Ryan: 0:10

Hello, welcome. I'd like to welcome Irina Nazarova, CEO of Evil Martians to the show today. Welcome. Thanks for joining us.

Irina: 0:18

Hey guys. Thanks me.

Ryan: 0:22

Awesome. We like to ask everyone to start out like how you found rails. Do you wanna give us a little bit of your background and origin story?

Irina: 0:32

Totally. First of all, my, my background, I actually have a degree in computer science, but I never touched web development back then as many people did. I regretted it, of course, I kind of was thinking, oh why wasn't I kinda thinking more seriously about web and I, crafted websites in, my teen years and I never connected. Ht ML craft HTML CSS and copying JavaScript the kind of program and work that I was doing in seal c plus I thought those were entirely different universes. I, for some reason didn't even think well that, that was programming in any sense. to me, kind of websites felt more like, like a craft and design and. Almost like painting, you know, creating

Brendan: 1:20

art. Mm-hmm.

Irina: 1:24

And crafts. Yeah. And that, of course that's because those are static websites, nothing not applications. Something like that. and then I went through this whole. Thing where I went to get another degree in finance and went to finance, went to an investment bank, JP Morgan, and then didn't like it and

Brendan: 1:44

Hmm.

Irina: 1:45

often start a startup. and this, this is where this journey of building a product myself, this is where I started of course, built in, in the web, right? it was a food ingredient delivery startup.

Brendan: 1:59

Hmm.

Irina: 2:00

Yeah, I like cooking. So, um, it was originally built on, WordPress, WooCommerce plugin, you know, stuff like

Ryan: 2:09

Sure.

Irina: 2:10

It, it looked like so ugly in the code. Just like awful. The worst. They didn't like PHP since then. Yeah. then somebody, I think it was 2014 when I was actually doing already my second startup. So that one for three years. We had a lot, cool things, but we ended up shutting it down the first one, and uh, and then I had another idea, and then, I thought, oh, I heard about Ruben Rails. Like many people, I think in around 2012, 2014, I, I think it was not possible to not know about it. kind of at least you were exposed to the notion of Ruben Rails it kind of had this sense of, I don't know. Somehow I hoped it would not be as chaotic. It would kind of feel more clean and, Easy to maintain and just more enjoyable. So this was, this were my associations in my head. it really was that, so, I was, I was building this, this second startup and I, I just opened the rails tutorial and I just built out the platform for. You know, engineers to find temporary jobs abroad, to kind of travel

Brendan: 3:21

Hmm.

Irina: 3:22

other country and, do something with a local startup. That was the, with the local company. And of course then, it actually didn't work out 'cause the visas actually are very hard thing to solve that I wasn't thinking about that before. But anyway, uh, yeah, I built out this whole platform. I had like a few thousand engineers on it those were. first of all, my friends from my school and, yeah, and this is where I found rails so for the record, they didn't learn the language apart from the framework and in some sense like, you know, apart from building something,

Brendan: 3:59

That that's pretty common, I think.

Irina: 4:00

yeah. I just chatted yesterday with, The CTO of Gusto, the founder

Brendan: 4:06

Mm-hmm.

Irina: 4:06

o of Gusto. And he said, look, when I was, I heard about like similar story much earlier, but he said, look, I went and got a book on Ruby and I thought, oh yeah, you are much more, um, I dunno, thorough in this than me. Yeah,

Ryan: 4:25

think that's pretty common to, I mean, when I first started out, I had very similar story as you, right? I just was like compsci, C plus plus, C sharp.net, php, oh rails. This makes so much more sense. Um. It took me a long time before I understood that. Well, I understood that Ruby was the language behind it, but I never dove in right until much later in the career. So it's like I didn't know what was a rails method versus what was a Ruby method. and you know, obviously there's some that are, you know, the same or very similar or overwrite and know, you, I think you build an appreciation for that over time, but I think that's also what made Rails easy to get started with. Um, because you didn't have to learn Ruby really. I mean, you, you sort of do by association, but you get in and be productive without the, the core underlying knowledge. Although I think, you know, we had a little bit of a head start with the, the comp side, just thought process. But, yeah, I mean, I, I think so far we talk to on the podcast has pretty much had the same PHP to Rails experience. So there there's gotta be something there. I, I'm curious, have you ever gone back to PHP later in life? Just to, uh, I, I am.

Irina: 5:45

I'm not.

Brendan: 5:47

Yeah.

Ryan: 5:47

I. I never, I was in PHP before Laravel was like really a thing. And I'm wondering if it's any better now, right? Like would, would my experience have been different had I started on PHP with the framework, like, you know, 10 years the road? Um,

Irina: 6:04

for sure.

Ryan: 6:05

I.

Irina: 6:05

for sure. But by the way, we first exposure to BC framework was Scala play. Uh, so this is something we used in my second startup when I kind of found a scholar engineer. He joined this startup and he said, look, we're gonna build it out. And he basically said, look, this is, and this was like so nice. I was responsible for the view layer. He was responsible for everything else. it was nice. We, we kind of paired, uh, pretty well on that. And I am sure that larva also would feel. A lot cleaner than, yeah. The problem with PHP is just, just like how people, the conventions, the lack of conventions.

Ryan: 6:47

Yeah, I

Brendan: 6:48

Yeah.

Ryan: 6:49

I'm not trying to, to prop one up, I'm just, I was just curious. I'm, I'm still waiting to find somebody who can give a, a decent comparison between the two. just outta pure curiosity. Um, but anyway,

Irina: 7:01

Ruby

Ryan: 7:01

I.

Irina: 7:02

for some, has this. Maybe it's Maybe because we're all here, maybe we're here because we think that Ruby is just more beautiful. Right. I mean, if we thought otherwise, if we thought that PHP looks great, we'd probably be on a different podcast.

Brendan: 7:18

Right, right.

Ryan: 7:18

I, I think that's a, a big part of it. I, I just remember, you know, thinking back to my own journey, it was like. To get a PHP app running, you know, without WordPress. So like just PHP directly, like you had to worry about like database connectivity and managing the connections. was the stuff that, you know, I found difficult to consume and, and, and do. You know, when I picked up rails, like all that is abstracted away, uh, for the most part. And it's like, all right, let go of all these little details and just build. Right? I mean, I'm, I'm sort of preaching to the choir here, I think. But,

Irina: 7:58

Yeah,

Ryan: 7:58

that's just sort of the nice thing. Um.

Irina: 8:01

you, you know, my, my first, uh, so this, that tutorial that. Kind of my dev flow when Learning Rails was actually on Cloud nine, cloud nine, IO C nine today or something like that. it was a kinda dev environment

Brendan: 8:16

I, I, I seem to recall it. Yeah. I don't, I don't remember the name either, but it, I think I know what you're talking about. Yep.

Ryan: 8:22

I, I tried to do it when I was on a Windows machine and back then it wasn't a great experience, so yeah.

Brendan: 8:29

Well, Ruby and Rails was why I actually started buying Max to make it easy to install.

Ryan: 8:33

A hundred

Brendan: 8:34

Yep. Yep.

Irina: 8:35

But I mean, I remember they, they, they basically just had a preset for real tutorial. I mean,

Brendan: 8:41

Mm. Mm-hmm.

Irina: 8:43

use it and not think about dependency management at all. And that's what enabled, like I, I would just. I was, I'm, I'm like not able to resolve like lots of, by the way, uh, to be honest, uh, AI helps me a lot when I have like problems like that with installing stuff. Um,

Brendan: 9:02

Oh, same here.

Ryan: 9:04

That's way easier than Stack Overflow you that

Brendan: 9:07

Mm-hmm.

Ryan: 9:09

Alriight, well,, so I think you started to touch on this. Why would you choose Rails now if you were a new startup? I know you've done some sort of talks about startups, in the not too distant past, you know, what would you tell somebody, you know, how would you approach it if you were starting a new company today?

Irina: 9:27

Yeah, I think it doesn't even matter what I think my, my opinion is based on more, mostly on the opinion of my team. At Evil Martians, we are 50 people. So the opinion of the engineers of at Merchants is, is what, I believe in and, basically where we all agree is that Rails is probably the best framework to start a company today, especially in in the areas where we work, like B2B, professional tools, business tools. This is where we would say, look, it's, there's just nothing that exceeds the productivity that you get with Rails. In building the business logic and in JavaScript, there were many attempts and we were, I will say we were searching for an alternative to rails for our engineers to feel more empowered and building full stack apps, and we still cannot find anything on par. I was thinking like, why, okay, there's so many more engineers in the world And there were many attempts, you know, to even, even to copy rails, like closely my conclusion and conclusion of why this is happening, why Rails is so superior versus, uh, JavaScript in, in, again, from the point of view of Evil Martians, of the productivity that. think is important. You know, the productivity from, from zero to revenue. You know, not just, not just from zero to uh, demo, but from zero to revenue and beyond and, and into growth and to scale. So this is the productivity we're looking for. And, My impression is that in JavaScript people, people can always, the competition is between the frameworks. So there's a new framework and then it competes with 13 other frameworks that are out there. And then you think, oh, I know a new one. And then there's like 14 different competing frameworks and et cetera, and good ideas in all of them. But, uh, because it's all different frameworks, you always have. You always choose, you cannot kinda take the best ideas from, from each of them, right? That you always have to switch from, from existing framework to a new one. Okay. But I mean, but what about the websites that I built two years

Brendan: 11:52

Hmm.

Irina: 11:52

They're now legacy. Like, do I have to like switch again, et cetera. So I would say like, there's this a a lot of, there's a lot of ideas, a lot of competition in some sense. But if you, in practical terms, you either have to migrate and switch frameworks all the time, or, my impression is that in Rails because of this kinda adapterization pattern. have, kind of sub frameworks. if you think about this, like lots of things are, not even kinda chosen by the core team, like our spec or Postgres or like lots of, lots of things, lots of things we are building, right? We're building on top of it. But what I'm trying to say, the framework is kind of open to. Kinda adapter rising right to essentially switching and swapping parts of it with better alternatives, which means that, okay, we have this basic architecture where we have great, parts of the framework like web sockets, right action cable, which, was kinda one of the first obstructions for web sockets and web frameworks. And things like that, right? Obviously Active Record is amazing and stuff that, so we have those amazing building blocks, right? But then there's a competition between the actual of those building blocks. You can speed them up, you can uh, can use alternatives. You can have an alternative DSL. all those things, and I feel like rails, the. What we have is that we have competition inside the framework

Ryan: 13:29

Yeah, instead of externally.

Irina: 13:32

yeah. Yeah.

Brendan: 13:33

Yeah. That's an interesting point. I feel like you used to hear more about like the testing frameworks and even the database, but, and it is still an option to your point, but like it does feel like,

Irina: 13:43

Mm-hmm.

Brendan: 13:45

Postgres maybe happens more often or a spec is chosen more often, but, but there's still the option to, to kinda what you're saying, which is a really good point. I haven't really thought about it in a while actually.

Irina: 13:56

Yeah. And, and kinda also maybe, maybe also in, in rails there's more, kind of open source solutions where in other frameworks it's more of services, kind of third party tools, third party services. And as much as, okay, for some things we, I mean, we all use services. We probably all use something to send emails.

Ryan: 14:19

Yeah, so you, you touched on something while you were talking about that, which is like, you, you have like an opinion as a company, um, that you guys, I, I feel like. If you work at Evil Martians, this is my opinion from an outsider, is that you're, you know, uh, a thought leader, you know, you're creating content. You guys, you know, have a shared vision,

Irina: 14:42

Okay.

Ryan: 14:43

As CEO, like to me, like I, I think about culture and how to build culture

Irina: 14:47

Mm-hmm.

Ryan: 14:49

How did you get that point where you had that level of, of buy-in or did you come in when you came in? Was it already like that and you just had to sort of continue it? I, I think culture is one of the hardest things to affect in business. and we, you know, it's, it's one thing at a company level, that's another thing at the, you know, the development team level. do you think about that, uh, in your role as, as CEO?

Irina: 15:14

Yeah, that's, that's a good one. Uh, when, when I joined, I joined as a, as an account manager, as somebody who works with customers, uh, about seven years ago, maybe eight,

Ryan: 15:26

Uh, you're losing track of time. That's a good sign.

Irina: 15:30

maybe. It's, um, I'll check back later. And, uh, Admittedly, I, I had, I had some kind of imposter syndrome as, as, um, I mentioned kind of joining a room are full of like super, super, super experienced engineers, super bright, brilliant. Many of them are. We, we have like real stars, uh, on the team. Um, it's challenging. Yeah. and again, I'm, I'm not saying it. That's, by the way, I'm not saying that everybody kinda buys in into my vision. Maybe now I can't say that most people are aligned. Uh, at the same time. People have different opinions. That's fine. I mean, and by the way, what we embrace generally, I say look. I, I shared something like that. What we thought about, what we think about frameworks in general, but it doesn't mean that everybody's choosing the same framework by the way. people build, uh, at Evil Martians, people build, so we have projects on, on rust, and then they have their own universe of tech choices.

Brendan: 16:34

Sure.

Irina: 16:34

right. And then Go and then Node, Next, Nuxt, um, I. Too many, um, remix. I mean, too many also because we are consultants, so, very often build, uh, inside the stack that is already chosen or we bring something that makes sense for, the particular team. Uh, so again, it's, have definitely have plurality of, uh, opinions, and it's, it's great. That's how it should be. I think my, my approach was, I actually kind of had to step up at some point. I replaced the founder, CEO I would say wasn't a walk in the park. it was stressful at, at that time. and as, as I think as any, any founding, any CEO founder. Any leader should actually think about, okay, what, what happens when I'm, I can run out of steam and, kind of how can I support this transition? I was given a lot of, trust by, uh, everybody on the team. why this happened, I think is yeah, my, my framework, the framework inside of my head is this. I think about their organization and the interests of the organization. And by organization, I mean this, again, this group of people, right. And I'm trying to figure out what's gonna be best for, you know, for the organization. Uh, and I think any, and think this is the re kind of mentality, it's strange phrase, but still you, you kind of, not thinking about your personal ambition, uh, but, but rather. What's best. And you can also imagine, okay, the organization here is to, is here today, is here, but do we wanna go? Where do you wouldn't wanna be? And then course there are different opinions, right? And then you are trying to, all of it to kinda make sense and to make the right, uh, choices also. And then you just, so my approach is be very transparent. So I brought a lot of transparency to the company. There's this book, uh, I think it's, it's called Reinventing Organizations, and they have a term teal organizations inside the book. It's about kind of like radical transparency inside the organization and the idea that, uh, and I'm not like fully following this book, of course, uh, sentence, it's just the idea that. If you, if you, if you work with amazingly talented and bright people, what you wanna give them, first of all is transparency of what's going on. Uh, so we have full financial transparency. We discuss things openly. and then every time we close something that has to be for a reason and there are things, uh, all the HR matters, for example, some course they have to be. It cannot be discussed in front of everybody.

Brendan: 19:32

Hmm.

Irina: 19:33

Uh, but I mean things like somebody's kind of underperforming. Of course, it's it should be handled with Karen, right? Uh,

Brendan: 19:40

Yeah.

Irina: 19:41

but at the same time, you can give a lot of transparency. You can say, this is what we know. This is what. It looks like we headed this way. For example, I said, look, we should focus on, on an industry you know, Evil Martians is kinda like a higher end consultancy, so we wanna provide higher value, right? And to provide higher value, you should be an expert and, and. In business sense, you should be an expert in, in the product as well as technology. And then we, we said, look, okay, we'll, we'll focus on the industry where we have the maximum empathy towards the end user, and the end user. For us, our empathy goes towards engineers. Um, and you know, and, and this is why we, we chose this, and this is the strategy and this is the transparency, and this is, these are kind of, this is, this is how we see value creation in the company and, and stuff like that. for example, we figured we have to be more, we have to act and more like kind of consultants inside the, the team. know, somebody comes and says, look, let's, let's build this feature And you can do it with like high quality and precision, and then this can go to waste. and you, you go through the cycle a few times and then you'll realize, okay, what were they actually kinda hoping for? Right? What's, what's the hope, what's the, the expectation of, of the outcome? and then, you know, we figure out the outcome and then we can actually get to this outcome much faster and with better, bigger chances.

Brendan: 21:18

Mm-hmm.

Irina: 21:20

Yeah.

Ryan: 21:20

So, so how did you. from, from our perspective, you know, as an outsider, it feels like you guys produce a ton of content,

Brendan: 21:30

Yep.

Ryan: 21:30

Like maybe you, you've got the role pulled over our eyes. I don't know, but Right. Do like, do you require everyone to contribute or is it just the people that want to, um.

Irina: 21:42

Yeah, it's.

Ryan: 21:42

I, I know you have, uh, members of your, you know, in your employee that have written books and do podcasts and like, all this stuff you do, you're, I think you're planning a conference and we can talk about, uh, that you do the Ruby meetup, like you do talks, I've seen you, you know, at all the conferences. Like, you know, maybe that's just your role, right? Which would make sense, but like, it feels like other people are contributing that as well. And then you got all the open source stuff, so like. I see how it all fits together. But like, was there an intentional plan or did you just sort of say, Hey, this is where we want to go. Like, and then people just started doing, you know, what they thought was best, right? Like, you know, was it orchestrated or was it organic? Is sort of, is sort of the question I guess.

Irina: 22:25

Yeah. Yeah. I, I would say you wanna give direction, transparency and support systems and then repeat transparency. I mean, look, we tried this, and by the way, lots of things we, uh, but we. We also have leadership kind team. It's who's the head of backend of. Uh, front end. Uh, we have had a design and so, and, kind of new business vi she's here, but in San Francisco now. So kind of like this, we have this kind of smaller, smaller team that is, uh, trying out many things and then we say, look, we try this out. And me, me, myself, you know, I, I, I started doing more public, kinda public facing things myself also to provide this, those learnings. I. I said, Hey, we tried, for example, publishing this article. We tried taking an idea for open source from, for example, our, the problem our customers had and did this and this is what happened. or we, yeah, went on podcasts or we went to conferences and this is what happened. And this is, these are the outcomes so this is transparency, right? or we also say, look, we also do this and it. kinda spent like a hundred hours on this thing and didn't bring us anything. Yeah. Uh, this also happens. So stuff like that. And so this is transparency direction means, uh, you know, where we wanna go, why we think there's something there, right? Kind of like, direction and vision and Uh.

Brendan: 24:03

Like, like roadmap kind of.

Irina: 24:05

Yeah. Okay. But it's

Brendan: 24:06

Yeah.

Irina: 24:06

like, to be honest, um, I don't know if it's a pro, pro con. We don't have like this kinda super, super detailed, granular

Brendan: 24:13

Mm-hmm.

Irina: 24:13

for everybody. Again, because it has to be very, um, uh, kinda liquid, uh, because people have, uh, time between projects. It's hard to plan. some people have super stressful projects. Some people have super kind of calm, um. Quiet ones. So it has to be up to the person right? To, to see what they can do. Uh, but they, if they have, again, kinda direction, transparency and support systems and best support systems who basically have an editor on the team, and he all the articles and he can, when he has time, he can also interview, for example, imagine you've implemented this. Thing just amazing. You just brought some results, and then Travis can even just talk to you and then this can turn into an article. Sometimes we do this, but usually, uh, we, we also brainstorm together. for, for the content, you know, or for the, uh, conference talk. Is there something, what's the angle? What should we. What's, you know, what's interesting about it? And then we all brainstorm in the group and then, yeah, I think it's kind of cool. It's gonna give us, gives us also this, uh, kind of teamwork opportunity because in consulting you, you often don't have the opportunity to actually collaborate, you know, inside the team.

Brendan: 25:42

Yeah. It's cool to, to hear like, it, it seems to me like there's a vision for the company and obviously you can't do point by point like you were saying, but everyone is kind of aligned and they're all moving in that direction, whatever that means, whether it's, you know, the podcasts or blog posts or whatever. Um, and then you've also got products too. Like I know you've got open source, but don't you also have some products, or maybe it's a mix of the two or you're. Trying to turn those into products. Do you wanna talk about those at all? Because I, I'm curious about kind of what, how much of that, or how much of those make up, you know, what your team does and what the company does versus just like consulting work.

Irina: 26:22

Yeah. Yeah. The way, the way I kinda see this, uh, we have open source that is used by, um, obviously of engineers because we, because Andre, I think is the author of post processes is popular,

Brendan: 26:36

Mm-hmm.

Irina: 26:37

Uh, you can think of this, but also not just that. Then we have a lot of open source in the Ruben Rails community. any keyboard election policy, uh, Ruby, uh, Ruben acts like lots of lots of things. but this is, this is, this is kind of, I, I imagine that people. There are many people who use it and they get some value out of it. And then there are just 30 or 40 teams that we work with as consultants every year.

Brendan: 27:06

Okay.

Irina: 27:07

a, you know, like a little, tiny fraction, right. Of, of all

Brendan: 27:11

Mm-hmm.

Irina: 27:13

who, who use open source. I think my goal is to try and increase the value we're creating in the world, right? It's our, our. goal as, as the company is to try and grow the value we create, and then it'll to the grow growth of value we capture. uh, with products we we're trying to do this, let's build open source that might not be as popular. It's maybe not be for million, but it's gonna be kinda deliver, delivering a lot of value. And this is the example of any cable. Where for companies that are relying on it for web circuit, uh, handling their web circuit connections, it's kind of a big piece of, uh, infrastructure. It's pretty big one. And any cable is open an open source. And we also have the commercial version. So just certain, certain features, uh, features that are made for the cluster mode. when you have a lot, kind of a bunch of any cable servers, and kind of all the more enterprise stuff like fallbacks, when web circuits are,

Brendan: 28:20

Yep.

Irina: 28:21

disabled and your private network and just, just a bunch of stuff like that. So, so we keep it in the paid version in the commercial offering. But the main, one is MIT. It's like fully open source. the goal is to, build, build, uh, some products where we will increase this, connect, serve more teams,

Brendan: 28:44

Yeah.

Ryan: 28:45

You sort of have a, a middle, middle level, right between open source and the limited amount of consulting that you can do at any given point. Yeah, that makes total sense.

Irina: 28:55

And I think that's, that's, I like strategically, that's what I, I think the consulting companies are probably thinking about right now.'cause they think, okay, we are, we're doing this, we have this specific expertise. How can we productize it?

Brendan: 29:09

Right.

Irina: 29:10

Yeah. Yeah.

Brendan: 29:11

Yeah, I was gonna follow up too and just ask, I would imagine not everyone, you have 50 people, I think you said. I. Like, not everyone's doing open source or maybe someone, or they all do contribute in some way. Is it, I'm assuming some people do more than others though.

Irina: 29:24

Yeah. Um, so with certain customers, we even build in open source.

Brendan: 29:30

Mm-hmm.

Irina: 29:31

so like for example, teleport, there's all fully open source, not that is fully open source. Um, so we, we built some stuff for them, so like a bunch of companies where. It goes to their open source, but in on our own team, the rule, the rule is not the rule, but kinda like the approach is that open sourcing our own tools that we need for our client work. It's not coming from, don't know. It's not

Brendan: 30:00

You're not forcing people to build something open source just to have it.

Irina: 30:03

Right. It doesn't.

Brendan: 30:04

Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense.

Irina: 30:07

it's normally something we needed and then we said, look, or it also could be,

Brendan: 30:12

Yeah.

Irina: 30:12

upstreamed open sourced, for the ecosystem. Right.

Ryan: 30:17

Action policy is a good example of that, right? Where you know the existing solutions weren't quite doing what you needed, so you built your own and then you use it with anyone who has that same problem when you do your work. Yeah.

Irina: 30:31

And, and, and then again. And now people actually reach out for, to us to kind of build something using an action policy, build a new kind of permissions, roles, permissions, um, in their applications using action policy.'cause they read about it. And the same about it in cable by the way. people reach out to build out some kind of real time functionality. So this, this helps the business and this also helps us stay. This is what the ideal kind of track for a consultant is to something you love, some problem space you love, right? And, and kind of keep getting projects in that problem space

Brendan: 31:07

Mm-hmm.

Irina: 31:08

and if you can, and then open source helps a lot because okay, you open source something, That helps you in this problem space. And then people can say, oh, this person is actually great. I. Um, for example, we have our web socket director. It's a, um, like a scenario, scenario testing for web sockets. Nobody does that. Uh, other than that, because no, everybody's just not thorough on, you know, not, not, as diligent, I think not as, didn't, maybe didn't see as many problems with Web Sec as, as, as we saw, you know, and we, we have those tools and people can see, oh. if they have those problems, search for tools, they find our tool and they realize, or these folks probably know what they're doing right? And

Brendan: 32:00

Yep.

Irina: 32:01

reach back to us and we get more and more projects in the same problem space that we care about, right? That, that we're passionate about. And it helps us also, tune out tools because we use them, they use them. This is a nice kind of circle.

Brendan: 32:18

Yeah, that's, that's, it's a good, it sounds like a good lead gen in a lot of ways for new clients or continuing with clients or, or whatever that are. Using your out or your open source tools or, and whatnot. So that's sounds like a really good approach and it

Irina: 32:34

I

Brendan: 32:34

just,

Irina: 32:35

that's the pragmatic side of it. And yeah, the other side is the that are open source. yes, they can be it. It's very, most often nobody cares, let's say.

Brendan: 32:48

sure.

Irina: 32:48

That's like, okay. But, uh, it can also happen that yeah, you'll see some instruction and you'll see people interacting with that and it kind of will not die. I mean, in some sense. Right. In

Brendan: 33:00

Mm-hmm.

Irina: 33:02

Even if, imagine, even if somebody even read your code. your ideas can live on.

Brendan: 33:08

Right? Yep. Yeah, that's cool. I mean, something that I've done a lot. You know, the team that I run is, I, I will go to the source, you know, and, and if I was using any cable, which we don't right now, we don't have a need for it. But

Irina: 33:20

Mm-hmm.

Brendan: 33:20

I personally would probably go to you and your team because I know, you know, know everything about it. And I've done that with other, you know, things we work with. So it might not happen all the time, but it's, it's definitely a, a good approach. maybe we can transition just for a minute.'cause I know you've got the San Francisco Ruby, is that what we're calling it? The conference you're working on? You wanna talk about that at all?

Irina: 33:40

yeah, absolutely. There's, there's a lot going on about this conference, so. We announced the San Francisco Ruby Conference. It's happening in November. You guys should all come. And we just launched the Early Bird and Supporter ticket sale today. Actually

Brendan: 33:57

Oh, nice.

Irina: 33:58

uh, four hours ago. Yeah. And so what is it about the, so I, I moved to San Francisco early last year, um, in January 24 and. I, I quickly realized there's so many Ruby engineers here, and obviously some of them, some of the most. Gonna talented ones, including by the way Andrew came Yeah. Who lives like super close by, apparently. never. Yeah. He's, he's not in the community, in person, you know, in the in-person ones, but obviously super active in open source. uh, I mean, we have, I dunno, Jeremy Evans, uh, is attending, speaking at our meetup. So I started the, I started the Ruby meet, the Ruby Meetup. Here. I dunno. Ben Sheldon, like just, I, I will not remember all the names, like Takashi Kokubun. many people that are, know that I saw on GitHub are in the Bay Area, which is probably makes sense, but I didn't know that by the way. I.

Brendan: 35:07

Yeah.

Irina: 35:07

I didn't realize. And then, so we, we, I started the meetup. And the meetup is, is very successful in the sense that every, every month we have a host. It's always a new company. This month it's gonna be at Figma, headquarters. And it's, I, I specifically wanted to do one at Figma, uh, because people don't realize that, uh, Figma is on Ruby and

Brendan: 35:32

I, I just realized that the other day. I hadn't realized that until like two days ago.

Irina: 35:37

Yeah,

Brendan: 35:37

It's cool.

Irina: 35:38

they, they have a tech blog, they, they shared about some of their problems, effective record and like scaling it and um, uh, stuff like that because obviously it's like huge scale.

Brendan: 35:48

Mm-hmm.

Irina: 35:49

but, uh, yeah, that, that was important. And it's also important for me to engage, kind of bring this community together to, because again, when we, we say community, but what do we mean? Right? Because if you think about. Big conferences, um, people who come to big conferences are usually okay, super active in open source or just super active in public speaking

Brendan: 36:16

Yeah.

Irina: 36:17

have some other reason, but so many people do not go anywhere and they only will go to a law government For example, when I was a a Ruby developer 10 years ago, I didn't even know about the conferences that the concept of the concept of tech conferences.

Brendan: 36:32

Mm-hmm.

Irina: 36:33

It's, it's hard to say, it is hard to explain when you're super deep in it, but inside it. But for many people, they're just not connected. And with, I think what we're trying to do, we're trying to connect with people, connect with people, Ruby developers at companies like Apple, uh, and kind of many, many companies. Figma, et cetera, bring them in. Uh, of course we have companies that have super active, uh, participation in community like Gusto, chime, uh, Cisco, uh, GitHub, uh, Shopify. So tho those, those comp, those teams, but also there's so many more. Um, and also in San Francisco there are many startups that are starting on rails, which we just see more of because maybe we'll work with startups.

Brendan: 37:22

Yeah.

Irina: 37:22

of them are any cable customers. So,

Ryan: 37:26

And you have the advantage of being in San Francisco, which. Also also helps a little bit. Um,

Irina: 37:30

yeah. Uhhuh. Yeah, because all, because all the, all the, all the HQs Right. Kinda

Ryan: 37:35

yep.

Irina: 37:36

companies that had got here, obviously. Uh, and, and we had one meetup at Y Combinator, uh, which, which was, which was great. Um. And yeah. And so now, yeah, the natural kind of extension of that is to run a conference and with the idea to have a bigger conference, bring people, invite people, you know, attract people to come to San Francisco and also get inspired by, by, by what we have here, what we're building. And and the idea is I want people to, to see the people working at successful rail companies. You know, companies that grew and also people working at startups and people building new open source that is kinda directed at those new companies, you know, directed at as the, at those new features being competitive. I hope can, you can feel it's a bit different from both rails, compound rails world, uh, entro, that,

Ryan: 38:38

trying to bring people together from different, uh, different backgrounds, almost right? Different parts of the community.

Irina: 38:46

Right. And with the focus on, on what we're on, on the startups, on the ambitious new products,

Ryan: 38:54

Okay.

Irina: 38:55

on that everything else. So, I noticed that lots of stories, are kind of not. I not super loud kinda stories of iPod and their Ruby Rails success story. I mean, it's, it's a, those are big things. And by the way, Ruby, uh, Figma filed for an IPO, so we we're gonna have

Brendan: 39:18

That that's actually how I saw they're on rails and somebody posted that. Them and Chime. Were both IPO-ing. Yeah.

Irina: 39:25

yep, yep.

Brendan: 39:25

Yep.

Irina: 39:26

makes sense. I mean, those are important. I mean, those important stories because, we see that people invest in, in the tooling for mobile, right. In the tooling for Rails. But I think it's not enough. I wanna see more as the case for Ruby. I want every new tech that is out there. I can be, ai can be, you know, tech, like quick house. By the way, I'm, I'm super. Uh, frustrated that we still don't have Active Record driver, uh, driver for quick house um,

Brendan: 39:58

Yeah.

Irina: 39:59

them. Yeah. So it's part of the, but I also want them to see, oh, but there's a huge, it's a huge thing. Rails is actually a big, a big part. And again, it doesn't have to be number one. It can be number six. It's fine. It's great. I mean, uh.

Brendan: 40:14

Yep. As long as that's in the, the conversation.

Irina: 40:17

Yes. Uh, but you also see that if you want to serve companies that are successful and kind of have business and have customers, you want to serve to rub rail engineers

Brendan: 40:32

Mm-hmm.

Ryan: 40:33

All right. So where can people find out more about the conference, about you, about any other, uh, things that you want people to know about?

Irina: 40:43

Yeah. Thanks. Conferences SF ruby.com. Uh, and this is the conference website. We, we have, um, I'm not sure we still have early bird tickets, but we have supported tickets and we have CFP, uh, call for, uh, proposals and also call for Ruby startups. That is open. So we gonna have also, we also gonna have like Ruby Startup demos, uh, at

Brendan: 41:11

Cool.

Irina: 41:11

second day. So. Uh, folks can also demo their products. This is what I want to see, you know?

Brendan: 41:18

That's a cool idea.

Irina: 41:19

Uh, yeah. So we're can have a CTO round table. The CTO of Gusto is already signed for that, and we'll have more kind of cool CTOs. We'll have startups and we have, we'll have amazing technical talks and we have. Already, uh, a bunch of cool speakers, all Bie Marco Roth, Carmine Paolino, Vladimir Dementyev, uh, my colleague, uh, Jeremy Evans. Mike Perham. The list goes on and on, but it it's gonna be great. I, I really

Brendan: 41:54

It's a good lineup.

Irina: 41:55

And we have like, lots of creative ideas for this conference. Uh, so I think it's gonna be pretty cool to keep the, keep it affordable. Um, so the early birth tickets are $300. the normal, the general admission are gonna be 450. And also it's not in the, in downtown. So it's, it's kind of in a very, very nice area of San Francisco. Very beautiful. Looking at the Golden Gate Bridge and like

Brendan: 42:24

Nice.

Irina: 42:25

Uh, and again, uh, San Francisco is like, thought to be, is known to be kind of very expensive, which I would say doesn't, it doesn't have to be. You

Brendan: 42:37

Mm-hmm.

Irina: 42:37

very cheap, uh, accommodation here, especially Airbnb. Um. a bunch of other things. Uh, when we went to Toronto, uh, for real world, I, I was under the impression that Toronto is more expensive, to be honest,

Brendan: 42:55

Really.

Irina: 42:55

maybe equally, I mean, okay, not in lie. Uh, if you wanna drink wine in, uh, restaurants, this is kind of like $12 a glass. Pretty expensive, but. Uh, so was Toronto.

Brendan: 43:12

Mm-hmm.

Ryan: 43:13

for sure.

Brendan: 43:13

Yeah.

Ryan: 43:14

All right. Well thank you, uh, very much for joining us today. It was a pleasure speaking with you.

Irina: 43:20

Yep. Thanks so much guys.

Brendan: 43:21

Thanks.