Hey, Welcome back to another episode of the Ruby Rogues podcast. This week,
on our panel we have Valentino Stole. Hey. Now, I'm Charles
Maxwood from top End DEEVS. I'm gonna do a little personal thing here real
quick. My contract work has slowed down, so if you need a contractor
let me know Chuck at topendevs dot com. Or if you're hiring full time,
I might even consider that, so anyway, just email me. We
have a special guest this week and that is Nathan Bellow. Nathan, do
you want to introduce yourself? Hello, I'm Nathan Bellow. I'm from Canada
and Montreal and I'm a cool for developers professionally since two years now and I
work with Ruby rails and you Jess very cool. Hey, folks, this
is Charles Maxwood. I've been talking to a bunch of people that want to
update their rest may and find a better job, and I figure, well,
why not just share my resume? So you if you go to top
endevs dot com slash resume, enter your name and email address, then you'll
get a copy of the resume that I use, that I've used through freelancing
through most of my career as I've kind of refined it and tweaked it to
get me the jobs that I want. Like I said, top endevs dot
com slash resume. We'll get you that, and you can just kind of
use the formatting. It comes in word and pages formats and you can just
fill it in from there. Yeah, just a little side note, My
grandparents met in Montreal, so yeah, neither of them are from Montreal and
they lived there very long. Anyway, Very cool. So you're you're kind
of new. Valentino introduced or invited you on the show, So I'll I'll
let Valentino kind of give us some context and steer this one. Yeah.
You know, I met Nathan at one of the Ruby comps when it was
virtual, and you know, he's he's awesome, and you know, I
got to talking with him, and you know, we pair on occasion on
a couple of open source things, and you know, I'm just curious.
I wanted to kind of get like a you know, how do people ruby,
Like, how do you get introduced to the community, you know,
what is that experience like? And Nathan graciously agreed to come on and kind
of chat through his experience and you know what you know Ruby local conferences are
like, I'm always curious. I see some great presentations at Montreal RB and
you know, I'm I just wanted to start a little dialogue with what you
know, with kind of like what new Ruby experience is like and how we
can maybe improve it or you know, help in any way as community members.
So uh, you know, I'm happy to have you here, Nathan,
and you know it. Do you want to give a little intro maybe
to how what were your first Ruby experience was like? Even like how did
you how'd you get involved? You know in this direction? Absolutely so as
far as software development, I was very into it since a long time ago
when I was a kid. And no so I'm originally from Brazil, but
I grew up in most of my school was in France. I lived ten
years in France and when I was twelve, there were there were some extra
curriculum at school which was you could choose different things, but there were one
thing that was about programming. So I was very interested, so I did
that. I don't remember which LINKU I learned. I think it was PHP,
but for so long time ago, but on my mind I always knew
how it is the past I wanted to take, but I didn't know it
was a career or anything before. So after high school I started looking to
universities. So I take the Yeah, so I was in France end of
high school. Then I go to university in Montreal. So I learned all
these languages see JavaScript, Java, and I really liked more the front end.
At that time I didn't like but at some point I wanted to specialize
in the back end, and I did a program in Rugby with open classrooms.
I don't know if you know this school, it's based in France.
I think I'm one of the only ones who have a bachelor diploma in Ruby.
It doesn't exist anymore, but I have it. I can show you.
And yeah, so that's how I got introduced. Because I didn't know
Ruby. I never heard about it. So I was like, this,
this is something I want to learn. And I researched a little bit and
it seems that it's beginning friendly, easy to use. Extra that's what got
me to choose that. So I did the whole program with Ruby, and
I had a grand mentor. And yeah, I think my program was so
hard that in the beginning I was doing some like just just Ruby. I
was making some Ruby applications like a game, and then I had to write
it in a object oriented way. Then I did the web application without rails.
That was the hardest thing with the RACK, you know, and there
were no documentations online. All documentations are with rails or active record and for
some deep stuff. So yeah, that was my most painful. But then
when I transitioned with rails, I find it it was kind of more easy.
Just with the active record, I had a hard time because my brain
was all squl So that was I think that was the hardest thing for me
to adapt. But other than that, it flew. It was it was
quite nice the experience. So that's that's my that's my traduction to to really
busy. That's awesome. I feel like a lot of REELS developers can relate
to the pain of RACK. It's the the inner It's it's funny because like
I feel like the design of the interface of RAC is really great, right,
Like it's just like you have inputs that are standardized and it requires outputs
that are also standardized. But that's it. You don't really get anything else
and you have to do everything yourself, which which makes you love reels that
much more so, honestly sounds like a great program. You you were part
of the pain, so you can know why you should love it, you
know totally. And then after that, yeah, yeah, I was going
to ask, but I think you were going there with your after that is
I was going to say, Okay, so you know you learn rails,
you you did some of this school work or however you want to put it.
You know, how do you how do you get from there to Okay?
Now I'm a professional, I'm getting paid. It's right code right,
So through all this pain, and I did a RAILS up like it's not
super complex, but I could deploy on Amazon WS. And then I felt,
okay, let's look for a job. And so I started applying.
And one thing I did was my resume was very but it was very unique
in I don't know for me, it was a I did like I did
some kind of design on it. I don't know if that's because of that
or not, but I got a lot of I got good results with my
research. That was in twenty twenty two, like January February, and just
in one month and a half, I think I applied thirty or fifty and
then I got I got how many interviews? Six interviews and two offers.
But the trick for me was I really I really saw myself like more than
my skills. I really say, oh, this is who I am,
this is my dream, this is what I'm passionate about. And I also
mentioned my previous experience, like when I was studying, I did some other
job like salesman, this kind of job, and it helped me too.
Because soft skills are very it's always a plus. So I think those things
that helped me get my first job nice. So what kind of what kind
of work setup was it? You can tell us who the company was,
but you don't have to. Some people aren't comfortable doing that and that's fine,
but you know, kind of give us an idea of what that job
looked like. Yeah, so this job is so at that time, it
was full remote and I was working with another rails developer and the beginning was
yeah, I was like kind of junior, right, So the first three
months he was giving me dask but he said to me, I was good
as the first three months. I said, you know, okay, he
was. He was impressed, I think because I went through so much struggles
with rack and everything. Yeah, so so yeah, after the three months,
I I was assigned more responsibilities and I ended up leading the project after
six months. And I learned views on the way as well I didn't know
before, and that's part of the stack at port and the company is LuxI
based in Montreal. So I like to get into kind of the Okay,
somebody who's listening, right, what are they going to get out of this?
Right? And so I kind of see two groups. I think a
lot of the people who listen to these shows are people who have been doing
Ruby for a while, right, So they're not necessarily going, all right,
how do I break into Ruby? Right? They're in. But there's
another group that listens because, yeah, they've picked up Ruby somewhere, you
know, they got exposed to it, you know, at one point or
another, like you did, and they want to get in. So I'm
going to ask this question twice, and I'm gonna ask it once for the
new people and once for the people who are already kind of past the gate.
So for people who are brand new. Right, So let's say that
I have a brother who wants to get into Ruby. I don't at the
moment you know and you know he's he's interested and he wants to get in
and be a professional Ruby or Ruby on Rails developer. What advice do you
have just to kind of get through to that first job? Right? So
one one first thing as far as as far as the learning, I would
say, if he goes to the audio projects, I don't know if you
heard about it project, I think that's what I hear the most, one
of the most helpful or one of the best source to to learn. And
then after that, one thing I always thought was if you if you know
other junior with you, you can do like a more ambitious project as two
people two people as all juniors, and you define all the what the app
we'll do, and it's kind of more complex, and you can use that
for your portfolio and to apply for jobs. I think that's that's I like
this. I really like the find a group mentality. Incidentally, I tell
experienced people to find their group, and a lot of people complain they can't
find a group. I'm actually starting when you can find a Ruby geniuses dot
com and you know, we get together week and talk about Ruby. It's
a new thing. So a small group, right, now, but anyway,
Yeah, it's so important to be able to find people who you can
kind of bounce ideas off, we're about the same place as you and can
explain things to you, and who you can work on projects with. So
critical. All right, so I'm gonna ask the question again. So now
now it's for people like me. Right, So let's say I'm working at
a company and they hire that brand new developer, right, they hire Nathan
two years ago, and so you're walking in the door and yeah, you've
done some Ruby with your other things, but this is your first job.
What do I do to help you succeed? M hm, yes, So
I think, uh, one thing you must do is, yeah, one
thing you must do is well be there for for the junior when you askign
him really small tasks and you kind of feel how how long it takes,
And my I would I would say that let's let him struggle a little bit
so he learned a little better, and then once you're you're there to help,
it's gonna be much more beneficial that that would be me. But I
don't know if it's the same for other people. Yeah, that's that's kind
of the one of the first things that come to mind. Also also doing
per programming quite a lot. That that's that's essential, I think makes sense.
Is there anything that they didn't do for you that you wish they had
done? Yes, there were no peer programming. Yeah, I bet,
I bet that really helps. I I'll just chime in on that one as
well. My first job, I was actually working with Nate Hopkins, who
used to be a host on this show, and I was I was like
brand new, and my Rails experience was at my previous job, I'd been
running the tech support department, right, so my job was actually to answer
the phones, answer emails, and manage all the other people that answered the
phones and the emails. But they wouldn't spend money on a system that,
you know, a ticketing system, and so I built it in Rails and
that that was my experience, right. So I come into this next job
and yeah, I probably spent half of my time pairing with Nate, and
I mean it's it's just immeasurable how much stuff I picked up from that.
I mean, there's just no way to know. And so yeah, I
I definitely feel that. I mean, I I still remember, I mean,
we're what what no seventeen years later something like that. And yeah,
I still look back on it eighteen years. It's been eighteen years, and
you know, it still was a highly formative thing that really helped me out.
Yeah, heavy plus one there. My first real rails gig was at
a small consultancy and I must have spent the first six months just pairing with
people yep. And like it's invaluable. Yeah, like you pick up stuff
that nobody would think to teach you. Yep. Yeah, I hadn't tested
at all, and I think I learned how to test and ruby my pair
program with people. Yep. You know, you do things, You learn
how to do things that you wouldn't normally want to do because of the you
know, fear of the unknown right where ye you know you don't know how
to do it, So why would you like necessarily like reach for it,
right, You wouldn't even think to reach for it? Yep, absolutely,
why did you do that? That's such a useful tool when you're programming,
Nathan, your background with like the kind of fuzzed out white It makes me
think of all the movies when someone goes to heaven. So you know,
is Montreal heaven? Yeah? There we go Yes, go ahead, Valentino,
I was gonna say, adding on to what you were talking about,
you know, asking the same question multiple ways. I feel like there's a
third way here too, in uh, you know, kind of like the
more experienced developers that are looking to take on more mentorship or maybe more managerial
positions or something like that. You know, like, how is there any
any ways that it could have been more helpful for like in that process of
either finding a mentor or like, was there something that did help you,
like kind of like because of mentorship of somebody, you know what I mean?
Yes, So for me, one of the first things that helped me
is called the First Ruby Friend. I think it's still up. It's it's
a website where you can sign up to either become a mentor or any junior
Rubis and or you can sign up to be a mentee. So I did
that and I was mentored by for six months by former Shopify employee, and
it was very great experience. I learned a lot from him. And another
thing is if we're gone Wells comf or Ruby comf, you can also match
naturally, you know, you can find a mentor that way. And yeah,
but I think first we'll be friendy. He is really great and also
i'm a I'm recently a member of Agency of Learning. I don't know if
you heard of it. It's basically it's kind of a Ruby shop of self
motivated early career developers. So the way it's done is we hire by pairs
or one junior and there is also some seniors that lead the project that there
that are there for mentoring. And that's a really great group to really get
ahead. Because we are a group, we can also pair with each other
between junior, between senior or mid and that's I think that's a great group
if you want to advance in your managerial skills, mentoring skills, and as
a junior, well it's a great group where you can progress or learn more
for your career. So I think, yeah, that's that's a great place.
Yeah, that's cool. I hadn't heard of that one. Well,
what's been your favorite project you've worked on? Yeah, so there was that
project called the pair Up. So basically it's an application where where for pairing
or anything that goes within a software development environment, like there is a you
can put your stand up notes there and you know, as the lead he
can see all the stand up notes of everyone if anyone is stuck, So
it's kind of a think So it's great. And there is another feature for
hiring as well hiring people, and yeah, there were other features, but
on top of my head that that's the two things that was very interesting.
And also we do some open source work like with Ruby for good. I've
been contributing to the Castle projects. So yeah, it's very interesting. So,
yeah, I learned every day when I'm pairing with even with another junior,
sometimes he learns he learns something I don't know. Yeah, it's something
that's also I'm interested to know, Like, uh, how do you start
first? How do you know to get involved in these these things? Right?
And like how how do you get involved? Like what what does the
process for that look like? Is it like pretty straightforward? Like is there
a learning curve? You know? Is there is there some takeaways that you
can like suggest people, like have things set up to make this process easier?
Right? So one of the one of the first things to get aware
of the kind of opportunities for me is is social media LinkedIn and Twitter x.
That's that's where I get news. Can I can I ask real quick.
So you mentioned LinkedIn and Twitter and they're kind of used differently. Are
there specific groups that you found in LinkedIn or specific Twitter accounts? I think
I saw groups in Twitter now too, but yeah, where you looking?
Yeah, yeah, So for LinkedIn, there is some Ruby groups. I
think they are called I mean, if you go to groups the type ruby
on Wells, you can find. Yeah, I'm on like four groups,
like one called Ruby's some five thousand members Ruby on Wells. Yeah, we'll
be the other ones that just called ruby on Wells. And yeah, so
I get a lot of like programming tips or something going on. And yeah,
and also I add people on LinkedIn that are Rubies, so I get
my feet is really great for me, Like I get Rugby related posts a
lot. And for Twitter, I I guess I'm in some group big groups
on Twitter, but I never really checked it's there, But I never I
never gone there. I just go on for you page and I get I
get some rub feed and I guess you should follow like the ruby page or
whatever, and you press like on any Ruby thing and then the algorithm will
show you will show you all the rubyists automatic and yeah, so that's the
first thing. And then specifically the Agency of Learning. So it's we are
hiring in batch. So there were one batch that was I don't know when
it was, but me I got like hired on November, I think.
And yeah, I don't know when the next one will be. But anyone
can apply, like if a senior or and the process is quite easy.
Just apply and once you there, you a member. Then we have a
private discord channel where you can post, oh I want to pair or who
is available to pair? Yeah, and usually if there is a space project
we have there is a lead. That's that's we have like a a notion
where all the project requirements are are there and we can also we are free
to also add to the notion like the specific picture. We can write design
documents. So yeah, it's really great. You can really expand your skill
in every way, not just a program. Hey there, this is Charles
max Wood. I'm excited because I wanted to let you know about this thing
that I pulled together that I had just I've been dying to have this for
years and I never felt like I could, and then I just realized that
there's no reason why I can't. So I'm putting together a book club and
we're going to read development focused books, career books, you know, technical
books, whatever. The first book that we're going to do is going to
be Clean Architecture by Uncle Bob Martin. If you're not familiar with clean code
or some of the other stuff that Bob has done, check that out.
I've also talked to him on the Clean Coders podcast, which is on Top
End Devs. But yeah, we're going to get on. He's going to
show up to some of our meetings. And what I'm thinking is we'll probably
have like five or six people part of the conversation along with Bob and I
at the same time, and we'll just so somebody can come on, they
can ask their question, and then we'll just rotate people through, so we'll
mute one person, unmute another person when it's their turn to come on and
be part of the discussion. So we'll do that for like an hour hour
and a half. And then the other part of it that I'm putting together
is just kind of a meet and greet gather area on Gathertown. And so
after the meetup and the call, we we'll do as we'll all go over
to gather Town and you can just log in, walk up to a group
and have a conversation, and that way we can all kind of get to
know each other and make friends and get to know people across the world.
One thing that I'm finding is that, yeah, the meetups are starting to
come back, but a lot of people don't have the opportunity to go to
a meetup. And I really want to meet you guys and talk to you.
So we're gonna put all that together. We'll all be part of that
book club. You can go to topendevs dot com slash book Club to be
part of it, and I'm looking forward to seeing you there. The first
book club meeting will be in December, the beginning of December. We're starting
the first week of December, and you'll also be part of the conversation about
which book we do next. I have one in mind, but I want
to see where everybody's at. So there you go, very awesome. I'm
going to kind of take us on a little bit. So you've been programming
now for or a couple of years, and it seems like I run across
people fairly often who they get into their first or maybe their second development job
where they're still kind of new and they're kind of being brought up and taught
how to do what they do, and then what happens is they kind of
wind up feeling a little stuck right where it's Okay, I've learned everything I'm
gonna learn here, or you know what, they're never going to promote me
because I'm always going to be the newbie, or you know, I just
want to try something different, or maybe there's something structural cultural at the company
and makes them want to think they want to move on, but they don't
feel like they can, right. They don't feel like they can apply,
they don't feel like there's an opportunity out there, or they don't even know
how to find that next gig. And so I'm curious, how did you
move from your first job where you were there for like six months and then
moved on? How did you move from there to wherever you're at now?
Yeah, actually that my first job. I didn't move. I'm still in
it's just that I got kind of promoted. But yeah, I'm still on
the same but I'm kind of in that same same thing you just described.
So yeah, I mean it's kind of it's kind of weird position, but
I would say one thing I do that that's essential. I think so far
is I just network? Because if I just apply to a job like that,
I don't know if it will be like ah, he's maybe two inexperience
or something. Or but if I talk to people, maybe they can say,
okay, I know this. I know that I could get some opportunities
just just by talking. But if I just go cold approach, it's harder.
It's a lot harder. The cold approach is a lot harder. I
think you brought up a good point though, of like I feel like early
on in your career, you think that you need to make this impression like
you know everything, or at least know enough where like you know you can
do everything by yourself, and you know, I feel like people hiring,
wait that goes away. I feel like people hiring don't want to know that
you can do everything right like they you know, we want to know that
you can't right like and that you're eager to learn what those things are.
And I know, personally, like I still have this problem too, like
of trying to, you know, over compensate for not knowing everything because I
want to know everything you know, and this is like a you know,
it never breaks in software, right, Like you're never going to break free
of this notion, right. But I feel like you make a good points,
like you know, you don't necessarily have to know all of it,
but having that conversation will highlight the things that you do know right in a
networking setting, And I feel like that's the most important part of like finding
your gig, because it'll align what your skill sets are and where it's going
with what people need. Rather than just trying to say that you know everything
or trying to, you know, make it seem like it's something you're not.
I feel like oftentimes people get placed improperly from just trying to, you
know, say that you know you can do it all. I know,
I've definitely gotten jobs, you know where I've been like, oh man,
I don't want to be doing this, you know, and it's like I
told him I could do it though, you know. Yeah. So like
I think setting expectations and definitely networking like that. Yeah, I completely hear
you on that. I'm curious. I wanted to shift the conversation a little
bit here toward like conferences and maybe meetups and things like that, because I'm
interested to know kind of like your insight on where you know, what your
opinions are on both like the Ruby conferences, rails conferences, and maybe even
like the local ones. Right Like you mentioned, you know, attending Montreal
RB. You know what value did you see out of each of those?
Right? Like did you see that one attending one of the events was better
than the other? Like was it important the timing in your career and what
you knew for each event? You know? Can you give us a little
insight on that? Yes? So, yeah, I think one of the
main value I get from this is friendship. Uhh, that's another number one.
I get to know people and I try to like every time, for
example, I go to Montreal RB and then once we add each other on
LinkedIn or whatever, I try to keep a conversation after this is the meet
up, right Montreal A, yeah for the meet up, And I tried
to even for I think Ruby comp or webs comp, I did the same
like, oh, nice to meet you, it was nice to see you,
blah blah blah. Yeah, So that's one of the first value.
But of course I learned a lot from the prince presentation, and that's that's
really great. I learned more about the philosophy of the framework, use the
language, and something I never knew was possible. That's that's really great.
But I think the number one is really the friendship I make. And like
just an example on Montreal at rb I So, okay, I met for
some friends and then like seven months after I get an opportunity, like like
a small opportunity. It was enup. I had to have the bug and
I got paid for like three hour work or whatever. So you know,
that's that's great and I never expected it's just because I knew someone and knew
me, that's awesome. And so I'm curious, like whether were there any
barriers to entry for for either, like did you find like, was it
was it easy to attend? As an example, rubycom for Rails comp whichever
you you did attend, Uh, was was it easy to do? And
like was it did you find it difficult to meet people or or connect?
Uh? You know what was that? Like? Yeah? Actually for the
rest comp, I was I got a free sponsor sponsorship tickets. I just
again Twitter, right, I saw someone was offering I like that's awesome.
Yeah, I just missage, hey, like that that person was offering for
early career junior and so I was like, hey, I'm new, can
you offer me a hit? And he offered me no problem. So that
that was very nice and yeah, and that that was the online that one
two, So it kind of pushed you to meet people through that networking thing
online. As far as party, I didn't attend yet any like yah in
person rast COMT maybe I would go to Real's World just in Canada, So
I have to go ye in Toronto and we'll go make friends there in person,
yes, absolutely. And as far as Montreal a derby I the first
time, I think it kind of feels at the beginner, maybe you can
feel intimidated like everyone is so expert, you know, but I said,
no one is judging or anything. Everyone's welcoming. So yeah, it's fine
for me. I don't have I don't have these kind of fears. I
just go a let's make friends and yeah, but yeah, it goes through
my mind like, oh that's so they're so expert. How can I contribute
to that conversation? So yeah, that's for sure. Yeah, I feel
that pain. I remember my first honestly, I've only ever been to one
reels COMPI it was early in my career. Oh really, Oh yeah,
I've spoken at it at least two or three times. I want to say
twenty twelve or eleven. It was when it was in Baltimore. I didn't
go to that one, okay, Yeah, I mean I just remember going
and being just like like you said, very overwhelmed with, you know,
not being able to contribute to any conversation or what was happening. And you
know, as i've as I've grown to know the community more, I feel
like it's you know, it's more welcoming than it appears on the surface.
And I know that the conference has changed a lot and they're a lot more
welcoming to newcomers. And I feel like when they ask it, you know,
they always ask at the conference, who's new, who's this first time?
Right? And there's so many with hands now, and that's so great.
Yeah. So I'm kind of excited to go to a conference again now,
all right and just see how it's changed and meet some newcomers, right,
like make them feel welcome. And you know, but I do feel
your pain, you know, how do you contribute to the conversations? And
really the answer is like just just talk about it. Talk about what you
know or what you want to know, and people are they really love to,
you know, talk about what you know what's happening, And to be
honest, it's really great if you do know you know all these things and
you know that you've learned over the years. It's like a great way to
like break it down in simple ways, right, Like that's one of the
best ways to learn it better is to be able to say it in simple
terms, right, Like sure, chat GBD can do so much, right,
but uh, you know, do it on your own. You know
it Definitely it helps your brain like learn it even more for sure. But
I'm curious, liked, did the conference offer anything specifically that you remember where
you were Like, oh, yeah, I've got to come back to a
conference for this mm. Yeah, so definitely please. The west COM that
I attended was like really great, and I really want to meet more people
and learn more. I the those conferences from twenty twenty three. I watched
online, but you know, I watched the content online, but it's really
not the same. I learned the content for sure, but that pushed me
to go back and meet more people and learn more from people. And yeah,
like just watching a YouTube conference. It's really nuts. The same.
Yeah, I'll admit I remember attending Rails camp there was Lightning talks, which
I had never heard about before. But basically, anybody can get on stage
and just like give like a one to two minute like presentation of whatever they
want, right, and it's great. I yeah, But just small takeaways
from that, Like this guy, Corey Haynes Is he used to be very
average years. Oh man, he's great. He has the four Simple Rules
of Design, which are like a great book if you if you ever want
to read that, but he gets He came up on stage and what you
know, just like ran his entire test suite with with like thousands of tests.
I was and it like ran in like a second or two, and
it was just like He's just like, you know, you don't have to
uh you know, your test suite doesn't have to take minutes to run.
And then that was like, yeah, that's the stage, right, And
it eventually became a thing like he did some follow up on it, but
I never forget like yeah, like and uh, you know, his his
key thing was, well, you don't load the entire Rails application for every
test while right, which has pros and cons but like you don't hit the
database if you don't need to things, right. But it definitely was a
key takeaway for me. Uh and even still to this day, I think
about it like, you know, of thinking more about why the things are
happening, right, and like I feel like when you get started with like
a framework in general, like reels, it's easy to like overlook the questions
to ask because it does so many things for you behind the scenes, right,
And that really opened up my mind. Oh, like I could just
ask this question and like figure it out, like uh. And that was
definitely like a key takeaway for me from from just a lightning talk right two
minutes. Right. But so I'm curious now, like for like the smaller
meetups that it's got like a much more personal setting. You know, do
you find like that you get more specific content, like what what value differentiating
from like a conference. Would you say that like something like a local meetup
offers that maybe you wouldn't get from a conference. Hmm, yeah, I
think local media up you can always well, first of all, one of
the first things you can always meet again with someone, like in a cafe
or something like for example, I I made friends with the CEO of one
small startup and one time I had some question with for him. So we
went to eat in a cafe and that was great. That's one thing And
the other thing you mentioned lightning talks. Sometimes we do jam gem. I
forgot the naming of it. But it's like like basically, you have to
share a gem that was useful to you, Okay, so kind of like
everyone Yeah so everyone, Hm, I can share, right. So sometimes
there were even someone that just came out of a boot camp got to present
uh what's the name form? Uh? You know that gem on rails for
the form with or I don't, I don't, I don't know. Yeah,
that's one. So he got to present that jam and and then me,
I, I think I don't remember what I Yeah, I shared the
jam where lets you find one queries? So that that was interesting. So
but the other times, I sometimes I feel like I don't I don't want
to share anything. I'm scared, I don't want to answer the question.
So yeah, but that's that's an advantage where you can have an opportunity to
share something brand new. Yeah. I want to just chime in on that
for a second, because yeah, I talked to new people and they're like,
I don't have anything to share that everybody doesn't already know. And when
I was pretty new to the my development career, I would go to the
Utah Ruby meet up. And it was funny because we had one in Utah
County, one in Salt Lake County, one in downtown. I think there
was one up in Cash County anyway, so you could go to four or
five of them in the state. But I would go, and especially at
the Salt Lake one, they usually have a short talk on something that was
pretty fundamental and so a primmer, and so I would do the primmers like
every other month, even though I was new. And what was funny was
that I would go. I would cover it thoroughly enough to where there was
always something in there, and it wasn't because I was trying to. It
was just, you know, I had five minutes and sort of fill the
five minutes. I covered everything about strings or whatever I was talking about,
you know, or you know the HT one of the http HDTV party.
But I would cover something and i'd have one of the senior guys come up
afterward and say, I didn't know it did that and the other thing is
is that in order to prepare it be able to speak to it for five
minutes, I had to really learn it. And so if you're new and
you're going to a meetup, volunteer to speak, you know, just raise
your hand. I mean even if you raise your hand and you say,
hey, look I'm going to talk about the device GEM and I'm going to
cover it for five minutes. That's all I have. That's all I can
manage to do. They will take you because the meetup organizers is appreciate it
because then they don't have to go find somebody to fill time. They don't
have to fill the time, and you you'll learn something. And I promise
they're going to people there who are going I didn't know that that was even
a thing. That's a really great yeah. Uh. I helped run a
very small ruby UH meet up in UH in Pennsylvania, UH for the Lehigh
Valley and UH. I think we had like maybe two people come a night
or sometimes three, but we would run it either way. It was with
work and UH. You know, people would come and like you would get
requests for once in a while, like as an example, like ah,
and I mean this isn't somebody new, but it was it wasn't even Ruby.
It was that there's a what power Spotify was the Echo Nest and this
like lead developer that like made the Echo nests like came in and gave a
presentation on how like math works with music really great and you can like extract
things from sound and it was like wild and so like you know, like
but as an organizer, you're like, yeah, like sure, it's not
about Ruby, right, it's not you know, it wasn't anything I knew
about, but like, you know, it was great. Like we had
actually like a lot of people show up that we weren't expecting for that night,
and h we we didn't have to think about the content and like yeah,
it's like for sure, like you know, if if you want to
give a talk or provide any like content, you know, for a meeting,
it is just super helpful to have that like come to you as a
maintainer, right, Like that's right, I didn't I thought this way,
but actually it's really great. Like you said, we prepared something like device
or just something everyone knows, but you present very well. That's going to
be grateful the for everyone. Actually, yep, I'm gonna do that next
time. Good deal, do it. Do it. It's awesome. It's
also if you want to speak at conferences. It's a really good way to
get your foot in the door, right even if you don't know if you
want to, but hey, that might be interesting. I want to try
it. It's a good way to figure out if it's kind of a thing
that you'll enjoy. So all right, Well we're kind of getting toward the
hour, so I'm I'm curious before we do our picks, Nathan, if
people want to connect with you on LinkedIn and Twitter or anywhere else, how
do they find you online? Yes, so I have a website. It's
called Nate Bell. So that's yeah. So Nate Bell b e l l
do's a and LinkedIn. I'm Nathan below, so Nathan, and below is
thee at LW. And Twitter is a not blow Twitter dot com that slash
not blow n ATVL. Awesome. All right, Well let's do some pics.
Have you ever wished that you had a group of people that were just
as passionate about writing code as you are? I know I did. I
did that for most of my career. I'd go to the meetups I try
and create other opportunities, and it was just really hard, right the meetups.
I got some of that, but they were only like once or twice
a month, and it was just really hard to find that group of people
that I connected with and really wanted to, you know, talk about code
a lot, right, I mean, I love writing code. I think
it's the best. And so I've decided to create this community and create a
worldwide community that we can all jump in and do it. So we're going
to have two workshops every week. One of those or two of those every
month are going to be Q and A calls right where you can get on
you can ask me or me and another expert quest questions. The rest of
them are going to be focused on different aspects of career or programming or things
like that. Right, So it'll go anywhere from like deployments and containers all
the way up to managing your four oh one K and negotiating your benefits package.
Well, we'll cover all of it, okay. And then we're also
going to have meetups every month for your particular technology area. So we have
shows about JavaScript, React, angular view and so on. We're going to
have meetups for all of those things. I'm going to revive the Freelancer Show.
We'll have one about that right so you can get started freelancing or continue
freelancing if that's where you're at. And I'm working on finding authors who can
actually do weekly video tutorials on some thing for ten minutes that's related again to
those technology areas, so that you can stay current, keep growing. So
if you're interested, go to topendevs dot com slash sign up and you can
get in right now for thirty nine dollars. When we're done, that price
is going to go up to seventy five dollars. At the thirty nine dollars
price gets you access to two calls per week. The full price at one
hundred and fifty dollars, which is going to be seventy five dollars over the
next few weeks. That price is going to get you access to all of
the calls and all of the tutorials and everything else that we put out from
top endevs, along with member pricing for our remote conferences that are coming up
next year. So go check it out topendevs dot com slash sign up.
Valentino, you want to do us some picks? Sure, Yeah, in
case you haven't picked up yet on all my ramblings, I'm very much into
AI at this point. I just I do it for fun, I do
it for work now I just have way too much fun with it. But
I got maybe a ridiculous at home server from these folks at Steger Dynamics that
just has several GPUs in it, and very much looking forward to getting that
set up and training my own models, hopefully to make a Ruby specific one
just just for fun. What kind of AI projects are you going to do?
Well? I want to play with making, you know, fine tune
models on open source lllms. So it seems very easy to do at this
point, like a lot of the infra has already established, and you just
like set up and install your own doctor containers and as long as you have
your GPUs configured right with Python, it'll just like let you train what you
want based on some open data sets. So I have some open data sets
I've been eyeing for training purposes, and I just want to see, you
know, how it all works and what I can make out of it.
But I want to start, like I know a lot of the good like
Ruby design, like gems that I would like draw from and so i'd like
to see, Okay, if I like feeded a bunch of GitHub repos with
well designed Ruby, you know, how well will it generate the Ruby responses?
Because I feel like for chat, GBT or like a lot of these
you know, non open models, it's like it's very hard to get it
this the output that you want out of it without like massaging it a little
bit. And so I want to see maybe if a fine tune version of
it could help. Nice. All right, I'm gonna throw in my picks
next. First of all, I just want to point out that we've had
fifty seven people watching us on Twitter and one on Twitch. So the loaner
on Twitch, way to go. The people on Twitter, welcome aboard.
It's good to see you. I'm gonna jump in with. I always do
to board game pick first, so if you're into board games, that's kind
of my jam. And last weekend I actually went to a board game convention
in Davis County, Utah's just north of Lake in Layton called salt Con,
and they're doing another event same location in June, So if you want to
go to that, you might see me there hanging out with my Buddies and
playing games. One of the games I played at the convention is called Challengers,
and Challengers is a card game. So if you've played war right,
where you just have a deck of cards, just deal out the deck to
both players and then you flip cards, whoever has the highest card wins,
right, and then you win ties by putting out more cards. Well,
this is kind of like that, except so you start with the base set.
Everybody has a base set of cards and a play up to eight people,
which is awesome because most games, you know, the bigger games will
go up to six, five or six, So going up to eight is
nice because I can like get my whole family playing and stuff. So what
you do is you take your base set and then they have eight cards,
B cards and see cards, and so you draw five A cards and then
it'll let you put two of them in your hand or into your deck,
and then you play basically this game with your deck, and once you've stacked
up enough cards to beat the top card of the other play right. So
if they have a three on top of their stack, then you you know,
one, one, one, three, three, you know, you
take the flag and then they take all their cards. And they put them
on their bench, and the bench has six spots. So once their bench
is full, if they can't put another card on their bench and they need
to, they lose, or if they run out of cards, they lose,
same with you, right, And so it's kind of this balance game
between do I have enough cards to keep going if I have to, but
do I have too many cards to where it's going to fill on my bench?
And you can double up the same cards, right, so if you
have three of the same kind of card, you start with three newcomers,
I think is what they are. And so those ones, those newcomers,
you can stack them up on your bench so that they only take one spot.
But anyway, that's the whole game. And they have little cards that
tell you who you're playing against, so you know, it'll have a purple
row and then the yellow row and then a green row and then right and
so anyway, so it was really fun. I played it last night with
my uh my buddies as well. Right, there were just four of us.
We just you know, played played for a while. And anyway,
so I'm gonna pick challengers. Board game Geek has a weight on it of
one point seven to seven, which means it is relatively easy to pick up,
and it has an explanation point on the end of it if you're wondering
if that's the right one. And I'm putting links in the comments on Twitch
and Facebook and YouTube. But yeah, anyway, really had a good time
with that, so I'm gonna pick that. And then, as I mentioned,
I'm getting the Ruby Geniuses going right now. I wasn't gonna mention it
until I had everything up, but it kind of got mentioned. So go
to rubygeniuses dot com probably next week as we record, so if you're listening
to it on the recording, it's probably out. You can come join us.
We're going to have a call every week talking about something with Ruby.
I'm going to be inviting people who are guests on the show and things like
that. We'll have conversations and then we're going to have kind of a social
like every third or fourth week. We're going to have more where we just
come on and get to know each other better so that hey, I'm looking
for a job, well okay, we're hiring, or you know, hey,
I'm trying to figure out the ployments with comell oh, well I've done
that here, let me help you out right. It's just a little bit
more personalized that way. So, I mean, and that's really the run
of it. You'll get premium access to a couple of other things, but
that's it. And then the other thing I'm setting up this week is premium
Ruby Rogues without the ads, and so if you want to join the Ruby
Rogue Supporters Club, there'll be a link, or you can just go to
Ruby rogues dot com slash premium. Again. This will be up next week.
I'm literally cutting things over today, but yeah, so go check those
out, all right, Nathan, what are your picks? Yes, so
my first pick is actually a bullet train. I'm building some science application and
that's what I'm using. This really has been great for me. And yeah,
that's that's my first pick, and the other picks those I mentioned before.
So just for everyone, if you go on first ruby friend dot org
for any willing mentor or we want to be mentored, you go to first
rub befriend dot org. And yeah, yeah, I look at bullet Trained.
I've heard some people talk about it and really love it, and I've
heard some people complain about some aspects of it. So maybe we should get
somebody from them to come on and talk ods. But that's very that fays
good. All right, Well we'll go ahead and wrap it up until next
time, folks max out. H m hmm