Ryan: 0:18

Today we're here with Adrian Marin author of Avo admin, speaker podcaster, host. I'm sure I'm missing a few things there, but welcome to the show.

Adrian: 0:29

Hey, it is nice to be here. Thanks for thanks. Thanks for having me. That's awesome.

Ryan: 0:34

Yeah.

Adrian: 0:34

Huh?

Ryan: 0:35

so we like to start out with the question of, why do you choose to work with Rails?

Adrian: 0:43

So I just wanna give you like a bit, like a short background. I started with PHP, I moved into Node, a little bit, TypeScript, and then I found Ruby at some point. So I'm not one of those old Gs that, has worked with version one or version two of Rails or but since I found Ruby and Rails, it's this is my language. I vibe to that. And I really think, I really believe in this. Like every person, every developer vibes with diff with a different kind of technology. That's why we have closure and people who like to develop enclosure and lis and all other things my brain just doesn't work like that. But when I see Ruby, when I see rails, when I see why I can, how expressive it can be and how elegant it can be, like this is my jam. That's how I wanna do it.

Ryan: 1:29

Yeah, we're starting to sense a pattern here. Almost every guest we've had on. Started with PHP or something similar, struggled with different languages,

Adrian: 1:40

Yeah.

Ryan: 1:41

rails usually first before Ruby. And then it's just hey, it clicked right?

Adrian: 1:46

Yeah.

Ryan: 1:47

there's definitely something to do that to, something to that. All right you're perhaps most well known for AVO admin, although you do a lot of different things. wanna tell our listeners a little bit about what that is?

Adrian: 1:59

For sure. So AVO started out as a super experiment, like a dev experiment. I wanted to see if I can do it. So I used, in PHP there's Laravel, which is the rails of PHP. And they have a product called Nova, which is basically what Avo is for Laravel. And I was working at the startup and we built this this different division of the company. In just a few short months, like seven or eight months. And we were able to do that because we were able to build all of the operation software and all of the internal tools using Nova, like extremely fast. So I could focus on, the most unique, more unique aspects of the business and of the app. And I didn't have to like do the tedious work of okay, let's align. Field, why doesn't the form working? I copy pasted something from a different page and it's not clicking anymore. Write extensive tests for all of this, boilerplate kind of code boilerplate features that you should have in most apps. And at some point that was 2020, I think you remember there was the pandemic. We weren't allowed to go outside of our homes at some point it was like, that, that. Period of time and I said, okay, I need a side project. I built like hundreds of admin panel before I, I used this Nova product and I know Rails and the rails like helps you move so freaking fast with everything you build. If you had something like this for Rails, then you know it's a match made in heaven. It's started as a side project. I just want to see if I can do it. As polished and as good and as, modular and extendable. And at some point I put like a price tag on it and said, okay, I worked like for six or seven months on it. It's gonna be like a hundred dollars. You pay a hundred dollars forever and you have it. And that's perfect. And then I thought, as probably other developers that you just create something cool, something good that you love, you think it provides value to yourself and probably to others. You're just gonna put it out there. People are gonna flock in. They wanna, they'll wanna use it, they want to, abuse it and everything. And that quickly moved from me telling people about the tool do you wanna try it in order to me begging people to try the tool come on. It's very good. It's amazing. It's cool. And then, I tried, I started, figuring out like, hey, if I wanna make like a business or like a side business for me with this. I gotta see what a side, what a business is. And then, I started figuring out, trying finding out about what product development is, how to, talk to people, what positioning is, how to do sales, marketing. I found out that, developers don't like being sold things, and especially Dev. Tools and all of those things that, there were they were like, in this fog of war to me, something there around marketing and sales. But I didn't know exactly what, so I basically jumped into it and I wanted to make a business and now I think four, five years almost in we are here, we are, we have a profitable business. We are providing a lot of value. We have hundreds of customers, even more hundreds of users. Yeah. And I just love it. I think it's the perfect, it's a match made in heaven between like rails and what you can do with internal tools and operations software.

Ryan: 5:02

I definitely want to dive into that. Into the product a little bit more. But before we do that, maybe you could share a little bit, like what was the biggest surprise for you when you transitioned from building and being a developer to, running a business, marketing, sales, operations, all the other things that go along with that. Were there any big surprises that you weren't, ready for, were there any,

Adrian: 5:25

yeah.

Ryan: 5:25

you'd give to someone on the same journey?

Adrian: 5:28

So it reminded me a lot about the days when I started learning development.'cause I didn't go to computer science school. I am a self-taught developer. And I tried, I think about three times to actually learn development. I was doing a lot of Drupal work some p some award press, they had those site builders. I was I did a little bit of action script with flash, if you remember that. That time. But never, yeah, but never, like professionally. And after I finished like my master's degree, I said, okay, fine, I'm gonna move out of my city, of the city. I was living with my dad I'm gonna move, go to the capital. I'm gonna get a job as a developer. I don't care what it takes. I don't care how much it pays and whatever. I just wanna be a developer. And it was the big jump for me. But getting back to your question. When I started development one of the things that stuck with me was that how frustrating it was to actually learn it and to actually be able to put out something of value, so some piece of code, some piece of app that works. I was going through all of the tutorials. I, I. Thought I was doing all of the steps, but nothing worked. Not as in the video tutorial. And, after a while it's this big mountain be this big mountain that you have to climb. And then it's, it gets easier because things start to click. Okay, I understand object oriented. I understand what CSS does. I understand what this does and the how servers work and, but there was this big hill, big mountain, and. I think it's the same thing in business. So like I said, there's this fog of war about, oh, somebody told us, you have to do marketing, you have to do sales, you gotta do pro propositioning for your product. Pricing is hard. You may hear this in people's tweets and everything. I didn't know what that meant. I thought, ah, at some point maybe I'll, I'll hit into this, but whatever. And. When I started doing it as a business and saying Hey, if I wanna make a business out of it, I gotta do it. It was this, another big hill, and it was like a mess in my head. I was going through all of the material that I could I was going to workshops, to webinars. I went into kind of acceleration programs. Like I, I ingested as much information as I could in a, like a rather short period of time. And it was a mess in my head, but at some point, after you get, after the first hill, it gets easier. Oh, okay, now I understand what pricing is, how you to do pricing, right? And where I understand what positioning is, and I'm still learning. I'm still learning. But this is, I think the best advice that I could give people is stick. Stick with it. It's gonna be difficult, especially if you've never done it. Everything is difficult. Development is difficult, design is difficult. Pricing, everything. Stick with it and you will at some point understand more like keep educating yourself and things will click at some point.

Ryan: 8:04

Yeah, I think that's a very healthy view of how to approach business. A like development. It's never done, always

Adrian: 8:11

Oh yeah.

Ryan: 8:12

improve, right? There's

Adrian: 8:13

Oh

Ryan: 8:13

You might have an end goal in mind.

Adrian: 8:15

yeah,

Ryan: 8:16

process, it it's, I always re, someone always reminds me, I think it's from a book or a famous quote, but you gotta fall in love with the process,

Adrian: 8:23

yeah.

Ryan: 8:23

business or the product. That as a business

Adrian: 8:26

yep.

Ryan: 8:26

or manager or whatever you're gonna enjoy going to work every day. And if

Adrian: 8:30

Yeah.

Ryan: 8:31

in love with the process is gonna be a bit of a struggle. At least that's been my take on it.

Adrian: 8:35

Yeah, no, for sure. And at any level you are at, 'cause like now we're like in tiny seed and we're going to MicroConf and whatever, and we're seeing people, making millions of dollars per year. Having they have different problems. So like you said, it never stops. It's not finished software. Definitely not.

Ryan: 8:51

Yeah,

Brendan: 8:51

cool. I didn't realize you guys were in tiny seed. When did

Adrian: 8:54

Yeah.

Brendan: 8:54

that the most recent cohort or

Adrian: 8:56

no. Actually, it's been a year. We just had, last week we had our one year call, kind of end of batch they call it. So last year when we were in, at Sin City, and when we first met, I actually got my, my, the email, like the proposal do you wanna go in? And, I spoke with a few people there you know if it's good, if it's not good, whatever. And I said, yeah, hell yeah, we wanna do it. It's it's a good opportunity for us.

Brendan: 9:17

Yeah, that. That's awesome. I know you guys, at least on your website, and when we talked, I think in Sin City, I think you had one employee. Is that still the

Adrian: 9:24

Yep. Still the case. Paul is the CTO lead dev, main developer, tech lead. He's doing most of the development right now. I touch it from time to time, but I try not to. So we're full-time. We're trying to hire another front end developer 'cause Paul understands the product very well. But, we want somebody to sweat on the details and we can get into all of that. Like why is that's important to us and we wanna hire another frontend developer. So if you are like that hot, like frontend developer, definitely get in touch with us. So it's the two of us. We're trying to get one more, and then we have somebody, a lot of contractors, design copywriting, legal, and all kinds of other things. Yeah.

Brendan: 10:07

Yeah, I was gonna ask, on what you were just talking about with Ryan's last question about the marketing and the business stuff, like how are you splitting your time? And it sounds I think you might have just answered part of it, that you're not doing most of the development anymore.

Adrian: 10:19

No not anymore. Like we do take product decisions together. We do take major technical decisions together. If you want to change an API or how should we do this, do a lot of pair programming and trying to figure out, okay, how does the API look like and what happens when people do this? But I'm trying to let Paul do the. The grant work there, people come up with all kinds of edge cases, bugs feature requests they send in prs and that's very taxing on your focus. And I would rather take that focus and put it into like kind of the business development and try to, see, 10,000 feet ahead of us. Like what's the next step of our business?'cause if you're in the code every day, and this is another like, good advice for developers who want to transition to business. If you're in the code every day that, that social juice I code, no, not social juice. Maybe know that, yeah, maybe that juice, that brain juice that goes into development, won't go into business development. So you won't be able to focus on marketing as well, or sales or networking and all of those things. So yeah.

Ryan: 11:21

much creative energy you have

Adrian: 11:23

yeah.

Ryan: 11:23

a given day before it runs out. And

Adrian: 11:25

yep.

Ryan: 11:26

know from personal experience, right when I. best work is first thing in the morning. It's I want to come in, I want to, code for a few hours, and by the time I'm done with that, it's like, all right, I don't have anything left to do real creative, or anything. So yeah I get that.

Adrian: 11:43

yeah, definitely.

Brendan: 11:45

Switching gears back to the product a little bit one thing I was wondering is you're doing all the marketing, obviously you've had the product for a while now. What is the biggest use case from your customers? Is it like net new apps? Is it they want to add into their existing apps? What are you seeing?

Adrian: 12:01

Sure. So we are in the process of doing a little bit of repositioning. So for people who don't know what positioning is, it's actually figuring out what is the most value that your product gives figuring out how to articulate it and who to who you are, basically giving that value. And for the longest time when even when I started it, it was like AVO is an admin panel framework for Ruby on Rails app. So that was the thing. And after we pushed a lot of features and a lot of remodeling to the product, we figured out that, admin panel, internal tools operation software, content management system, CRM, they all blend together at some point, into this kind of digital brain of the company. When you tell people usually about admin panels, it's like the thing in the back of the closet that only. Three people touch because if you input the wrong thing, it's gonna break the whole app, or it doesn't have the proper tests or whatever. You don't have to touch the wrong buttons. So people think about that, but actually everybody in their app has if you come one layer in, in front, they have this operation software where you can manage your plans, your customers, your products, whatever you are selling, whatever you know your service is. Basically we transitioned our form, like that admin panel that nobody touches into. Okay, this is gonna be our operation software, this is our internal tools, this is how we manage the digital, this is the digital version of our company. And that's how we like to think about it. We have a few customers who pull, put it like one level more in front. So their customers, they come in, they actually see avo and they do everything inside avo. So it's basically consumer facing software to them. And that's fine, that's perfect with us. Some apps are like very well suited for that, but not all apps. But if you talk about operation software, internal tools. They're, pretty much very similar. There are a lot of common things you can extract. So this is where we are at right now. So it's a framework on which you can build internal tools for your apps for your business. And you ask if it's for greenfield apps or for new apps or existing ones. And my answer is like, for both. Like when I, since the inception. I knew that people will change eventually. They had, they will have, 5-year-old, 10-year-old code bases and they will have coded in some way. We don't we don't enforce any schema changes. We don't enforce anything like that. We actually don't even run the database. We don't have anything. We will add a few things, but we don't have any products that create tables for you. So you can use your own models and your own schema and your own everything that you have already and progressively. Add vo whatever you need it.

Ryan: 14:36

Yeah, so you touched on something that I had been. Maybe struggling to understand. I've been following Avo for a long time, and conceptually I want to use it in my apps. Idea of an admin panel until just this second, I think, confused me a little bit.

Adrian: 14:58

Yeah.

Ryan: 14:58

it's like, all right, there's a difference between like a backend operations for internal, right? And

Adrian: 15:05

Yep.

Ryan: 15:06

thinking this was, I was gonna use this for was more that second thing you mentioned, which was using it as an, a quote unquote admin panel for my users. And when I think about using it for my users, then it breaks down. So like, you know, our, our app is a marketing platform for local, like chambers of commerce, main street associations, magazines, newspapers, those like local anchors.

Adrian: 15:27

Yeah.

Ryan: 15:28

So a lot of it is, it aligns well with ABO or, the standard tread interface. You're

Adrian: 15:32

Yeah.

Ryan: 15:33

your blogging, you're doing all this stuff, but then the views become this like front end website or page and it seems like maybe that's not really the best use case for abo so the question is, am I understanding this better now or am I still lost?

Adrian: 15:48

No you're perfectly right. Yeah, like I said, there are some apps I'll give you an example. If you are running like a, an A ticketing system, like a help desk system, right? You could use AVO for as the consumer facing application. Like your users can come in, they see a table of their issues, they click one, they see like comments and whatever the response is. So that's, it's perfect. Like you could use AVO and that's. Yeah, that would work. But like you said, if you have something with news that need to have a richer interface, you have like maybe sidebars or things moving around. Okay. Now we know that we're you could do it 'cause we, we do give you like a lot of like escape hatches and we can talk about that. You could do it, we're, we have to be honest. Exactly. Yeah. We, use the right tool for the job. We're not gonna push you like, you should use it for everything.'cause no. It's, it doesn't work like that. Yeah. Yeah.

Ryan: 16:35

Okay. That's helpful. Now I have a clear picture and I think you

Adrian: 16:38

Yeah.

Ryan: 16:39

something with the operations concept, right? I

Adrian: 16:42

Yeah. Good. Yeah.

Ryan: 16:43

end point, that cleared a lot of stuff up in my head about,

Adrian: 16:46

That's awesome.

Ryan: 16:47

audience is. Yeah.

Adrian: 16:49

Yeah.

Ryan: 16:50

I did want to Brendan had asked. New apps or, legacy apps. And I know pre-show I mentioned it's like, all right. How would, what would you suggest to your users that are wanting to introduce avo to an existing app? What

Adrian: 17:05

Yeah.

Ryan: 17:06

the process that you would recommend for them to follow?

Adrian: 17:10

Let me tell you the process. I'm not sure if this is exactly what you should use, but let me tell you what usually people do. So on a weekend they think something they think something like, oh, let me try out we have this, like you said, 10-year-old code base, it's rails 6, 7, 8, whatever. We brought it in, like the presentation, but still it's this all code base. We have these internal tools that use. Outdated technology, jQuery, and all kinds of, other things. Maybe web packer and all kinds of, it's like untested. Nobody wants to we even have a customer, we Exactly. We talked about exactly this. Like it's untested. Nobody wants to touch it. Like, whenever somebody changes something, for sure it'll break. Nobody wants to take ownership of that and whatever usually happens in a weekend. One engineer goes in and say, says, okay, let me see if AVO is for me. I've heard Adrian about it, LA talk about it and let me see if it's good for me. And what they do is they usually, build 60, 70, maybe 80% of the whole admin file, their whole internal tools, and they, send a lot of bugs to us or corner cases or whatever.'cause we see it on our GitHub, on, on a Saturday evening or Sunday evening or whatever usually.'cause it's it's. My experimentation time or whatever you wanna call it. So they do that and then they're like, oh my God, this is so freaking fast. But then they're like, oh my God, wait a minute. So there are other tools, active admin, whatever, which where like the 80% is like really easy and then the rest of the 20% is like super difficult and we know about that. Then we built a lot of escape hatches into it. If whenever you wanna take over with like rail queries, CSS, Java script, you want take over with partials like. Custom scopes, like whatever you need to do, we have that. And so basically people build 60, 70% of the app in a day or two, like whatever they had, whatever they built over 10 years. And then they run them side by side. This is what our customers do. They run them side by side and they'll, they tell their users like their coworkers, teammates, everybody that's, inside those internal tools. Okay, use them both or use this new one. Use them both. And then, in, in the next week or so, they flesh out a lot of the other. Corner cases that the old one had and they start to put it inside vo and then at some point, maybe after a week or two or three or maybe a month or something when they, 'cause usually some custom development might be involved, they have this custom interface to do something, then you have to do it by hand. At some point they send us. This screenshot of a closed PR that says migrating everything to our removing that other thing or whatever. And that's, for us is like the big hearts go on, like discord and everywhere. Ba basically this is a process. They you do it iteratively. You you try it out.'cause this is what all I'm telling people try it out for an hour build something meaningful and you'll figure out really soon that this is right for you or not. It's not gonna, I'm not gonna tell you it's, and yeah, people try it like on a weekend or whatever. They figure out, okay, this is good or not good. And then in the next few weeks they transition everything towards Avo and then, they never think to go back.

Ryan: 19:57

There's a lot of interesting things there. One is that you get, if you can get 80% in a weekend. pretty solid. And I think, having 20% left, that's just the life of a developer, right? Like

Adrian: 20:09

Yeah.

Ryan: 20:10

the last 20%

Adrian: 20:11

Yeah.

Ryan: 20:11

So the, nothing new there, but if you can roll this out in a three or four week period right? That,

Adrian: 20:17

It's still

Ryan: 20:18

part, right? That's nothing in, in, in developer hours really.

Adrian: 20:22

yeah, exactly. That's what I mean. And I know it sounds too good to be true, it sounds and it's not perfect. We have some bugs we have, but again, like if you think about in the great scheme of things, like you worked on this app, full app for 10 years 10 developers that has been through it. And I was able to build it in like a few months. Like it's, yeah. Yeah.

Ryan: 20:40

You had mentioned, when you first launched you were charging like a hundred dollars lifetime But now you've looks like you've adopted the, SaaS, model. So I, I

Adrian: 20:50

yeah,

Ryan: 20:51

that means yes, every SaaS has bugs, but you're actively, developing and improving. So that's the value that you're providing.

Adrian: 21:00

yeah.

Ryan: 21:00

Is

Adrian: 21:01

Yeah that's part of it. So part of it is, yeah, I probably, many listeners will identify with this. You go on a repo, you find this cool tool, you needed to do something or it doesn't, or it has a bug and you put a you add, you put an issue there. Like you, can you help me? Whatever. Sometimes you can put in a pr. Sometimes you can put it, sometimes you can fork it and build it yourself. You could do that, but you put this issue out there or PR and nobody gets back to you, like nobody. And you're like, come on, I wanna pay you, I want to, sponsor you. I wanna donate whatever I wanna pay you to. Please help me get this done. And this was frustrating to us, so that's why we figured out really quick that yeah, this is a gem. This is a library you put inside your app, so it's a little bit different from a cloud service. So everybody's is used to paying for cloud services. You talk about retool for stat admin, you talk about any other google fly render, whatever, it's a cloud thing, so it's okay to pay a, subscription. And this is a gem. Like nobody, very few people do it. Very few companies like, there's Sidekiq, there's Kafka, there are others. But we figured out really fast that, this is not gonna be finished software anytime soon. People build their apps in so many ways and when they get stuck at something. They would rather have somebody to pick up the phone and help them by, fixing the bug, fixating a feature, or at least telling them how to. Pull out of it. So this is what we try to do very actively. So if it's something that we cannot do or it doesn't make sense in the grand scheme of things, we tell them, okay, you can get out of it. Write this partial, whatever, and you inject it like this and you do it like this. So you're unblock, you're unblocked, you're unstuck. So you can do that. So that's a part of the thing. It's like this, open source kind of support thing. And then the other thing is. Once you get built, once you get like building with this, with Avo and you figure out this is a platform I can make so many things, I can build so many things on it. So many people need common things, right? And if you check our, if anybody wants to check our roadmap, like we have a release cycle every four weeks. Every month actually. When we release like a minor version we call it. And in every release we have something of value. Sometimes we have two, three, or four. So that means like new features new scenarios open up for you so people can upgrade their apps. You get all of that, like for, let's call it for free 'cause it's a subscription, but you get that out of the box. It's not the, it's not the finished software and it's not a thing that you stop when you do get cloned. You get it and then you start to develop it, right? It gets gets better with time. Boxes, bugs are fixed and yeah, we figured out that this cannot be this, you can't monetize this as a once kind of thing, right?

Ryan: 23:37

It makes total sense to me.

Adrian: 23:38

Yeah.

Ryan: 23:39

All so you touched on something there. Which was like, obviously you're building a platform, so to speak, right? It's a tool that it can be used for hundreds, if not thousands of different use cases, edge cases, whatever you wanna call 'em. So as you're developing your roadmap, you're collecting customer feedback, you're seeing issues, you're seeing bugs. How do you go about determining A, what you're gonna work on,

Adrian: 24:01

Yep.

Ryan: 24:01

b. How it fits into your overall strategy. Maybe the heart of the question is, I imagine, and correct me if I'm wrong here, that every feature or thing that you do in the app, you have to conceptualize, like, how can it be I. Useful for all of these use cases. So

Adrian: 24:20

yeah.

Ryan: 24:21

how do you manage that? Because that's, it's a lot and it doesn't, there's not always alignment between what the customer wants and your vision of

Adrian: 24:29

Yeah.

Ryan: 24:29

I'm call it a platform 'cause I think it's a platform, but semantics maybe.

Adrian: 24:34

That's a great freaking question. To answer it started like, how do you figure out what to build? It's it, at first it was me as well, it was scarcity. What could it do? Like in the beginning it was just, list some records. Click details and click edit and show a form. Like it was very basic. And then, okay, we need associations. We need, so in the beginning, like the first year and a half, whatever, we have to build like the, let's call them basic features, like features that everybody needs. And then people started using our more and, we got, we started to get flooded with feature requests and we did them in a way. A little bit in the order, but a little bit in the, how it fits in the whole ecosystem, like the whole platform thing. And for about two years we were under this, I mentioned this like four, four week re four weeks release cycle. We were doing two, like two years ago, like every two weeks. So it was it was. Under constantly. Under fire. Under fire because we know that if we want to build a moat around the business and out the product, we need to be the best. So we need to have all of the tools that a developer needs when they're building those internal tools.'cause if it's something that. Avo doesn't do, or doesn't enable doing or allowing to do they won't use it because, it's that thing and it's gonna block them. So yeah, now we are at this place, this cool place where we're okay, we're a little bit chill now. We don't have, we're not like under constant fire about, okay, you need all of these features. Of course we need a few more. But now we have the peace and peace and quiet to okay, let's work on nested.

Ryan: 26:03

features, right?

Adrian: 26:04

You always. Yeah, exactly. But we also talk about deleting lines of code and everything. It's a balance. But yeah. I love that. I love that. Yeah, so it's I think it's a mix between the feedback and like how much feedback are we getting? Like everybody told us we need nested records and creating, and then when you get, to, to the drawing board. It's okay, what does nested mean? Accepts nested attributes for, and then you figure out, okay, but you have, has one, has many. Do you wanna support that? Do you wanna do you want to add more? Do you wanna delete What do, what happens when you click edit? Do you wanna do inline for tables? There are all of these questions and the hole gets so freaking deep maybe for this feature that we say okay let's do the initial iteration. Let's do the, has many, right? You can do, you can, whenever you create a post, you can add like comments for, or for example it's a stupid example, but, 'cause you wouldn't do that, you would add that has many.

Ryan: 26:52

understands.

Adrian: 26:53

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And, we did that. Actually we're working on that, but when we launch it, I know that people are gonna be like, half of them are gonna be like, amazing. I love this. And the other half, yeah, but what about this and this, and say okay, chill. That's the initial iteration. That's the first thing. We want to put it out there to see if it works, whatever. Of course. And then we create these to dos. Okay, what did you want? Did you, what did you want? Okay, perfect. And then we add them to the platform. So it's a little bit of a balancing act for sure. Yeah.

Brendan: 27:20

We've covered a lot about AVO and I know you do a lot of other stuff as Ryan mentioned in your intro. So maybe

Adrian: 27:26

Yeah.

Brendan: 27:26

switch gears a little bit and you run a conference that, that's pretty interesting. Maybe let's talk about that for a couple minutes here.

Adrian: 27:32

Sure. So it's called Friendly rb and it was born in two years ago. So it's 25, 24. Yeah. 2023. I, it was after the pandemic. There weren't too many conferences around. Definitely not in Europe. And I went in 2022, I went to, so that's in Poland, that's a very, it's a little bit local, but a very well put together conference. And I said perfect. I think this is my next challenge. I love, new challenges and everything. And in February I spoke to a few people. I talked to Andy from Brighton, Ruby, and whatever. I said Hey, I'm thinking about putting together a conference. There aren't too many. And I think I would. Be good at running one. And we talked about a few things, and I tweeted in February, I think Hey, I wanna put on this conference in Bucharest who would come? And people are like, oh my God, same in yeah. I wanna do it. I wanna do it. And that's how it started me. And actually I'm not alone this time. They were like five friends who got together. We have this weekly chat about it's like masterminds, whatever. It's a group of friends. Every week we talk about, we started talking about Ruby, and now of course we talk about everything like from life and whatever, but it's a very good support group. But, and in Romania, Ruby is not very popular. It's not very popular. Just call it that. And we always wanted to do something for the community.'cause, we'd watch Twitter and the feed and everybody doing cool stuff and, we said, okay, we're gonna do this. What are we gonna call it? We said, okay, let's do friendly rrb. And then I went on this tour at every conference that I could go and, I started talking to people about listen, this is what we wanna do. We wanna do it differently. Like we wanna do it have some activities, have some talks outside of Ruby, have some, all kinds of stuff. And people were like, oh my God, I think you might have something there. And in the fall, in the first edition. All the cool people came all the cool people on Twitter, all the, some friends that I made during that let's call it conference tour. And somehow, I recently heard, like I was at Balkan Ruby last week and somebody told me like, Hey, I think Friendly has this prestige around that, that, you don't get to talk so easily there and everybody wants to speak there and everything. I said, I don't know if, I don't know if it's. If it's like that. But I do wanna have a nice lineup that's a little bit different and, attack some, let's call it, attack some subjects that aren't as spoken about in our community. I. Yeah, it's a, it's an international conference. Most people are from outside Romania. It happens in September. This year is gonna be 10 to 12th. It's two days single track. We having some amazing speakers, so Andrew, Culver Michele Hansen, Irina Nazarova. And and some more coming. And we have a cool, so one of the cool things we do after the first day, I get some. Official, like tour guides and I take people throughout the city and they do like a tour together. And then on the last day we get on a train, we go to the mountains and we have the most amazing day together to visit some castles and some other things. So yeah, I'm trying to, I'm trying to make it a little bit different so it's not just, that conference that you go to skip a day of work or something. It's something that you really enjoy.

Ryan: 30:34

name means something and it has some context behind it, which is nice.

Adrian: 30:38

Yeah I like to think about it that way and people come to me and say oh my God, the net, like the networking and the connections that I made during friendly, that, they, those were that was some of some of the best that I made ever. You've both been to Sun City, Ruby. I think about, since Ruby Blue Ridge, Ruby maybe.'cause, they were before like the. No sister friendly conferences. I don't know. It's a small conference, you know the vibe. You know the vibe. Everybody knows their each other. Cool people come, you get to, to hang out with everybody. So it's just a little bit different from the big ones. Oh.

Brendan: 31:09

cool and.

Ryan: 31:10

the fun part of smaller conferences, right? You get to talk to everybody and ha you can get lunch, you have meaningful conversations, I've made, lots of friends from just that one weekend, which is amazing. I didn't mean to cut you off there, Brendan.

Brendan: 31:24

No, it's all good. I was gonna ask just to the, you mentioned Adrian, that a lot of people wanna talk at it. Do you do a CFP or do you hand select the speakers?

Adrian: 31:32

We do a CFP, it's still open until July 1st, so definitely apply. But we do, I do feel this what's the word? When you're on the hook for something. Sorry. Yeah, I do feel this need to actually ob obligate Yeah. Kind of obligation, to actually curate the event a little bit. So I was at, in one year and they have this big selection process where, they have a team of people, selecting talks, very through various kind of various kind of levels and degrees and I can't do that. Like we do that, we do that. It's not only me, we do the small team. But I do want to invite cool speakers. Speakers who, have experience and they have like cool things to say Michele Hansen, she. Build, deploy empathy. Like, when are you going? She's gonna speak at MicroConf after friendly. So when are you gonna get to see her? You're not gonna get to see her very often. Like Andrew Culver, if you ever met him he's busy as hell and he's built a business in Rails. He's now. Still in the rail ecosystem, helping with ClickFunnels and everything. There these are people that you don't have access to very often, but we do have a CFP and one of the thesis of Friendly.rb is we want to get new people on the stage. We always wanted to do that 'cause I know what it meant for me to actually, get somebody to have me on stage. Yeah, definitely apply for A CFP and for the CFP and yeah, let's keep in touch.

Brendan: 32:56

That's great. Yeah. I think this is a good place to, to wrap it up. We've covered a lot of stuff there anything else you wanted to add before we, we wrap up

Adrian: 33:04

no, I'm good. I love meeting people. If anybody, needs some help with anything I'm around online and you know where to find me. I'm Adrian the dev everywhere. Awesome job with the podcast.

Brendan: 33:15

Oh, thank you. Yeah, I was just gonna ask, is it, if there's anywhere people wanna find you on the internet, but it sounds like you already answered that question. Obviously Avo, is it avo hq.com? Is

Adrian: 33:24

It's AVO hq.io or avo. Cool. That's a domain. That's a domain name. So Avo do cool and you'll find the right place.

Brendan: 33:32

I love it. It's been great having you on Adrian. Great to catch up again and yeah, thanks for coming on.

Adrian: 33:37

That's awesome guys. Thank you so much for having me. See ya.

Brendan: 33:40

I.