I don't want to say animators, but I think that she also is one of the co-founders. But she definitely helped organize the breakfast that we had during Rolls World. So we did have a WMB.rb breakfast, which was really nice because you got to see a lot of people or just that were interested, mostly women and non-biotech.

 

So it does give you like that different perspective, like how do they experience the tech industry? How are they experiencing Rails? And they also have talks that happen. So if you join the group, we have talks that happen, I think once every month, that are quite interesting that either discuss something that's happening with the framework or with Ruby, or perhaps just in general about your tech career, which is quite helpful.

 

Valentino (01:22:12.033)

Yeah, that's awesome. I know several coworkers that are part of that too, and they just love the meetups and the book club and all that. And I'm always happy to hear that it affects more people, you know, because they do, they do awesome. Brittany and Gemma and I think Emily too. Yeah, they're awesome. And I'm so glad because it-

 

Dari Goldman (01:22:20.908)

Oh yeah.

 

Dari Goldman (01:22:34.13)

Now I'm gonna have to find them.

 

Valentino (01:22:41.753)

They'll be at all these conferences and I just love it because they bring such a great vibe to the whole conference and it's great to see what they do.

 

Valentino (01:22:54.553)

So is there anything else you guys wanted to talk about? We've said, we've gone through quite a lot. I'm really excited to see these Railsworld conference talks come out and see your lovely faces emceeing as well. I'm sure it's gonna be, maybe not. Is that a conference only? Oh no.

 

Dari Goldman (01:23:02.146)

A lot of stuff.

 

Dari Goldman (01:23:11.158)

I don't know if you'll see us. Because of the way that they edited, yeah, I think because of the way they edited the keynote, I'm thinking that we might not be too visible in the actual videos, but we'll see. You might've had to be an in-person experience. Sorry, you have to be there.

 

Valentino (01:23:24.832)

Well, you could say you were there. Oh man. Well, I will make the next one for sure then.

 

Dari Goldman (01:23:34.606)

I don't know if we'll be in sync for that, but hopefully we'll be attendees. And we would love to meet you in person, Valentino.

 

Valentino (01:23:36.942)

You'll be here.

 

Valentino (01:23:40.766)

Okay.

 

Valentino (01:23:46.273)

Yeah, that would be great. I love to meet my guests. So, you know, I don't get out much, but when I do, you know, but I'm sure I'll see you around in the Rails community, you know, I'm online a lot. And so you never know when a commit might pop up for me from something you're working on. So, you know, thank you so much for coming on. It was really great to have you and great to hear, you know.

 

Dari Goldman (01:23:53.821)

Hahaha

 

Dari Goldman (01:24:08.264)

Nice!

 

Valentino (01:24:16.381)

I love to hear its newcomer stories of, you know, that are new to Rails and helping the community thrive because we need it. We need everyone, you know.

 

Dari Goldman (01:24:26.138)

Yes, thank you so much, Valentino. It helps make that passion grow even more for Rails to see everyone so excited about it. And it's nice to even just be here talking with you, someone more experienced, who's giving junior developers like us hope as we make our marks.

 

Valentino (01:24:50.669)

Yeah, thanks again for coming on. And don't worry, nobody knows everything and I'm sure you're doing great. Just keep up with it and the realest magic will take over your life for sure. Hopefully fill your pocketbook.

 

Dari Goldman (01:25:07.041)

Thank you.

 

Dari Goldman (01:25:10.434)

Yeah, that's the most important thing. The magic needs to spread as the wealth increases.

 

Valentino (01:25:13.87)

Ha ha

 

Valentino (01:25:20.045)

All right, well until next time folks, I'm Valentino and hope to hear from you soon, bye.