DAVID HILL
Happy Wednesday, and welcome to the show. I'm your host, David Hill, and joining me today is Jim Remsik from Flagrant. Welcome to the show, Jim. Thank you so much for having me. So one of the things that you've been doing, you and Flagrant have been heavily involved with Ruby Central, doing a lot of the web work for Ruby Central for the conferences the last several years, but you've also got your own kind of conference line with XORuby that you've been doing. Is this year two now?

JIM REMSIK
Yep. This is year two. So we did about 9 ,000 miles on the road last year. We did six events from Chicago to Atlanta to New Orleans, quick trip home. And then we went out and did Portland, San Diego, and Austin. Did you know that it is a 22 -hour drive from San Diego to Austin? I didn't when I booked that trip, but it's great. I think I am from an older generation or what, but... road trips are nostalgic for me. I really enjoy them.

DAVID HILL
I did road trips as a kid because my dad was in the Air Force. And so whenever we got transferred, we would drive there. But his transfers were weird. We always got transferred back and forth between two bases, one in Maryland and one in Japan. So we would drive across the country from Maryland to Japan, not in a straight line, of course. We'd go down to Texas and then back to California. fly from there. And then three years later, we're going back to Maryland. So we go back to California and drive back across the country. So yeah, I've done those. I don't find them therapeutic, but I'm glad there are people who do.

JIM REMSIK
Mine were mostly, we went from Wisconsin to Florida and we were visiting the touristy stuff down there. And so that was all positive vacation related stuff.

DAVID HILL
Okay. Well, that would be different than how we did it. Yeah. That would be much better. So I just wanted to dive into XORuby a little bit more. What was kind of the inspiration behind XORuby? And you're doing a second year of it, so I assume it's going well. But sometimes people grin and bear it to push through to see if it's worth it in the end. So I just kind of would like to hear more about how it's going, how it's going for you, that type of thing.

JIM REMSIK
I've been asked several times by people this year, like, how do I measure the success of XORuby? We'll come back to that. I think the inspiration for it really was, as you said, we'd spent a bunch of time working with Ruby Central on RubyConf and RailsConf. Largely our impact there, I was co -chair once, but really the thing that we were mostly focused on was getting a website built. In 2023, I saw that we were a few weeks out from RubyConf in San Diego and wasn't impressed by the output of the... the website there. And so I said, just give me the keys and we'll make you a site. And we did. Back then it had been built in Framer. And as we carried forward and continue to do those sites, we wanted them to be done in Ruby. And so we worked with Bridgetown and our talented designers at Flagrant and started putting together more accessible, more interesting websites for those events. And so as part of that, we got to go to those events and participate. You know, I would just talk to people and people really enjoyed getting together in person. And this is coming out of the pandemic as well. And we've gotten to a point,

JIM REMSIK
gotten to a point, especially here on this side of the pandemic, where it's not everybody has the education budgets. Not everybody has travel budgets. And so the feedback that I was getting from folks is that these are great. And It would be cool if I didn't have to fly across country and spend a bunch of days in a major metro, et cetera. And so RubyConf, RailsConf, RailsWorld, those all have their place, but it's not something that everybody can do. And so we wanted to de -risk. I have a history of running Madison Ruby as well, which is my first year was 125 and we got up to 300 people at our largest. And there was a lot of risk involved in those. These days, it is a risk that I wasn't sure would pay off. And so we really look to de -risk that experience for us as our organizers. Yes, but also for attendees. What if you didn't have to take a day off work? And so all of the events are scheduled on Saturdays. That is the thing that I've gotten the most feedback about specifically from parents. Scheduling fall Saturdays is hard for them. It's something that we'll look at going forward. But it's $100. Even if you're on the hunt for your next opportunity, hopefully that is something that you can afford. It is one day, so you're not required to have a hotel. We really just try to scale everything back to the point where it's approachable for just about everybody. And that has been something that has been fairly successful from the feedback that we get from folks. It is something that we get a fair number of day of tickets, which is fine. But people aren't sure if they're going to be able to make it and they'll come out. They were able to get a babysitter. They were able to scrounge up the money or what have you.

DAVID HILL
So if you want to continue on with how you gauge the success of this effort, because on the one hand, mentioned before, RubyConf, RalphConf has their place in the ecosystem. Those are like one -time events and they're basically done for the year. Whereas like what you're doing is like 9 ,000 miles of travel last year just for this outside of anything else going on in your life or client work or anything else. It was like, so how do you gauge the success and the viability of continuing to do this?

JIM REMSIK
I don't think it's something that I could continue to do if we didn't get support. And that support comes through our sponsors as well as through people showing up in. Not only as attendees, but also we tend to over -volunteer or over -staff with volunteers. And so if you get a couple hours of time, you get free access to the rest of the conference. And beyond that, while I do enjoy the travel, it also takes me away from my family and whatnot. But the feedback that I get from people at every event, certainly this year so far. And I think most events last year, we had first time speakers. And so we're able to first time conference attendees, first time speakers, bringing people into the community and having them have a great experience is super important. It's how a lot of us got into the community. I actually, I started building a blog in 15 minutes a couple of decades ago, but then I. Went out to RailsConf in Portland in 2007, and that really opened my eyes to the people that are involved. Was very lucky and got to meet a bunch of really great people, including Brian Davis, who just spoke in both Seattle and Vancouver.

JIM REMSIK
And a lot of those have been long -term relationships. And so I consider it a success if we're able to bring people in, have them meet people who become friends, who become influences, what have you, that is a strong sign of success as well as just hearing feedback from people. We had somebody in Seattle that said, Hey, I just had a kid two years ago. I have not been able to travel, but the fact that there's an event that's happening in Seattle means that I can come. And that was one of our attendees from a big company that everybody would recognize. It is not that they're not of means. It's just that they cannot travel. And so that was a... Victory there. I've had other folks write very nice things and share them on LinkedIn and whatnot messages. Like I came to a technical conference. I didn't expect to leave with local friends. And again, that with our events, we're drawing mostly from local folks and we wanted them to be exceptional events and draw in who's in this city that I might not know about, but. We had a gentleman from 1Password show up at Seattle. In my conversation with him, he said that he had never been at another technical event. He's never been to any of the regionals or Ruby or RailsConf or RailsWorld. This was a low enough bar and easy enough for him that he was able to check it out. And he had a great time. Those are all stories that I point at. And I'm just like, is it successful? We're not losing too much money and we're creating an opportunity for things like that to happen. So absolutely.

DAVID HILL
I love that. It feels like we're living in an era of capitalism where success is often boiled down to just the financial bottom line. I love that the definition of success for you is like, we're not losing too much money, but this is having a good impact on a lot of people. And that's what we're actually paying attention to.

JIM REMSIK
I say that kind of casually that we're not losing too much money. I'm in a position where I'm able to lose some money and that's the privilege that I have. But also the fact that we lost money at our first couple of events this year is largely due to just some wildly unexpected stuff in my personal life that I couldn't have predicted. And so we're on pace now for the rest of the year to be in the black and super excited about that.

DAVID HILL
That's really good to hear. So in our. conversation before we started the recording you mentioned that you had this almost meditative process after an event where you've got like a bunch of feedback that you've collected and now you just kind of sit on it in the car as you drive to the next event i don't know that that was intentional but what i have found to be my experience especially with these longer drives is that i surround myself with a lot of really talented interesting smart

JIM REMSIK
don't know that that was intentional but what i have found to be my experience especially with these longer drives is that i surround myself with a lot of really talented interesting smart and friendly people and have those experiences for a couple of weeks. Cause also we're meeting up with people as we go along in the cities that we go to lots of people that didn't make it to the event. I had a friend in Seattle whose daughter's birthday was on that day. And so she wasn't able to make it to the conference, but I went out and we spent time together after the event. I met up with Kane Jameson in Anacortes, Washington, and we went up to the top of the mountain. I went and visited a, former employee in Bellingham, Washington and caught up. We probably haven't spoke since seven or eight years. And those things are priceless and it fuels the possibilities in my head a little bit. And so what ended up happening was I spent all this time with all these great people. And then I had a 31 hour drive home from Vancouver to Wisconsin. Took the course of a couple of days, but yeah, really let my my mind carry on for a little while. And as I do, I, I also tend to take a lot of calls while I'm driving and yeah, just that inspiration has led to you some follow -ups and hopefully some things that we're going to try to get done this year yet.

DAVID HILL
So maybe this kind of dovetails into like, you're talking about your normal work outside of the conference side with XORuby. How are things going with flagrant and You kind of said it jokingly, but I'm going to steal the line. It's not really a podcast in 2026. If we're not talking about AI at some point, how has the work kind of changed and evolved in light of the rapid and ever -changing state of AI in our space?

JIM REMSIK
I think for a long time, we tried to stay away from it. And I will say through early 2025. And it was obviously something that we couldn't ignore. Taking it up and we have a skills marketplace that we share with folks. And I think because so many people are able to write code and contribute code, I think that we've gotten to a place where we feel maybe a little less needed than we have before. But what's also true is that I think it was in 2024, Devon AI came out and they're like, development's over. The computers can do it. And had my moment of panic before. reading the debunking post shortly thereafter and it's like oh okay but we can see that things are changing and so in 2024 we shifted to be half development half design and that has been a really strong position for us to be in in fact this year for the first time we always struggled to sell design at the same level that we had as development and this year is the first time that we actually have experienced more Dev bench time than designer bench time. Wow. Cloud design is coming. And what is true of AI for the most part is without talented hands, you'll get the median result.

DAVID HILL
Right. That's mathematically what it really is.

JIM REMSIK
And so when we work with folks and we're able to produce something better than the median, they appreciate that and they want to work with it more. And that has been our experience. I think that I feel like we have. a fair amount of older projects that have continued to run apace. But we've also gotten some new projects in languages that maybe we haven't had as much experience in, but we've been able to deliver for those clients. We had a client that came to us that had a project that they had put out as a fixed bid last year and had expected. to leave 2025 with their app in production and it's a nice run number like 10 months of runway that they were looking to have for that they came to us and we got a quarter of that we got 10 weeks to take them from the half developed app that had been completed thus far and try to complete it and get them to market in 10 weeks we were able to do that and That is not a pace that we would have been able to tackle last year, for example. We had a good -sized team, and they were really motivated by that date trying to get their app to market. It has changed a lot. I will say on that app, one of the things that we curated over the first couple of weeks of the project, we curated what the development environment would be and spent a fair amount of time setting that up. And I think that's really the reason that we were able to be successful. We put in not just agents files, but we put in vector searches and with MCP servers and what have you. It really allowed us to just go to town and we perhaps, I think, scared our client a little bit. We told them that we were going to crawl, walk, run. And after two weeks of crawling, they were a little bit nervous, but we said, give us one more week. We'll start walking. To their credit, they gave us that space and we were able to essentially deliver no cards in the first two weeks of the project as we were getting things lined up and ensuring we knew what the project needed to be at the end. I think we delivered something like 700 cards over the next eight weeks.

DAVID HILL
And on the one hand, I can see like why they would be concerned. But on the other hand, I feel like that's almost the way most software projects should work. at the beginning when you're laying the foundation like you're literally laying the foundation for everything else and if you do that right yeah you're not gonna deliver many cards at first but as you get deeper into it they should just go so quickly if you've built the foundation well yeah there is the analogy of the road trip the first 20 and the last 20 are the slowest

JIM REMSIK
there is the analogy of the road trip the first 20 and the last 20 are the slowest It's logical. And at the same time, if you've been in the car for 20 minutes and you're still not on the interstate, I think it's worth asking, are we going to get there anytime soon?

DAVID HILL
Yeah, I would be really curious to learn more sometime about the work that you did to curate that development environment initially. That sounds like it'd be really fascinating to dig into at some point.

JIM REMSIK
That is an excellent point and probably something I should write up. I would love it if you did that. I will have my agents. write that up no i i think that there's a lot that goes into it i think irena from evil martians was one of the people that i heard first say anybody can get a 20 cloud account that does not make them an ai developer or a developer augmented by ai right i'll just say that i still have issues with the source a lot of the stuff was stolen and gotten by ill -gotten And there's still the ethics of, are the data centers actively polluting particular areas of cities and whatnot that are less than fair? But I would love for the world to be fair. And at the same time, just trying to make sure that we keep our nose above water and make sure that we're talking about these things as we go as well.

DAVID HILL
I 100 % agree. My daughter is... part of the generation of college kids right now who are just staunchly anti -AI for all things, which I understand. She's a very artistic, craftsy person. And so the seemingly constant desire for big companies and movie studios to use AI to replace actors, to replace graphic designers, really just rubs her the wrong way. I've got family who are in the staunchly anti -camp. I'm sitting here as like, well, I kind of can't ignore it. I've been told at work that the expectation is that we're using this and we should be thinking about as much as we can new and innovative ways to use it in our day to day. So I was like, I have to be digging into this, even though like you, I have a lot of concerns over like the ethics of how the technology was developed, how it's powered, how it's maintained. It's a big keeping pile of concerns. But is there anything else you would like to talk about before we move towards wrapping up? I think,

JIM REMSIK
again, if we dip back into Exo real quick, I think that I talked to people that have said that they would like a larger event. Hey, this is great. 60 people is a good size. But I'd really like to meet up with all my friends in a different city. And this is one of those thoughts that... came up while we were, while I was out in the Pacific Northwest. And so teasing some idea of maybe in 2027, late 2027, we might do something a little bit larger. But I think the more likely thing to happen is I think that we're probably going to do smaller events and probably pair them with events that are going on already. And so be like the night before. an event we'll get together in a city where people are already gathering maybe folks have traveled in the day before and the value in doing those in part is i think the value of extra ruby is not necessarily going into the room and sitting there while somebody talks at you i think the big value is the community and the feedback and the first event that we have done at all of our exo rubies is a interactive facilitated conversation where we break out into small groups have people ask a question on an index card dot vote those things so that we can say as a group these are the things that this room would like to talk about and so been toying with the idea of an exo xs or an extra short exo ruby that will allow us to post up the night before In relatively small ways and have facilitated conversation as a community. Where do we want to go? What are we missing? And what is the work that we need to do in order to get there? That is the conversation that I most want to have. Because I don't know about you, but it is hard to find community these days. There are so many walled gardens. I'm not begrudging anybody who wants together with their small group. But when I talk to people like, hey, where do you find people? They'll name individual people who have started their own Discord or Slack and they've gathered their troops there, which is great. And they're getting what they need out of those scenarios. There's a few better known wider Slacks, whether it's Rand's leadership Slack as a Ruby channel or Ruby Central as a community Slack. It just feels like there's nothing that's open and like how many of those things do you actually find as a new person entering the community so trying to figure out how to have those conversations and while at the same time being transparent and sharing these are the things that people are saying that they want and need communicating them more broadly so that hopefully we can have those conversations have a little bit of a ripple effect and help people find their space their people Yeah, just make more community happen.

DAVID HILL
Right there with you in terms of the community aspect of this. I've been struggling for a little while to find a Ruby community to really feel like I'm a part of and integrated with for a little while just because I moved recently. There isn't an active Ruby meetup here in the Orlando area anymore that I've found. And so it's one of those thoughts that I keep. Circling back to like, well, if there isn't one, maybe I just need to get one going again and see if I can get people to show up. So yeah, that's an ongoing thought of just kind of like, well, I want more of a community around here where I am geographically. Maybe I need to put in some work and see if I can make something happen.

JIM REMSIK
And I will say that in the year 2026, I think meetups are a harder sell than they used to be. When I first got started in 2006. two decades ago, we used to enjoy, we had the escape coffee house in Madison, Wisconsin. We would get together and would hang out with folks and we would just sit there and learn from people that were doing it professionally and, and not, you know, there was just a energy and you could get together with people locally in person. I think it's just such a harder proposition these days. Yeah. For some folks, it is the fact that, you know, they've, aged up to a point where they have families and they've got things that are keeping them home. On the other side of that equation is that content is now available on choose your media platform in ways that it never was for us back then. And so again,

JIM REMSIK
part of the whole ethos of the ExoRuby conferences was getting people to put their shoes on, come out of the house and spend time in meet space with other humans. And I've heard from a lot of meetups. We worked with Van Ruby in Vancouver and Seattle RB in Seattle. They're successful, but they're not successful the way that they used to be 10 years ago. And so it feels like a bigger ask today than it has before. And I don't have an answer for how to solve for that unless you're in San Francisco or perhaps Toronto, New York City. Those all have large groups of people that get together regularly. In the Midwest, Chicago does a great job. In Madison, we struggled to get folks together. So I don't have an answer for that. But in Orlando, could you make a 30 or 40 person meetup happen? I don't know.

DAVID HILL
I don't know either. I think I'm going to have to try and find out at some point. So last question, unless something else pops into your head that you'd like to discuss. Is that a new kind of question I keep trying to remember to ask my guests on the show? Do you have any recommendations for who else I could bring on this show that's doing something interesting in the world of Ruby or Rails that I should maybe talk to?

JIM REMSIK
Kind of along the same lines as what we were just talking about. Javier Cervantes from Ruby User Forum is doing a great job. He and Gemma, and I don't know if there are more folks involved there, but they seem to be doing a good job of reaching out. grabbing people, pulling them onto the discourse. My biggest problem is that there aren't enough dark patterns to keep me engaged. I keep forgetting to actually go and participate. But I've learned about new projects and old projects on the Ruby users forum that wouldn't have probably gotten my attention if it weren't for that. I've seen a few other folks say the same thing.

DAVID HILL
Nice. I think I was aware of the Ruby user forum before, but hadn't really... I hadn't even registered until a few days ago when Rachel Wright -Munn suggested I take a look at it. So I was like, oh yeah, I should probably set up an account over there. So yeah, I'm paying attention over there now a little more than I was.

JIM REMSIK
And just full disclosure, they are a partner of ours at ExaRuby. But that is in part because they reached out and they've been doing the work to get people over there. Great.

DAVID HILL
Well, thank you very much, Jim, for coming on the show with me today. I appreciate the invitation. It was great talking to you. It's good talking to you too. This has been the Ruby on Rails podcast. It was a pleasure talking with Jim today. Thanks to JudoScale for sponsoring this podcast. And thank you for listening.