Hey, folks, welcome back to another interview for the Ruby Dev Summit.
I am here with Jason Sweat. Jason, it's good to see you again.
Man, good to see you too. Yeah. So let's just jump
right in and ask what is the future of Ruby. I have no idea
what the future of Ruby is. You know, it's been said that making
predictions is a really good way to end up being wrong, and so I
try not to be in the habit of making predictions. Okay, there's some
things that we can probably know with fairly high certainty, which is that it'll
be around for a long time. I think we could be confident of that.
You know, I maybe have ten or twenty years left of my programming
career, and I have no concern that Ruby will go away before I'm ready
to stop working with it. So that's one thing. And right now it
seems like we're experiencing a Ruby renaissance, which is wonderful to see. And
so who knows, maybe Ruby will be ten times as big ten years from
now. It's impossible to know. Yeah, that's true. It seems like
you keep betting on it though, right I mean, you've got you've got
to see eye product that you've got coming out that you're working on in Ruby,
and I'm assuming it serves Ruby clients. You run sin City Ruby.
You know, you talk about Ruby on your podcast, So yeah, it
seems like you're you're mostly all in on this, and you know, are
there particular things that are making you excited or bullish about this? Is it
just the renaissanceers or something else. I don't know. I just like the
Ruby language, as many people do, and when I've tried other languages,
like Python, for example, it's like I've nothing against Python. I like
Python, I just don't like it quite as much as I like Ruby.
And if somehow a better language came along, then I would certainly consider switching
to that. It's just nothing I've worked with is quite as nice to work
with as Ruby. You know, it's optimized for programmer happiness, as they
say, and I certainly experienced that happiness that they were shooting for. That's
what keeps me, keeps me with it. It's not necessarily anything external,
like what's happening in the community or what's happening with rails or anything like that.
It's just I like working with the language, and I have a hard
time considering any alternative, right that makes sense? So yeah, I'm just
curious. Then, maybe not so much the future of Ruby as the language
or the community or things like that. But where do you see Ruby taking
you? Then? Like? Where are you going with Ruby? Very interesting?
Where do I see Ruby taking me? Where am I going to go
with Ruby? I think I'm going to go the places I'm going to go
anyway, Like if God took Ruby away from the world tomorrow, I think
I would do basically the same stuff. It would just have to be with
something that's not Ruby. Ruby is just my favorite way to achieve the things
that I want to achieve. So for me personally, as you know,
Chuck, I do consulting, TDD coaching, and that kind of is technology
agnostic. Largely, the principles of testing are technology agnostic, and so if
I had to switch to Python, Django testing or something like that, it
wouldn't be that big of a deal. I'd had some new technologies to learn,
but not new principles. So where do I see myself going? Still
the consulting stuff, I'm working on a book about rails testing. You know,
I already have a book about rails testing, but I'm redoing it.
I will confess that I have a tendency to take on too many projects,
and so sometimes I start a booking that I don't finish it. But I'm
pretty confident that I'm going to finish this one, just because it's a book
that I've had in me for a long time. I just haven't gotten around
to putting the entire thing on paper yet. And then, yeah, as
you mentioned, I have my CI project that I'm working on, but that's
like a distant third or fourth priority for me right now. Yeah, it's
basically just for the sake of having a project for pedagogical purposes so that when
I do live coding in front of people, well I have something to code
on. That's that's right, That's maybe the main reason for it. And
just I I have developed a loathing for Circle CI and get hub actions,
and so I'm creating it out of spite to some degree too, but it's
it's not my main thing. Oh I'm gonna I'm going to ask it.
So, so what is it about Circle CI or get Hub actions that you
don't love? Do UI? And it's not just that I don't love it,
It's it's that I absolutely loathe it. It's it's really frustrating, Like,
for example, and get hub actions, because that's what I've used most
recently. When a test fails, What is the first thing you would want
to know? You'd want to know what failed? Which that answer is kind
of hard to get. It's like what you have to you have to drill
down and scroll and all this stuff. And it's like that's kind of crazy.
It's like that just scruptured the log to find out Yeah, oh that's
yeah, that's aboptimal optimal. Yeah, and you know you have to you
have to go to your build and then if you have parallelism, which you
probably are going to, you have to find which parallel job contains the failed
test? Yeah, and go to that. And it's like the parallelism is
just an incidental detail, Like why should I have to be concerned with the
which parallel job it is? I should just be told what the failure message
was so I can address the failure, right, So things like that,
Like it feels like they just don't get it. It feels like the people
who have built it don't actually use CI themselves, and so I want to
build something that's like pleasant to use I gotcha. And I think that kind
of harks back to what you were talking about with Ruby itself, where Ruby
gives you that experience, right, it gives you that experience that makes you
happy. Are there particular aspects of writing Ruby that lean you that way?
Hmmm. I've used Ruby exclusively for so long that it's hard for me to
even even think about what that might be. Oh, here's here's maybe how
I could access that answer. I switched back to Python occasionally because I do
some like genetic programming experiments in Python from time to time, and it's so
annoying, for example, that you have to put like self in every class
method definition and it's like, why why are you making me do a thing
that the computer can do better? So stuff like that. They just made
it. They just made it. This isn't a very nice way to put
it, but they just made it. Not stupid. I can't disagree with
you, but yeah, yeah, yeah, like no offense to Python,
but the fact that you have to type self and to every method definition,
like that's dumb that you have to do that. And so I appreciate those
those thoughtful details. And it's not even like the presence of something in that
particular case, it's the absence of something like I'm right, I like the
fact that that's not there in Ruby. I don't have to think about things
I shouldn't have to think about, right, that makes total sense. I
kind of want to veer into Sin City Ruby for a minute. What are
you looking for as far as like experienced speakers things like that. I know
that it's you know, your CFP is closed or you know, things like
that, but because we're getting close to it, but yeah, yeah,
and crazy enough, I have the speaker lineup for twenty twenty five all my
almost full, even though though twenty twenty four conference hasn't happened yet. Oh
really yeah, But what I'm hoping people get out of it is that they
have fun, of course, and that they make new friendships. It would
be an ideal outcome for me if everybody who goes makes at least one lifelong
friendship that can help them in their career and just enhance their life and career
in some way. That's the ideal outcome for me. That's cool. Usually
people talk as much about like what talks are going to hear, or what
technologies they'll learn, or what kind of if there's a career outcome, it's
skill based, not relationship based. Yeah, well, no offense to everyone
who's ever given a conference talk, But like, is a conference talk ever
really that great? Like maybe one conference talk in a thousand is like a
life changer or whatever. It blows your mind. Most of the time the
talks are fine and the speaker does just just find job. That's all good,
but it's like the talk ends and then everybody forgets what it even was,
Like it's just not exactly the right format for conveying technical information. Right,
talks that are like a story or something like that can be good.
And so you know, I think the main thing that happens is like with
me personally, at least, I'll go and see a talk and maybe the
talk mentions an idea that I wasn't aware of, Like it mentioned, oh,
I don't know, like Turbo eight's coming out, and I'm like,
oh, turbo Right, I'll go look that up. Not a great example,
because that's that's pretty well publicized at this point, but right, it's
usually like an idea rather than like where if if you read a book,
then like I'll learn a lot from that book and maybe retain it and I
can go put back over it and stuff like that. A talk isn't quite
the same thing. So I'm even though I am having speakers and I think
the speakers are very good and they'll give great talks and all that stuff,
the emphasis is more on the on the relationships that I hope people form.
What are there? Yeah makes sense. Yeah, it's really not that far
from here either, which makes me want to go. There's still tickets all
right, Well that these are going to come out next week. So if
you all want to go to Las Vegas and have an awesome Ruby experience,
go check it out. Is it sincityeruby dot com sincitaruby dot com. As
of this recording, there are about fifty tickets left. I'm limiting it to
one hundred attendees. Oh wow, and right now about half the tickets have
sold. Okay, good to know. So I'm kind of wondering too,
and this is turning into more of an interview about what you're doing. But
it's it's very fascinating to me. So, you know you have code with
Jason, you know, I think I've seen you do like weekly. I
don't know coaching calls or ask me anything kind of calls at some point in
the past. I don't know if you still do those. I do.
You know, you've got the you know, the projects that you've mentioned.
Is there some overall direction you're trying to get to. Is there some you
know, outcome or mission that you're on or is it just oh, well,
that and that looks great. I have a brain disease that drives me
to do all these things and take on way too many projects. So that's
that's part of it, you know. I think during these these a couple
of decades of the twenty twenties or whatever, I'm noticing a lot of adults
are discovering they have ADHD and and maybe other neurodivergence. And I think I
got something like that going on. And so, if we're being truthful,
that's where a lot of this comes from. But also I am trying to
build a good career for myself, and all these things like podcasts, bogging,
speaking at conferences, all that stuff. I believe those things will directly
or indirectly attract client work for consulting or you know I mentioned books, that
stuff helps sell my books and stuff like that, and so I do that,
but then they're intrinsically rewarding. Also, I really enjoy meeting people.
That's why I do those those calls. I have a page dear Listener on
my website that's like, I think it's just titled let's talk, and you
can go and fill out that form and we'll have a call and get to
know each other just for no particular reason, just because I like to meet
people. And you know, you never know. Sometimes you meet somebody with
no particular expectation. Then five years later they help you get hired for some
big project or something like that. So there's the intrinsic, wholesome reasons and
then there's like the selfish, completely commerce driven reasons also, and it's both
at the same time. Yeah. My experience though, is that you know
the person that's going to help you find that job five years down the line
after you meet them, it's because you built a real relationship. It's not
because you were mercenary about it. So's yeah, there's this quote that I
love. Sorry to interrupt, there's this quote that I love from Benjamin Franklin.
It'll take me a minute to retrieve it from memory. Let's see if
rascals knew the advantages of virtue, they would become honest men out of rascality.
Oh interesting, I like that. Hey, how can I greedily make
as much money as possible? Oh? It turns out the way to do
that is just to be like a genuinely good person and help other people.
Okay, I'll do that, but I only do it out of rascality,
right. I think zig Ziglar was the one that said you can get anything
you want if you help other people get what they want, right exactly,
And yeah, yeah, so that's the exact mindset that I look at it
with. Very cool. So you have any anything coming up that you want
people to know about other than Sin City Ruby, Yeah, so I send
a monthly newsletter. I don't know if you know about this, Chuck,
a monthly snail mail newsletter. You'll actually get a letter delivered to your house.
I've been doing that since May of twenty twenty three, so coming up
on well, it's about nine months I've been doing it so far, and
that's been great. I send it to like forty countries around the world,
So if you're not located in the US, some people ask, can I
get it in Pakistan or Bulgaria or whatever I am. Yeah, you can,
So if anybody is interested in that, you can go to Code with
Jason dot com. And I'm currently on what I call the Code with Jason
World Tour. I'm doing this just to meet people, meet people all over
the world wherever I can get to. So far, it's been not really
a world tour but a Midwest United States tour. I've in Chicago and Detroit
and a couple other places. But I'm planning a rails testing workshop to happen
in Paris this coming spring. Oh yeah, as we record this, it's
twenty twenty four for any listeners of the future. Yeah, so Paris is
actually really inexpensive to get to. You can get there from Chicago, for
example, for like five hundred bucks. I never knew this until like a
year ago. So it's actually cheaper for me to go do a workshop in
Paris than like San Francisco or something like that, all things considered. And
plus I've been to Paris before and I really want to go back, and
so that's that's part of why I chose that too. But dear listener,
if you're located in Paris, or if you want to go to Paris,
which I highly recommend. I'm doing a workshop there and should be May.
I'm still working out the exact date, but May of this year. Very
cool. Yeah, I know there's a direct flight from Salt Lake to Paris
as well. And okay, you know, yeah, I think the round
trip depending on how you swing it. I just typed it into kayak dot
com. I think I put in the dates for Ruby Kaygi because I was
talking to Jeremy Evans when I put those dates in. But yeah, I
can do a round trip for nine hundred bucks. Nice. So yeah,
it's really not bad. So that's not a direct flight and yeah, but
it's yeah, that's not bad at all. Yeah. Yeah, so there's
that. There's of course, since City Ruby, which happens pretty close to
now. It's like six weeks or whatever. I'm not good at at times
that way, But it's February seventh right now. Happens in March twenty first
and twenty second, okay, and then if you hear this too late,
dear listener, there'll be another one in twenty twenty five around the same awesome.
Yeah, yeah, and then I always have a ton of stuff going
on. Oh, I do an online meet up twice a week, and
I offer free mentorship to anybody who wants it. It usually around testing related
stuff, although other things too, and if you're interested in getting in on
that. Everything I do is listed at code Withthjason dot Com, and I
publish all my videos to YouTube also, so every time I do one of
these meetups, which again is twice a week, I publish a recording to
YouTube. So I'm accumulating a collection of educational content on YouTube, mainly where
I pair with somebody and we work through some kind of programming problem together.
Very cool. Well, I'm just gonna let it lie there. Let let
people go check it out. Coding with Jason dot is, coding with Jason
dot com or with Jason dot com coswith Jason dot Com. So anyway,
folks, go check that out. Sounds like everything you want if you want
to connect with Jason is there. And uh yeah, we'll wrap this up
until next time. Max out, folks,