DAVID HILL Happy Wednesday and welcome to the show. I'm your host, David Hill. And with a bunch of travel that I had this month, more than is usual for me, I needed to call in a favor and ask an emergency guest to come in because I didn't have anyone scheduled for this week. So joining me today as a favor from a friend is Andy Kroll. Welcome to the podcast, Andy. ANDY KROLL Hello, and only half an hour after I said I would be here. So I'm definitely on it. DAVID HILL This isn't going to get published until next week. So, you know, no one's going to care about a half hour delay. ANDY KROLL This is true. I'm on time for Wednesday. DAVID HILL Nice. Yeah, perfect. So one of the big things that you're well known for in the Ruby community is Brighton Ruby, which happened earlier this year. And Brighton Ruby is on my short list of three conferences that I really want to attend internationally one day. Are you planning on doing another one next year? ANDY KROLL Next year. So it's been a weird year. I don't know if anybody has noticed, but our jobs are very different. And this has made the conferences super strange in terms of ticket sales. So it was quite a scary thing to be organizing a medium -sized conference this year. So I'm taking next year off. Okay. I'm calling it right now a fallow year, and then we'll see if I get back on the horse the year after. But yeah, so this year sponsorship was harder. DAVID HILL But yeah, so ANDY KROLL My working theory is, so Brighton Ruby is in late June, so it's halfway through the year. And so I sort of sell tickets from like November onwards, pretty much. I think the good models arrived in November last year. A bunch of senior people who don't normally code had two weeks off over Christmas and thought I should play with these models. They did when, oh my God, everything has changed. That made them super, super, super nervous in January, February, and March. I think training budgets went weird. I think the teams themselves would have been weird. The discretionary spend was probably cut back, I think. Hiring probably froze for a bit. It definitely had the vibe of when COVID happened. Right. And everyone just went very still. DAVID HILL Mm -hmm. Kind of a stop and hold your breath and see what happens. Let's everyone just chill. ANDY KROLL everyone just chill. for like three months. But unfortunately, I was like, but I would also like to not be put into the poorhouse. Could you please buy some tickets or sponsor my coffee? I mean, in the end, the tickets, we were nearly where we were last year. In the end, sponsorship didn't ever really quite pick up. DAVID HILL Right. But I got through and the day was great and it was a good time. ANDY KROLL got through and the day was great and it was a good time. But like the stress of not knowing how it was going to pan out, even for someone who, you know, I've been doing this for a few years now. DAVID HILL for someone ANDY KROLL It was enough. It felt at one point dangerously like I was going to have to actually have the conversation with my other half where I said, yeah, you know that thing I spend hours doing? Yeah, I also, it cost us money as well. I also need to put money into it. DAVID HILL well. I also need to put money into it. Yeah, exactly. ANDY KROLL exactly. So I'm just going to take a year off, certainly from Brighton Ruby as it has been, and maybe I'll do something, but I don't know. We'll see how I go. I'm sort of like looking forward to like not... planning it now having you know it's like six weeks after the event pretty much i'm like good i don't actually have to plan the thing right now that's probably a healthy way to approach the problem of giving it some time and seeing what else changes in the landscape before you commit to something more yeah i mean also like who knows what we'll be doing in six months time because there have been no significant changes in what we do in the last six months no exactly DAVID HILL probably a healthy way to approach the problem of giving it some time and seeing what else changes in the landscape before you commit to something more yeah i mean ANDY KROLL yeah i mean also like who knows what we'll be doing in six months time because DAVID HILL there have been no significant changes in what we do in the last six months no ANDY KROLL exactly It was still a really good day and people had a great time and the talks were amazing and the talks were up on YouTube and Ruby events and stuff. DAVID HILL Nice. Yeah. So speaking of the big kind of tide shifts in our industry, for you and for your work, how has AI impacted you? How are you using AI? ANDY KROLL I was relatively early to playing with it in sort of the mainstream. When Claude Code landed, I started playing with it fairly quickly. experimenting with what I could do. My team is relatively small. There's only like four engineers. So I've always been, still have my hands in the code. I'm certainly reviewing a lot of code. And it turns out, I think I've been training myself for this moment for the last 10 years in terms of like, I spent a lot of time reviewing code. Now I'm just reviewing more code and it's not all written by people. Right. DAVID HILL It's quite interesting in that I'm starting to get to... the obvious list feels more achievable. ANDY KROLL obvious list feels more achievable. So like in a small team, there's always things you could be doing, right? So for example, this week, I built 2FA for customers. So we've had 2FA for our admin system for the longest time, but no customers had ever really come to us and said, we're desperate for 2FA. Like coverage book doesn't deal with personal data, particularly it's mostly like publicly shareable things. So people aren't putting personal information into it. So it's felt like an okay thing to not have 2FA. Right. So we'd always made the trade off of like, okay, well, as soon as someone, as soon as a big customer tells us they definitely need it and they definitely need it. But now it's like, oh, I can just do that. There are plenty of patterns. The models know. There are gems to do this. We already have it in the app. I can just do that. I can knock that off on the side of my desk whilst also working on the bigger features that we do. So it really feels like the obvious list has become much more capable. I think there's a reason none of my back and forth with the various robots has turned up in any public things. It's because of all the swearing. It's an incredible tool, but it is a tool. It still needs someone to hold it. And sometimes it does incredible stuff, and sometimes it's incredibly stupid. In many ways, like myself. DAVID HILL There's so many comments I want to make there about, yeah, but you can learn from your past experiences. And does the AI really learn from its past experiences? No, it doesn't. ANDY KROLL No, it doesn't. Trying to apply your own guardrails is a real challenge, right? Weirdly, it works best when you give it something big and chunky and verifiable. When you see people doing stuff like translating things between programming languages where there's a big test suite, DAVID HILL test suite, ANDY KROLL it's a real use case. Or emulate this API or the gems that are just wrappers for an API. Those feel completely redundant because why would you install the gem when you can just go, here's the API, build me just the endpoints that I... Pretty much everything except the Stripe gem, that's always been my approach because at work we tend to use very narrow slices of different APIs. We tend not to use the whole breadth of a product. But it's always been like, DAVID HILL But it's always ANDY KROLL why wouldn't we do that now? So now we have a pattern for that that we use. Yeah, if you've got a way for the robot to work out what it's done, and it's a fairly constrained problem, you can just let it run for ages. But getting it to do UI or responsive design or make a good product decision is still an incredible challenge. DAVID HILL Yeah. ANDY KROLL But then that's when the superpower of being able to review code really well and know Rails idioms very strongly is being good said over the last months or so. Although, ask my team. They probably just think I'm a disaster. DAVID HILL That could probably be true everywhere. I don't know. I know I have opinions about certain things, but I know other people have different opinions. And so it's just kind of like, tastes vary. And so it's always going to be that argument between... what your tastes say is good and what somebody else tastes say is good. ANDY KROLL And for me, it's like I still have to produce a maintainable system. DAVID HILL it's like ANDY KROLL a maintainable system. Right. And whether that's maintainable by me or by a future cheap, infused robot. We're also living in times of a token abundance. I'm getting quite a lot of value if you looked at the API costs versus the what I'm actually paying for Claude. Yeah, I'm getting quite a good deal. And I'm imagining they're still losing money on the enterprise pricing. So this can't continue in the same way. My supposition is we end up... Thankfully, I bought my most recent MacBook before the Rampocalypse. DAVID HILL Oh, right. Yeah. ANDY KROLL My supposition is the technology is not going away. I think potentially... the way we buy it or use it might go away or might change. Like if the locally run models get powerful enough and the harnesses get good enough, I think what you might see is that's how the technology gets democratized. Yeah. I think two things can be true. The technology is astonishing, but also we're in the midst of an enormous bubble. It's going to go weird. DAVID HILL I am. in the camp that is hoping for the open weight models and the harnesses to get to the point where we can just run it locally for a variety of reasons. ANDY KROLL Yeah, yeah. For so many reasons, it would be a good idea not to trust various lunatics in positions of technology. DAVID HILL Yeah, because we only have a few of those. ANDY KROLL Yeah, the problem is there is only a few of those. DAVID HILL I'm getting sidetracked onto areas of conversation that I probably don't want to rant about for very long. So you mentioned in our pre -recorded conversation that you've been interviewing for CoverageBook. Yeah. How has that been going in the age of AI? ANDY KROLL It's a very interesting process. So CoverageBook is a small team. We don't hire much. In the recent years, we've mostly been hiring junior folks at boot camps. And that's gone really well. And we've got some amazing folks in our team. DAVID HILL We're hiring for more senior roles. ANDY KROLL So a more senior engineer and a more mid -level engineer. Of course, giving somebody a coding test is why there's just absolutely no way that that's a valuable test for anyone. Because anyone who's got a brain is going to throw it into a model of some sort, look at the output, and how do you tell? So we're not doing that. ANDY KROLL And also, that's never been necessarily the best way to find out what kind of an engineer somebody is. Right. Pair programming also is a bit weird now as well. Like, you know, if you have a pairing interview, it's like, would you want me to behave like I would in an actual job? Or do you want me to pretend that AI doesn't exist so you can see me reverse engineer a link list? Doesn't make sense for me. DAVID HILL me. ANDY KROLL So what we've been doing is we've given them a written exercise to try out the product. One of the things is like, write five to 800 words on trying out coverage. We're like, sign up for a trial. We've got a free trial. Done. critique our product so you're sort of testing for how do they think as a product person as much as how do they think like an engineer and then we also got them to speak about a recent project that they've done again like five to eight hundred words and that's our first round of just like explain to us why you made certain decisions i'm looking to understand the decision making because as we all know the robots think we're full of great ideas which might be entirely in opposition to the thing they just showed us so You need to have good decision making to be able to work. And that has always been true of software engineering, right? Decision making is what the best software engineers do. Do I work on this or just do I not build it at all and use a spreadsheet? That's the first round that I've been having a chat with them. And the second round we're about to go into, which is like, this is actually a thing we did for someone we hired like four or five years ago. The exercise was we gave them our worst piece of code from our app, lightly redacted, and said, what would you do to fix this? What are the problems with this? Back in the day, it was our user model. Like, everyone's user model is horrible. DAVID HILL And ours was particularly bad. ANDY KROLL ours was particularly bad. So we gave them our user model and said, please tell me how you would fix up some of this 500 -line mess of a Ruby file. And there was plenty in there that they could get, like, half an hour's chat out of it. So you're sort of testing for multiple things. Again, decision -making, knowledge of the gems they might use, organizing their code. naming of methods, or there's all sorts of things that can come out of that, DAVID HILL all sorts of things that can come out of that, ANDY KROLL but it lets you then have a discussion with them as a colleague. They're looking at your code and going, oh yeah, I would enjoy that way. Or I've seen that done a thousand times. I've never known quite how to deal with that. Let me actually think about how to do it. So if you give them real code and then get them to talk about it, and that's the interaction you're looking for. That's what you're trying to get from a pair program interview. That's what you're trying to get from a take -home test. And also you get to do your... asshole check as well, to see if they're a nice person or not, which I think is also, certainly for our team, is very, very important. It's a real challenge. It's a challenge to thin the herd as well, right? You get a lot of CVs and a CV is not a great discriminator. ANDY KROLL Every 10 -year engineer looks like a good engineer on paper. That doesn't tell us how well they fit with coverage book and how well they would fit with me. Fitting with me actually is, sadly for them, quite important because it's a small team. It actually makes the interview process more human and less sort of transactional, I think. DAVID HILL Right. ANDY KROLL Because you can't test base competence anymore. DAVID HILL you can't DAVID HILL Making it more human feels like the direction the hiring process has needed to go for a long time anyways. ANDY KROLL The exercise is not that different from what we used four years ago when we hired someone into the team. So it's sort of pleasing that some of the decisions I made in the past in naivety. yeah in retrospect it looked like i understood the future but i absolutely didn't i just stumbled forward like everybody else there are worse situations to be in than looking like you knew what was coming i can always pretend i knew what was coming exactly that's awesome i really like that approach to interviewing because i've been thinking about my past interviews a lot lately and all of the things i didn't like about them and just like DAVID HILL are worse situations to be in than looking like you knew what was coming i ANDY KROLL can always pretend i knew what was coming exactly that's DAVID HILL awesome i really like that approach to interviewing because i've been thinking about my past interviews a lot lately and all of the things i didn't like about them and just like If I was the one doing the interview, how would I change this to be better, to give a better experience for both of us to get what we were trying to find out of this experience? And I was having a really hard time coming up with anything, but doing what you were just describing, that sounds like, oh yeah, that's what I was looking for and trying to figure out how to do. ANDY KROLL That has to be how you work as an organization anyway, right? Your interview process has to reflect. For me, always, an interview process has always been as much. for me personally, and also for other people, has been about working out whether you would fit in that organisation. And so like, if you have a very confrontational interview style, I remember there was someone I used to work with, who I got on with very well. If a candidate got them in an interview, in like a airing interview, they were like, well, we're going to struggle. Is he just in that circumstance? He was early enough in his career, he was a little bit rough with them. And I was just like, but that's not necessarily how we work. But like he just had incredibly high standards for the people he wanted to work with. We probably passed over some really great candidates because they just didn't get through his pairing filter. But like for me, there's a lot about just an awful word to use. But like, I definitely think there's the people who will work well with you, you immediately get a feeling about as well. And then you're just... Like with making friends, right? You just get a feeling, I like this person and I don't know why. In a life environment, it doesn't matter. But you can just like people. That's good. In a work environment, you have to work out what is it that is appealing to them? What is making me think that I could work on a problem with them? You almost have to reverse engineer from the people you already work with the sort of qualities that you're trying to get. And then you have to insert those qualities into the interview process to try and pull that out. But yeah, you do have to be... quite regimented about sort of how you inverted commas score someone but also keep it incredibly human because there's nothing more nerve -wracking for a bunch of introverts than going trying to prove you're good enough to join them i mean it's just like please pick me for your football team please please don't pick me last there's a lot of anxiety going on in there right i've been through that sensation more than once DAVID HILL a lot of anxiety ANDY KROLL a lot of anxiety going on in there right i've DAVID HILL been through that sensation more than once ANDY KROLL So why were you thinking about interviews? Is this the David Hull looking for a job podcast now? Is that what's going on? DAVID HILL No, not quite. Thankfully, I am still employed and generally happy doing what I'm doing. It's just the topic has come up with other people I've talked to with the general state of kind of the economy and hiring and everything like that. It's just kind of like I've been of the opinion that the hiring process is kind of ugly and maybe too strong a word, but broken. a while and again anecdotally from my own personal experiences i've enjoyed very few of my interview experiences over the years as it's kind of like there's got to be a better way to do this right i mean the better way to do it is contracting to hire that's the better way to do it unfortunately that requires people to be able to leave a job going i don't want this job but i'm confident that i can get another job which is quite a hard thing when you have mortgage children whatever right ANDY KROLL mean the better way to do it is contracting to hire that's the better way to do it unfortunately that requires people to be able to leave a job going i don't want this job but i'm confident that i can get another job which is quite a hard thing when you have mortgage children whatever right The best way is because you pay someone for their time, they work for you, they produce something, and then you go, would I continue to like to work with this person? But then that also requires a certain amount of knowledge. And when someone's in a job, the biggest hiring failure is nearly always keeping someone past their probation. I've done it in the past where someone has joined the team, not in my current job. DAVID HILL I literally had the experience at a previous job where someone got through their probation and literally the week afterwards, there was some problem with another member of the team. ANDY KROLL and literally the week afterwards, there was some problem with another member of the team. And I was like, I knew this was coming. I had a decision point. I didn't make a decision because that's the important thing. It's like a team leader or a manager is to actually make those decisions because that's what management is. The most obvious failure mode is hiring someone who looks good or feels good in an interview. They come in, they're a bit of a disaster or it's not quite working out. Because recruiting always feels like hassle as well. Like if you're doing the recruiting, it's difficult and it's draining. And in the same way as a conference is a lovely thing that you just want to hide in a cave afterwards because you're so socially drained. Because when you're doing an interview, it's only fair that you are like 110 % of yourself because you've got to lift them up and like hope they're the best version of themselves. You try to appease their anxiety. assuage their anxiety rather appeasing their anxiety is something else so you mentioned rails world and our conversation are you gonna make it to austin i am i bought a ticket not tremendous expense but it's not a cheap it's not a cheap day out or days out you're flying across the pond so i am actually i can go from my like my nearest london airport so that helps a little bit like you know it's my one conference of the year so i sort of like DAVID HILL mentioned rails world and our conversation are you gonna make it to austin i ANDY KROLL you gonna make it to austin i am i bought a ticket not tremendous expense but it's not a cheap it's not a cheap day out or days out you're DAVID HILL flying across the pond so i am actually ANDY KROLL i can go from my like my nearest london airport so that helps a little bit like you know it's my one conference of the year so i sort of like I permit myself one big trip. Okay. The work -related or work adjacent. It is work. It's pleasurable as well. DAVID HILL I can get to see so many. It's work -related, but it's also fun. ANDY KROLL get to see so many. It's work -related, but it's also fun. Yeah, yeah. So I get to, you know, hang out with a bunch of people who I really like. Running the conference, running Brighton Ruby for so many years means that I've brought people over to the UK and there's a few folks who I've known for a decade, but like once a year. Right. And, you know, I've got chums who live in the States who I only ever see at conferences. And it's quite nice to be at one. It's really not like I know Amanda a little bit from, you know, being event organizers in our little community. And she's wildly better at it than I am, which is lovely because I get to go to her big shiny event and be super impressed with it. DAVID HILL Right. ANDY KROLL And just make sure I give her a glass of wine at the end. When she's out of the madness, make sure she can chill afterwards. It's really... Lovely to see an event of that scale in our community. Done with Amanda's level of polish and thoughtfulness and energy. It requires to be a big chunk of someone's job to do something like that. Oh, absolutely it does. DAVID HILL that. Oh, absolutely it does. Yeah. They announced the speaker lineup for Rails World just a couple of days ago. Is there anything in particular, like either speaker or topic -wise, that you're really looking forward to seeing at Rails World? ANDY KROLL Genuinely, for me, it's always the people. And Rails World's been going, long enough now that there are things about it that are, oh, this is part of it. Like, you know, the Buzzsprout podcast booth and the, you know, seeing Tom and that. And, you know, it's hanging out with good friends. I mean, it really is like, there are things about an enormous conference that I don't like. ANDY KROLL about an enormous conference that I don't like. Again, the exhaustion thing. It's like, when else do you get the opportunity to be in a room with so many people who actually understand what you do for a living? Mostly we're in rooms where you have to say, yes, I sort of make websites. Someone says, oh, what do you do? I'm saying, yeah, I do web stuff. And they're like, oh, cool. Can you fix my printer? Well, yes, I can fix your printer because I'm just going to turn it off and turn it on again. ANDY KROLL Yeah, it's just nice to be in a room where people can understand you at some level. DAVID HILL I've tried to explain what I do to my wife multiple times and she just kind of waves her hands and says, it's magic. I don't need to know anything else other than that. ANDY KROLL I mean, at least you get magic. I get, this is boring. Stop talking about this. She's not wrong. DAVID HILL I think my wife calling it magic is an attempt to not be insulting and saying, this is boring and I don't care. ANDY KROLL I think this is the difference between British marriages and American marriages. Oh, okay. DAVID HILL So yeah, I'm looking forward to Rails World. It's my last scheduled conference of the year. So we'll see how that goes. ANDY KROLL You were helping out Rubikov this year, right? DAVID HILL Yes, I did the program committee for RubyConf this year. ANDY KROLL Okay, nice. That's like a nice level of involvement. It's like very, very intense early. And on the day, you just get to like support people and go and do a little bit of introduction. DAVID HILL like very, ANDY KROLL and do a little bit of introduction. Kind of, DAVID HILL of, yeah. ANDY KROLL You're sort of there, but like at a big conference, you're not on the hook, like the day running. DAVID HILL Yeah, it's one of those things where I really enjoy the CFP part of it. And then through the rest of the conference, it was like, I kind of wish I could be a little bit more involved. I'm not really having to do a whole lot here. And then the day of is like, okay, I'm going to be over in this room and introducing the speakers that are speaking during this time block. But I have wanted to be more involved. ANDY KROLL to be more involved. It's genuinely, it's a stress you don't need unless you really, really, really love it. DAVID HILL I'm not sure I really, really, really love it, but I keep having this. thought in the back of my head of wanting to do a conference local to me so that I don't have to travel as far for it. ANDY KROLL That's genuinely how I got myself in trouble for 12 years. I thought, you know what would be good is if I didn't have to travel for a conference that I could pick all the speakers for. That's a really, really stupid way to go to a conference. DAVID HILL It's a lot of work and it's financially terrifying. And you've been doing it for 12 years. ANDY KROLL a lot of work and it's financially terrifying. And you've been doing it for 12 DAVID HILL years. ANDY KROLL Yeah, I know because I'm fundamentally quite a stupid person. It's not the same, but it's the same as like when I claim I am a lazy person. DAVID HILL Most of us will claim that, yeah. Yeah, but the way I'm lazy is I'll work really hard to make something simple. ANDY KROLL is I'll work really hard to make something simple. Yeah. The programming is like the hardworking lazy person. It doesn't make any sense. DAVID HILL Yeah. It's my favorite version of lazy, where it's like I've had to do this annoying task two or three times now. I'm going to do extra work to automate it so I don't have to do it ever again. ANDY KROLL Until I find the next bottleneck. Yeah. DAVID HILL Wanting to have a local conference is just kind of like, oh yeah, that'd be really cool. I would have to probably put that together. I would like to have some experience actually doing a conference before it all rests on my shoulders to put that together. ANDY KROLL The only way to do it is to work our way to do it really cheaply. To do the cheapest version of a conference you possibly can so the financial risk is so low. I think I said this to... Travis, who ran Blast Off Rails, he interviewed me as part of his preparing series. And the advice I give to everyone who's ever asked me about Conference Rosa, you have to know how to do it cheap. Because the biggest stress is, I'm doing all of this work and I'm going to lose money. I was being flippant earlier, but it was genuinely worrying. You don't want to do all this stuff, be knackered, be tired. at the end of the tether, and then at the end of it go, and now I'm also in the whole thing. And now I had to spend money for the privilege of being... Yeah, DAVID HILL And now I had to spend money for the privilege of being... Yeah, I'm just like, ANDY KROLL Yeah, I'm just like, why not just buy a business class flight to Railsworld? Like, genuinely, like, at that point, it's like, okay, fine. Right. Also, like, the economics are different in different countries. The economics of a hotel -based conference in the US are very, very different to what I can do in our local venue in Broadway. Right. You have to know what your budget is. and like scale the event to the budget right i'm in orlando now so like i keep hoping that if i actually try to do this one day that orlando itself is enough of a draw that people like yeah i'll come do a couple of days at a ruby conference and then we'll go to a week and a half of disney right we'll go to disney world or universal or one of the many other things that you can do in the tourist trap that is orlando florida absolutely brian is a draw as well DAVID HILL in orlando now so like i keep hoping that if i actually try to do this one day that orlando itself is enough of a draw that people like yeah i'll come do a couple of days at a ruby conference and then we'll go to a week and a half of disney right we'll go to disney world or universal or one of the many other things that you can do in the tourist trap that is orlando florida absolutely ANDY KROLL a week and a half of disney right we'll ANDY KROLL is a draw as well Brighton's a tourist town. It needs a draw, and, you know, I deliberately do it in the summer so that the sun's out, although it's a little bit warm. I don't know if you know, but Europe's on fire. DAVID HILL I was not aware, no. Oh, yeah, no, France, ANDY KROLL Oh, yeah, no, France, Spain. We've had fire in Scotland, which, given that it rains like 95 % of the year in Scotland, is quite impressive, yeah. So it's really warm over here now. Okay. And it was for Brighton Ruby, and I've never been happier that the aircon in my venue worked. It was literally hot enough that they were canceling trains because the rails were bending on the day of the conference. DAVID HILL I don't know what to do with that. That sounds ridiculous. We did have public transport for it to go wrong. ANDY KROLL public transport for it to go wrong. So like in that way, again, Europe, US, it's all very different. DAVID HILL Oh, yeah. I have traveled internationally before. My father was in the Air Force. And so like we were stationed over in Japan for periods of my childhood. I did some missionary service for my church in Brazil. So I have traveled internationally, but it wasn't until Rails World in Amsterdam last year, there was recreational travel that I chose to do. I never understood why people liked to travel before. And then I went to Amsterdam last year and I was like, oh, this is why. And this is my first trip to Europe. So I came away from that experience going, oh. I really wish I had the money to travel more because that was kind of cool. And there's all kinds of other places I would like to see now. ANDY KROLL Yeah, I spent most of my late 20s and early 30s. My wife and I were in Singapore. We were there for six years. Oh, wow. And so in our pre -kids years, we did a bunch of travel in Southeast Asia, which was amazing. And then we came back and went, and now my summer holidays are driving to the south of France. And I get there and I'm like, this is why everyone does this. It's great here. The supermarkets are genuinely exciting. Interesting. Yeah. I was fairly a Europe newbie, as my 15 rating for French in Duolingo will attest. DAVID HILL Oh, Duolingo. I never got into that one. It didn't work for me. ANDY KROLL It slightly overpraises me, if I'm honest. DAVID HILL It's probably programmed to do that, yeah. ANDY KROLL I think the algorithm is like, it's even more obsequious than the coding robots. That's where Gerolingo stands. I was going to say, DAVID HILL I was going to say, like ChatGPT always telling you, you're right. You're so smart. You've got such a great idea. You look so handsome today. It's like, wait, does ChatGPT have access to my camera now? Well, before we wrap up, is there anything else you'd like to chat about regarding the world of Rails or Ruby? ANDY KROLL I'm pretty all good, I think. It's going to be fun to see folks at Rails World. It was nice to see folks at Brian Ruby, and it's always about seeing the human beings. as much as me feeling really smart because I wrote some code with a robot. DAVID HILL You were one of my big takeaway memories from Rails World last year. What did I do? ANDY KROLL did I do? This is troubling. DAVID HILL You posted on Twitter or Blue Sky or something that you were at this one little coffee shop if anyone wanted to swing by and say hi. Yes, of course. ANDY KROLL of course. DAVID HILL As you mentioned before, a lot of us are introverts. I was kind of... deliberately trying to ramp myself up into, I need to go out and I need to see people and talk with people despite how nervous it makes me feel. And so like, I saw that as I was like, you know, I've met Andy once or twice. If the most that I do is kind of walk by and say, hi Andy and walk away, that's still going to be an improvement over just hiding in my hotel room. ANDY KROLL Yeah. Leaving me drinking coffee on my own in Amsterdam, which is a dangerous place to do that. Right. DAVID HILL But yeah, just like. came by the coffee shop and sat down with you and we chatted for a little while. And in hindsight, it's very much a kind of a nothing event where it was like nothing super important happened. But at the same time, it was like, you know, me trying to get out and be personable and you magically providing the opportunity for me to be like, okay, I'm going to go talk to this person now. ANDY KROLL You're absolutely welcome for my incredibly generic invite to everybody that apparently people are memorable. Remember that. Yeah, you kind of are. ANDY KROLL Yeah, this is what I was worried about. DAVID HILL Awesome. Well, Andy, thank you for joining me today on the show. ANDY KROLL Happy to do it again when you run out of guests. DAVID HILL Hopefully I won't need to call on you too often for that. Hopefully I'll get back on a regular scheduled sequence of guests soon. ANDY KROLL Excellent. Jolly good. This is Peter David. DAVID HILL This has been the Ruby on Rails podcast. It was a pleasure talking with Andy Kroll today, and I'm really looking forward to seeing him and a bunch of other Ruby friends at Rails World this year. Thank you for listening.