What we talked about
Chris Oliver, Rails Luminary and Founder of GoRails, Hatchbox, and Jumpstart, explores his path from open source Ubuntu contributions to leading Rails innovation. He reveals insights on building community-driven projects and mastering public speaking to inspire developers worldwide.
Show notes
Chris Oliver built GoRails by spending three months unable to record a single usable video, then forcing himself to record and delete something every day until he got better. That same pattern of confronting personal limitations head-on runs through everything he has built, from a dial-up offline package manager that ended up on a US government air-gapped server to a suite of Rails tools used by thousands of developers worldwide.
What we covered
- His first major open source project, Carricks, was a GUI tool to download Ubuntu packages offline using a flash drive at school and dial-up at home. It got 150,000 downloads, was featured in Linux Journal, and was used by a person in South Africa setting up a computer lab and by someone in the US government on an air-gapped server, connections Chris had no idea were happening when he built it.
- GoRails nearly died in its first year: after quitting consulting cold turkey in 2014 with nine months of savings, he sold two courses at $39 each in the first month. The turning point came when someone submitted GoRails to Hacker News on the same day he was interviewing at a Y Combinator startup, and he woke up to 600 consecutive MailChimp notification emails.
- Jumpstart Rails and his other starter templates came from a personal pattern: he kept rebuilding the same payment and auth logic across multiple apps, extracted it, and figured others would find it useful too. The constraint he learned the hard way is that he only officially maintains payment processors he actually uses, Braintree’s subscription swapping, for instance, requires manually calculating prorations, canceling, creating a new subscription, and applying a prorated coupon code, while Stripe handles it in one call.
- For Hatchbox, he stopped using third-party API gems for cloud providers like DigitalOcean, Hetzner, and Linode entirely, instead writing plain Ruby API clients using net/http. The reasoning: he only needs the create-server feature of each, the external gems have inconsistent interfaces, and if he doesn’t maintain them personally they become liabilities when APIs change.
- He was awarded the Rails Luminary Award at Rails World in Amsterdam, and failed to eat a single meal both days of the conference because people kept stopping him to talk. He considers the conference the highest-value Rails networking available and plans to speak at the Amsterdam edition again this year.
- Chris describes his business as self-feeding: everything he learns building Go Rails or Hatchbox becomes a screencast, every shared component gets extracted into Jumpstart, and Jumpstart goes back into all his apps, meaning he maintains a portfolio of projects with minimal redundant effort as a one-person operation.
About Chris
Chris Oliver is the creator of GoRails (a Rails screencast library), Hatchbox (zero-pain Rails deployment), and Jumpstart (a Rails starter template), and is a co-host of the Remote Ruby podcast. He has been building Rails tools and teaching developers full-time since 2014.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/excid3
- Website: https://gorails.com
Episode 22 of the PreVetted Podcast.
Full transcript
Federico Ramallo (00:01.58) Welcome back to the PreVetted podcast where we spotlight extraordinary people and remarkable talents reshaping our world. So our guest today is Chris Oliver. He’s a Rails Luminary serial product shipper and unstoppable force behind the Rails power, wow Rails. He’s also doing Hatchbox IO, which is a zero pain deployment for Rails.
on your own server. Go Rails is a Ruby on Rails screencast and learning library. He’s doing a Jumpstart Rails template, a starter kit, a cell repo, a one-time purchase storefront. He’s also doing podcasting. He’s hosting the Remote Ruby podcast. He also works on Railsbytes, plug and play templates.
the turbo charge, any rails up and I don’t know when he sleeps but hello Chris how are you doing today?
Chris Oliver (01:10.274) Good, really good. Yeah, you make it make me realize like, yeah, I have way too many projects going on.
Federico Ramallo (01:19.754) I realized I ran out of breath. Well, let’s say, yeah, yeah, So.
Chris Oliver (01:22.418) Right. Yeah, some of them haven’t been touched for a little while, like RailsBytes, but you like you build the idea and if it’s just a small thing like that, you build it in a weekend, you ship it and it kind of just keeps running and doesn’t need to change. So it’s been nice to have a few things like that that are simple.
Federico Ramallo (01:43.926) Yes, yes, that’s amazing. Yeah, I haven’t seen a Rails Byte in detail, so I have to review it that I found it on your website.
Chris Oliver (01:50.006) It’s pretty much just little scripts. So you know when you can run like Rails app template or like Rails new with the template, it’s just that you can point that template to one of our URLs, which will give it the source code that somebody uploaded. So it’ll execute that like if you wanna use one to install a device or Tailwind CSS or Bootstrap or something. That’s pretty much all it does, lets you edit those and share them with people.
Federico Ramallo (02:07.299) nice.
Federico Ramallo (02:19.896) Oh, nice. Nice. I have a friend who’s working on his own template. And he’s doing the… He’s basically building a lot of the basic components he needs for a new app. And he has like 10, 20 apps now that he built. And he keeps adding things to the template. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I’ll mention Resbyte.
Chris Oliver (02:19.928) That’s it.
Chris Oliver (02:26.286) Mm-hmm.
Chris Oliver (02:43.532) Yeah. Yeah. That’s exactly what that’s exactly where rails bites and jumpstart came from. I’m in the same boat, built a bunch of apps and was like, you know, every time that I do it from scratch, I built it a little differently. And it’d be nice if I could just like, you know, fix this payment issue in all the apps all at once. And that’s kind of where jumpstart came from was like.
I built Go Rails, I built Hatchbox, I built a whole bunch of other things and I was like, you should just extract this into something. And if you’re gonna use it for all of your apps, maybe just share it with the world too, because they might find it useful as well. And that’s where Jumpstart got born. So that was it. It’s a good path. I mean, it’s something that like is really hard to maintain for other people.
Federico Ramallo (03:28.418) Nice.
Chris Oliver (03:37.902) cause things change so much. It’s much easier if you do it for yourself and you don’t have to, you know, add infinite other features that you may not use that people are asking for or whatever. that gets hard to maintain like where it becomes a tough business. But, if you’re doing it for yourself and only building the features you need, then it’s totally worthwhile.
Federico Ramallo (04:02.2) That’s a good way to say it because then the maintenance cost is minimum and you’re only working on the things that you actually need.
Chris Oliver (04:13.036) Yeah, exactly.
Federico Ramallo (04:15.02) But in retrospect, happens with that is that then other people needs exactly the same features that you need. So it kind of works.
Chris Oliver (04:22.179) Yeah.
Yeah, until they start asking for other things and you’re like, that shouldn’t be that hard and you go build it. Then you got to maintain it for the rest of your life. and you don’t use that, like that payment service or whatever, if you don’t use it and it changes, then people are like, well, when are you going to fix it? And you’re like, I didn’t know it was broken because I don’t use it. And that’s where it gets to be like really tough, you know? So you have to figure out where to draw the line of like, I use this, so I will maintain it and.
Federico Ramallo (04:33.367) Right.
Chris Oliver (04:54.828) You know, we’ll officially do that, but maybe not everything. So, it’s tough.
Federico Ramallo (05:00.888) That’s a good tip for open source repos maintainers.
Chris Oliver (05:05.718) Yeah. yes. Yeah. I’ve been burned by that. Like with the pay gem, just supporting many different payment processors and like, only use one or two, Stripe and use Braintree a little bit for PayPal, but we don’t really use that anymore. and it’s just like, seems fine.
at first, but then you get into the weeds and you’re like, actually these services look similar, but they’re very different. And this is way more complicated. And now I have to deal with all these edge cases and things like, for example, Braintree, at least last I looked, and I don’t think it’s changed, but they don’t let you swap a subscription from like a yearly plan to a monthly or vice versa.
You have to calculate the prorations and cancel the subscription and create a new one on the new billing period. Uh, and then you have to credit them for the portion of the month that you paid for already, but haven’t used and like create a $1 coupon code that you then multiply by that time period that you’re giving them credit for. And it’s tedious. Like you go to stripe and it’s just like, Oh, you want to search that? Cool. We’ll prorate it for you and calculate all that.
Federico Ramallo (05:54.029) Right.
Federico Ramallo (06:02.292) Chris Oliver (06:23.704) do it ourselves so you don’t have to. And Braintree was like, nah, that’s your problem. So little things like that end up being very painful to, you know, just maintain, especially like if you don’t really use it much or at all. So I’ve said yes to too many things and now I have to say no to too many things.
Federico Ramallo (06:44.792) Yes, and the and Because it’s your if your repo you can say well, it’s there You know if you want you can clone it and you know make it your own right? But now you have to maintain it or you can use it as is you know
Chris Oliver (06:56.621) Yeah.
Chris Oliver (07:02.606) Yep. Yep. Yeah. Now I take the default of like, well, go make a plugin or something like, you know, add this yourself and, and, uh, that helps. Cause then I can maintain the stuff that I use. And that’s like a good example of like until recently rails had always told you don’t use SQLite. It’s not going to work in production. It’s not fast enough, blah, blah. And recently, um,
with all the effort that 37signals put in and Steven Markheim and other contributors like SQLite’s totally production ready. It was like the Rails implementation of SQLite wasn’t actually that good and was missing a few things. So then finally when 37signals needed SQLite support in their once apps, like, let’s go fix that finally.
Federico Ramallo (07:46.168) specifically.
Chris Oliver (07:58.862) Like nobody really used it. So nobody cared enough to fix those things until, until they did. So, you know, it’s a good example of that where it’s like, it’s open source. Yeah, we have it for convenience. So you don’t have to run a database server like Postgres or MySQL, but it’s not production ready. Well, it was only not production ready because nobody put the effort into like fixing the issues. cause SQLite’s actually really powerful.
Federico Ramallo (07:59.608) You
Chris Oliver (08:27.823) perform it. it is just a good example of that in action in the real world of the open source projects can say they support everything, but there will be a lot of rough edges in those things that don’t get used very often.
Federico Ramallo (08:47.852) Right. Yeah, I think that used to be the issue with open source projects that they didn’t have enough quality to be used in production environments. And that has been changing throughout the years, And well, Rails is one of those projects that, you know, from the get-go was production ready, right? You could build stuff very quickly. Yeah. And…
Chris Oliver (08:58.99) Yeah.
Chris Oliver (09:13.87) Right?
Federico Ramallo (09:17.494) The issue that I had with open source project, for instance, for Ubuntu, you had like four or five different audio editors, but none of them were good enough to use, right? So…
Chris Oliver (09:32.567) Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that’s probably one of the biggest things holding me back from switching to Linux full time is like, I really need something as good as screen flow where I can record my screen and my camera and then have just basic editing built in so I can insert my intro and outro and the audio and music for that and just some kind of basic stuff. there’s like…
You know, things that are good for video editing but not like screencasting software, like ScreenFlow really. And so maybe, I’ll, if I ever find a lot of free time, maybe I’ll make an open source screencast editor for Linux.
Federico Ramallo (10:20.312) Yes, the maturity of the tools that we can find on Mac are really good. It pains me to buy the new hardware, but it lasts forever, so it kind of works out.
Chris Oliver (10:36.419) Yep, definitely.
Federico Ramallo (10:38.423) I recently bought a Mac Studio to start playing with the LLMs. It’s amazing. You have so much RAM, right? They call it differently. It’s integrated memory. So I got the 96 gigabytes of RAM.
Chris Oliver (10:41.571) Me too.
Yeah.
Chris Oliver (10:47.991) What size did you get?
Chris Oliver (10:54.799) Did you get the M3 Ultra?
Federico Ramallo (10:57.846) I think yes.
Chris Oliver (10:59.299) That’s the one I got too. Yeah. Yeah. I got that one, not for LLMs, but the, the ultra processors have more media encoders. So when I’m exporting video and screenflow, it’s like way faster, like several minutes faster. Like I think last time I tried it, on my M1 Max versus the M2, I, I bought an M2 ultra.
Federico Ramallo (11:16.44) nice.
Chris Oliver (11:28.771) before I started reading, was like, well, the next one’s coming out soon. So I returned that and waited, but it was like 50 % the time to export from my M1 Max, and I was like, whoa. And it was just, if you watch the activity monitor, it’s like CPU and GPU usage are like nothing. And I was like, well then what is doing the exports here? And it’s like screen flows using the media encoders.
in order to export. like the more of those you have, the more it can do in parallel. And I realized then, if you look at the, you know, one ultra, two ultra and three ultra, whatever the ultra has had double the max of media encoders. I forget it’s like two to four or something like that. but they may, they made a big difference. It’s I’m so happy to have this cause I can like record a video.
export it and upload it all within like a few minutes. It’s awesome.
Federico Ramallo (12:31.052) Right, right. I used to build computers, you myself put them together, screw them up, you know, it’s so much fun, you know, and when you have more time than money, you know, you can save money, you can, you know, you can take, yeah, my first computer, didn’t have enough money to buy the case, right? So my first computer was literally on a table with all the components, you know, and it worked, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah. And,
Chris Oliver (12:51.345) yeah, yeah.
Chris Oliver (12:55.503) Yeah, works fine.
Federico Ramallo (13:01.13) Ice caverns component from here and there. When you’re doing IT support, you kind of get spare parts that nobody wants. So I was saying, can I take this home? And they were like, yeah, sure. We’re going to throw it away. So it wasn’t the last one, but it works. And then eventually, I evolved to when I moved to Ubuntu, I building the core, the kernel, and all that stuff. But then eventually,
Chris Oliver (13:11.033) Yep.
Chris Oliver (13:15.235) Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (13:31.22) you run out of time of doing those type of things. So having an off the shelf computer you can grab and it has everything you need to work, I think it’s great.
Chris Oliver (13:40.653) Yup. I agree. Yeah. I’ve, you know, every time I built a computer, there’s like little settings that you need to tweak or something doesn’t work and you gotta find this driver configuration thing. And it’s just like, so tedious to try and get working. And I’m like, I just buy a Mac. It works. I can focus on what I need to do, but I used to like, speaking of Ubuntu, like
Federico Ramallo (14:01.016) You
Chris Oliver (14:07.247) When I really got into programming, I bought my own laptop and installed Ubuntu. It was probably 7.10, or it probably was 7.10, maybe 7.04. I don’t remember exactly, but it’s like 2007. And I got on the forums because there was all these different things. Like the Nvidia driver was really hard to install back then.
I found on the forums, some guy on the Ubuntu forums had the similar laptop, but the AMD version. I had the Intel version and he had documented like all the different drivers and config things and they didn’t work for me for everything. Cause I had a different graphics card and I had whatever else. so I started writing a tutorial like he did with all of my parts and all of my drivers and things. And.
Was like, you know, if I’m going to write this down for myself, I might as well share it publicly so other people can use it. And, maybe we can get more people using Linux. And that kind of was what started my, career, like, you know, making education stuff like that. So I met that guy. We talked a whole bunch. He was like a software developer. and he like gave me some advice on like, wanted to.
write software and there was some kid in college that wrote this tool to install the Nvidia driver because it was pretty tough to do and tweak properly. So he wrote this little GUI that you could run and it would do all that for you. And so this guy with the other laptop, the AMD version, he goes, I was asking him for some advice and I was like, I want to contribute back somehow.
And I have dial up at home and I have a flash drive and high speed internet at school. So he was like, you know, you should probably use like Python cause it’s, works on windows and it’s pre-installed on Ubuntu and it should work on a Mac. But I reverse engineered, um, aptitude, the like package manager for Ubuntu. I would run it in verbose mode. it would tell me all the files it’s downloading.
Chris Oliver (16:26.927) And I would go download the files and read them. And I would learn like, this is how Ubuntu works internally. Like it’s got the packages that are installed. can grab that file and read it with Python and then go download like Firefox and all its dependencies. And I would pull down that from the repository and see like this has all these dependencies and each one of those has its own dependencies.
But we have these installed. So let me go find a list of the packages that we need to download. Because it’s not as easy on Linux as just grabbing an EXE file to install everything. So that was my first big project that was open source called Carricks. And I got interviewed in a magazine because I wrote that and open sourced it and shared it on the Ubuntu forums. And it was like, if anybody else has this problem. Because there was a couple tools.
similar, like didn’t they weren’t very user friendly and I didn’t really want to have a command line program. So I wrote a UI for it. and I learned like, well, you gotta use threads because if you do the work in the main thread, then the UI freezes in the window gets stuck. So I don’t know what a thread is. Let me go figure that out. And I read about it and then built, I rewrote that app like 13 or 14 times. Cause I learned so much, you know, I didn’t know.
Object oriented programming. Or anything like that. So sorry, my dog is wanting to play. Yeah, so I didn’t know any object oriented programming and I had to teach myself what a class was and all this stuff to build this app. And so each time I’d be learning a bunch of stuff and go back and be like, I think I could do that more efficiently or faster or with a better.
Federico Ramallo (18:06.712) Yeah
Chris Oliver (18:24.335) you know, UI or something, and I would just rewrite it. And each time I’d learn a ton of things, and it was like something that people tell you don’t rewrite your code or whatever, and it’s like, rewrite your code. You’ll be amazed how much you’ve learned when you can compare the two side by side. Like, the first version I wrote was horrible, and then the last version had a great UI. It had all these different features. It had plugins. I didn’t know how to do that.
And I just was doing what… I was just kind of exploring and it was way faster, way more efficient. And then it got popular on the forums and I got interviewed in the magazine. At my parents’ house, we went to Barnes and Noble and I had bought the magazine with my article in it. I think it’s online too somewhere on the Linux Journal website, but that also got a couple emails.
where some guy in South Africa was like, hey, I’m setting up a computer lab. We barely have reliable power, and we don’t have reliable internet. And we’re going to use Linux. So we used your software to set everything up. And I was like, that’s amazing. And then somebody else in the US government emailed me once when it was like, hey, just want to say thanks. We were using this on a super secure air gap server that can’t be connected to the network.
Federico Ramallo (19:37.91) you
Chris Oliver (19:50.987) And I need to put software on there. So I used your tool and I was like, what? Like that is wild. So this is all when I was in school, you know, just learning. And I was like sharing what I was doing and exploring and you know, you have no idea what’s going to come of it, but it’s amazing. Open source is so much fun. So that kind of like, that got a, I don’t know, 150,000 downloads over a few years. And I just realized then that like,
Federico Ramallo (19:58.117) Ha
Chris Oliver (20:19.799) whatever I work on from now on, like people have to use it. That’s what like fulfills me. I don’t want to build software that nobody uses or whatever. That became really important to me because I met so many people. So it’s been fun to build Go Rails and Hatchbox and everything else and, you know, see people using it and asking for new features or bug fixes or whatever it is. It’s just, it’s the thing that I’m like, well.
the people at the end of the day that I’m helping is why I like programming so much, you know?
Federico Ramallo (20:56.598) Yeah, when you work on this open source project, you have such an intimate connection with the people that use it that no other, when you’re working on a closed source project, you don’t have the level of connection with the people, right? And then because it’s open source, a lot of people can contribute it. So now that builds a community around it. So yeah, I think that’s great.
Chris Oliver (21:14.329) Right.
Chris Oliver (21:25.987) Yeah, yeah, it’s what it’s all about at the end of the day, you know?
Federico Ramallo (21:32.076) Yes, interesting. I didn’t know that the origin story for Gold Rails comes from… It’s connected with Ubuntu.
Chris Oliver (21:43.597) Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, because I took what I like, the tutorials I started to write for Ubuntu I had on my personal site. And then I started learning Rails because I got a job for a professor at school that was doing Rails. And so I’m learning to deploy a Rails application and whatever. And I’m writing notes myself. And I put them up on my blog because why not share my notes? There’s nothing.
You know, that important I need to keep secret. And then at some point I was like, you know, I should just like, I have a bunch of random thoughts that I’m putting on my blog about school or learning or business or whatever, random stuff. And then there’s like Rails tutorials sprinkled in the middle. And I was like, I should just buy a domain and put all the Rails stuff there. So I…
search for like, you know, domains with rails in it and go rails came up and I was like, well, there you go. Short domain, um, great name and everything. And then I put my tutorials up there and for whatever reason, uh, they got indexed and then people started sharing that on stack overflow, which then got some good domain reputation from stack overflow. And, uh, you know, immediately had like five or 6,000 visits a month after.
not being live for very long. And I was like, well, this is fascinating. Maybe I could do something with this. Like if they come and learn something from those tutorials, maybe I could like sell them something. So that became GoRails. in the first, in 2014, I quit consulting Cold Turkey because like I was just like risk averse. Like I knew I could just do another consulting project and make money.
But in my free time, I wouldn’t really put myself in the uncomfortable position of like, you got to make this work. Like do stuff that, you know, go talk to strangers, go sell stuff. And I was like, yeah, I’ll just keep hacking on code and whatever. So I decided I’m going to force myself to figure this out. I’m going to quit everything. I’m not going to make any money. I’m going to take this rare opportunity because I saved money. I didn’t have any expenses hardly.
Chris Oliver (24:06.209) No responsibilities. And I was like, now’s the time to try it. So, I did and was like, I’m going to make some screencasts and maybe sell a course. like, I missed rails casts, which were a weekly, screencasts, but I didn’t want to like commit to doing a screencast every week for the rest of my life. So was like, I’ll do a course and I’ll do one free one and a paid one. And the free one was like five lessons and the paid one was like 10.
And nobody bought them because nobody knew who I was. like, why would you buy a course for somebody you’ve never heard of? Why are you going to trust them? And it was like 39 bucks. And I had sold like two of them in a month. And I was like, I’m not going to pay for rent or food or anything like this. So that was like four or five months in, in 2014.
Federico Ramallo (24:55.162) Ha
Chris Oliver (25:05.807) And I was like, well, my savings is dwindling and I better figure this out soon. So I realized then, like, if people don’t trust me, then I need to publish free stuff. And hopefully that will help build trust more that if you learn something from the free video, then you probably learn something from the paid video. So that pretty much became go rails being a weekly subscription.
screencasts just like Railscast because I was like, well, maybe that’s what made it work for Ryan Bates. And yeah, then people recognized immediately like, this is kind of like Railscast. And I was like, I’m not trying to be like Railscast, but I’m just trying to figure out something that works and it seemed to work well for Ryan. And I ended up interviewing for a job.
for a Y Combinator startup that was doing education and had their big course as one month Rails. And I was like, well, I’m a pretty good candidate for this job. And the day I was interviewing with the CEO, somebody had submitted Go Rails to Hacker News. And Go Rails was number two all night. And so I woke up to 600 emails from MailChimp that were like, you have a new email subscriber. And I was like, whoa.
So that really was when GoRail started to actually make a little bit of money. But I was out of money, so I actually went and worked for that company for a year. And then a year later, it didn’t really work out. And so I went full time on GoRails after that. yeah, that’s kind of how GoRail started. It was real slow at the beginning, because I didn’t.
I wasn’t confident, I didn’t know what I was doing, I doubted myself and keep, thankfully kept making content and didn’t give up, but it was slow going for a long time.
Federico Ramallo (27:07.384) Right, right. I think we all miss Ryan Bates’ railcasts. That was very interesting, A few thoughts. So first, I think that it’s… You said lightly, so I want to emphasize on that the lessons learned. In retrospect, sounds, obvious sounds, you
Chris Oliver (27:13.081) Definitely. Yes.
Federico Ramallo (27:37.272) That was a course to make, that was a decision to make. in that moment, it’s so difficult to come up to realize those insights, to understand what is going on and to make the decisions because you’re operating on a very limited subset of data that you have. And when you have no response, no response, what does that mean? Does it mean that nobody likes what I did or does it mean that I did something wrong?
And operating on that uncertainty is difficult, right? Yes, yes. And then the other thing I want to, you know, encomend, I don’t know if that’s a right word, but recognize that you took a leap of faith. You put all in. And that’s very brave.
Chris Oliver (28:17.508) Yeah.
Chris Oliver (28:30.894) Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, it was, I mean, it wasn’t, it felt scary, but it wasn’t that scary. Like worst case scenario, I’d go live in my parents basement or whatever, like, you know, but, but I had saved like nine months worth of cash and was like, you know, I am a person who, um, you know, these days, like I can go to a conference and talk to people and stuff, but I was like,
Federico Ramallo (28:45.548) Bye.
Chris Oliver (29:02.869) and any other awkward, quiet, introverted developer back then. And so I didn’t like the idea of like, want to run my own business, but I didn’t want to go talk to people and stuff. And it was like, I got to go figure that out. Like, I’m the one holding myself back here. I need to address my own shortcomings and like force myself to figure it out. So yeah, that was kind of the big thing that I realized. Like even recording videos, like
I learned to program in grade school and all of it’s in your own head. You’re not talking to anybody. You’re sitting there quietly, like typing at a computer, thinking about things in your head. But when it came to like recording videos, I couldn’t stand my own voice. I couldn’t really edit it. I couldn’t even explain what I was thinking or any of that. So like the first videos are horrible. And I just like, I couldn’t stand it. So it literally took me
three months to come to the conclusion that like I’ve spent January and February and most of March doing absolutely nothing. I’ve gotten nowhere. I’ve not even recorded a full video yet. And I was like, this isn’t gonna work. I’m just gonna have to give up. Or, you know, I can force myself to record a video every day and just record 15 minutes and like I’ll delete it if it’s bad.
And I just did. Every single day I’d record something and delete it because it was terrible. But eventually after you do that for like a few weeks or a month you’re like, well that one wasn’t that bad. Like I’m starting to get the hang of it. And those videos became like the first 15 videos. Those two courses that I made became the first 15 videos of Go Rails. And they were the ones that were decent enough that I thought were okay to publish, you know.
And they’re terrible if you look at them now, but like they were still good enough at the time because not many people were making videos teaching Ruby on Rails. So most of it really was just me holding myself back. I had some standards that I couldn’t get to. And then I realized like, just got to keep practicing until I get better at this. And if I don’t, then I will never get better at it. And then what happens? yeah.
Federico Ramallo (31:25.944) You
Chris Oliver (31:28.811) It’s nice if you’re able to do that where I didn’t have a family, I just had a cat, I didn’t have many expenses, I was happy to eat ramen or whatever. And worst case scenario, I could go back to living with my parents, but I really didn’t want to do that. And I can also always go back to consulting. That wasn’t a problem either. I didn’t enjoy it, but I could fall back to that at any point. I could probably get a project pretty quickly.
you know, from my old clients or a friend of theirs or something. So I just realized like, I got to go force myself to do something scary. and that, that I remember, this is funny. I remember back in that day, there was, there was like a popular thing going around called like rejection therapy or something like that. And there was this guy on YouTube that would go around and do
He would do that, which is basically like every single time you go into a restaurant, go ask for something. Just ask for 20 % off your bill. You would be embarrassed to go do that normally. Just go to Walmart and ask for 20 % off your groceries or something. And they’re gonna just tell you no. Why would you just give you some random person a discount?
This guy, this video goes viral because this guy goes into Krispy Kreme and he goes to order donuts and he goes, he goes, can you make me the Olympic rings in donuts? And he’s like asking a ridiculous question because he wants to get a no so he can just like feel a little awkward and move on. But the lady at the, the lady at the register was like, yeah, like, do you have a picture? And he’s like, no, I don’t.
Federico Ramallo (33:19.8) And they say yes.
Chris Oliver (33:26.583) like I wanted you to say no, but she goes and finds a picture on the internet of the colors and which location in the Olympic rings they are. And she goes and makes them for him and cuts the donuts and everything so they link together. And video was him sitting there waiting for her to make these donuts, just being like face palming the whole time, like so embarrassed, like what have I done?
Federico Ramallo (33:49.474) What have I done?
Chris Oliver (33:53.691) And the internet was like, this is amazing. Like tell Krispy Kreme corporate to give this lady a raise and a promotion and whatever, cause she’s, she’s incredible. And, that’s when I was like, you know what, this is the kind of stuff that I need, like in my life right now, because I’m afraid to like, I don’t want to go up and ask for something or whatever. Like if you made a mistake in my
in what I ordered, like I asked for no peas or something and there was peas in my like pasta or whatever. Like I just deal with it, you know, pick them out. Not a big deal, but like you could say something you could say, Hey, I didn’t order that. Like those little things at the time I was just like terrible at, and introverted and everything. So it was, it was funny. that kind of stuff made a big difference for me back then. Cause it was like,
Yeah, you know what, the business you want to build, the person that’s going to hold you back from success is you. So you got to fix yourself first in order to make progress. And I was like, OK, I think I can do that. That’s not so bad. But at the time, it felt scary, really scary.
Federico Ramallo (35:09.75) I have the same issue with I’m an introvert that trained myself to become extroverted. So I remember the day that I made that decision. It’s like, if I want to make this work, I have to be more extroverted. So I had to go out and do things. And that’s when I started doing a podcast. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Chris Oliver (35:17.71) Yeah.
Chris Oliver (35:30.189) Yeah, like doing a podcast.
Federico Ramallo (35:37.312) And after a while you feel more comfortable, more comfortable doing it. but, but yeah, it takes a while. Yeah. and I, I, if I watch my videos from the beginning, you know, from the beginning of the podcast, I realized, this is, you know, I sucked on those videos, right. and now it can be better and better, you know, on, on doing this. So yeah, I, I think that the practice, the practice makes.
Chris Oliver (35:57.303) Right?
Federico Ramallo (36:06.86) makes you better, but you need to break that initial ice of, have to do it even if it’s going to be bad, so I can just break the ice and start it, right?
Chris Oliver (36:18.093) Yep, yep. Yeah, that’s the way it’s gotta be sometimes. But as long as you get through it, you know, you can live so much more of a fulfilling life that way. And I think most people are in that same boat. No matter what kind of thing it is, it’s usually something that they’re holding themselves back from. You you’re afraid to go ask for promotion at work or…
whatever, and it’s like, you don’t get what you don’t ask for. So if you’re not, if you’re not going to ask, then the person who does will much more likely get a promotion. So if you want to get a promotion, go ask for it. And if they don’t, if they say no, then you ask like, okay, what do I need to do to get one? And then you can learn because otherwise you’re just going to sit around like doing the same stuff and not changing your behavior. And you may not get the promotion at all.
Because you didn’t even bother to ask, like, how do I get there? So, yeah.
Federico Ramallo (37:23.278) you get rejected 100 % of the time that you don’t ask.
Chris Oliver (37:27.287) Right, exactly, and you don’t even know it.
Federico Ramallo (37:28.524) Yes. That’s right. So talking a bit about Rails 8, know, it’s coming, well, it came up recently. You know, we learned a little bit about what’s coming up new on the last Red Scope, which is a little bit of a little bit, you know, sad. Which one?
Chris Oliver (37:48.771) Yep, the next one’s coming up soon. 42 days.
Chris Oliver (37:55.971) Rails World in September, yeah, beginning of September. So, very soon.
Federico Ramallo (37:57.547) yes!
September. Yes, yes, I won’t be able to go to that one, but I wish you a lot of success there.
Chris Oliver (38:11.223) Yeah, thanks. I gotta start working on my talk.
Federico Ramallo (38:13.944) That’s a good question I was going to ask if you’re going to do another talk there.
Chris Oliver (38:18.925) Yep, yep. We have a baby coming right afterwards. So I was deciding whether or not I should submit a talk. And I said, you know, I’ll submit something. And if I don’t get picked, then good. I’ll stay home and we’ll just relax before the baby comes. But I submitted something too good, I guess, and got selected. So I’ll be speaking this year in Amsterdam. And yeah, I can’t wait.
It’s another one of those things where like, it was not very long ago where I was going to conferences, but I would never submit a talk. And my wife was like, hey, you need to submit something and get, you know, get used to speaking on stage. And I was like, what are you talking about? Like, I hate public speaking and you know, I don’t want to be up on stage. This is the worst thing. I like, I tried to avoid that as much as possible in school. And you know what, after you do it.
A few times, it’s not so bad. And especially at a conference, like a Rails conference, it’s all just a big group of friends. It’s not strangers. It’s all people who are there because they love the same programming language as you, or framework, or whatever, and they’re there not because they have to be there. They’re there because they want to be there. that made it a lot easier. And I was like, this is great. This is so much fun.
Federico Ramallo (39:43.864) You
Chris Oliver (39:44.259) and I get to like share some interesting things that I ran into or whatever that, that was the other thing that I struggled with too. It was like, okay, you’re going to get up in front of 800 people or something. What are you going to talk about that is interesting for everybody, no matter what their experience level is? Like DHH may be in the audience. What are you going to talk about that he might find interesting or whatever? And then there might be somebody who just started learning.
yesterday, can you also talk about stuff in the same talk that they’ll find interesting?” And I was like, this is hard. But over time, you start doing… You do that a few times, then you start to get a feel for, I should talk about this or that or whatever, because it’s kind of genuinely applicable to everything and not super specific on one…
Federico Ramallo (40:23.254) Yes.
Chris Oliver (40:41.839) level of expertise or something.
Federico Ramallo (40:46.616) Yeah, I did a presentation in front of, I think it was like 3,000 people, something like that. Yeah, yeah, that’s a lot of people. The whole Hilton packed with people, you know.
Chris Oliver (40:55.079) wow, that’s a lot of people.
Federico Ramallo (41:06.08) I had to do my demo and while I’m walking to the stage, my computer freeze and I had to reboot it again. So I’m like, no, I’m going to die. know, so eventually you get used to that level of pressure, you know, but, the thing is you, I, well, what happens to me is that I still feel nervous, but now I know how to process that. So I can, you know, let it go. doesn’t affect me as much. Right.
Chris Oliver (41:11.542) no!
Chris Oliver (41:16.493) You
Chris Oliver (41:30.564) Yeah.
Chris Oliver (41:35.607) Right, right. Yeah, I had to learn to like, sort of memorize my talk so that if I get up there and something like that happens or I’m nervous and I forget things, if it’s memorized, then I can’t really forget it. So it’s much calmer up on stage then. I’m not worried or whatever, which then I might talk too fast or too slow or whatever. It’ll…
it’ll mess me up. So I realized like, just need to be prepared. And if I memorize it, then I feel prepared enough. And if I’ve done it enough times, like then I feel like, okay, I don’t need to memorize it all. can go up and wing it and still be good. Because, you know, I’ve practiced enough or just understand it well enough to go up and talk without having to be fully prepared or something. So, you know.
More of that understanding yourself and your flaws and how to address those so that you can get through those things makes a big difference.
Federico Ramallo (42:38.392) Yes, yes, I agree. Yeah, and the preparation is key because then if something goes wrong, it won’t like affect you as much, right? Yeah. Yeah.
Chris Oliver (42:48.815) Right, exactly. Yep, yeah, I’m excited for the, I hope some, you know, there’s a lot of three main things that were announced last year at Rails World that I’m hoping I’ll ship somewhere soon around Rails World this year. And then maybe we’ll get some more teasers about what’s coming next in Rails. I know there was like search and a new editor.
Federico Ramallo (43:08.946) nice.
Chris Oliver (43:18.649) text editor, and I forget what the third thing was announced last year, but we haven’t seen any of those yet. So looking forward to, it’s eight or nine months later, so we should see them soon, I hope.
Federico Ramallo (43:33.986) I hope, yes, yes. I like the new rich text fields on Rails 8. That’s amazing, yeah.
Chris Oliver (43:40.525) Yes. Yeah. Yeah. The new the new text editor is going to be built on Jorge is working on it and it’s built on lexical from Facebook and it has like all kinds of functionality and I think it’s going to support like HTML and markdown output and use like the one of the things that came out with the rich text was
I think I was the first person to kind of dig into this, like action text got announced in Rails 7 or whatever it was. And there was like, as I’m poking through the code, I was like, there’s something interesting here, but there’s no documentation about it. Well, you can reference any database records you want. So like you can at mention a user and it will save a reference to the user’s record.
So when they change their name or their avatar or their email address or whatever, when the text is rendered again, it will look them up out of the database and display their current name and their current avatar and stuff. Because if you used GitHub, you might have noticed there is sometimes at mentions to somebody’s username, but they’ve changed their username and it just doesn’t link to anything anymore or it links to a different user who took over that username.
And they don’t do that rich linking to the database records. They just have the username text and they look that up when they’re rendering the comments and stuff. So the way Rails is doing it was actually really, really great, but there was no tools to be able to build that into the editor really. So I had to go learn how that worked and, you know, talk to, I think George Claghorn had done a lot of that.
work and so he was explaining to me a bit in the in the rails github repository about how it works and I was like okay I think I can piece this together and I think that became one of my like railsconf talks that I initially gave or was explaining some of that stuff like you can embed a tweet you can embed a youtube video you can embed a user out of your database and all of this is really cool and supported but
Chris Oliver (46:04.141) not really documented. So that’s a really good conference talk to give. And that was one that fit my criteria of how can I make a talk that will be useful to somebody really beginner or a Rails expert and like here’s a new feature that nobody really understands, go explain it. And that makes for a good talk. So that was fun times and I kinda try to do that now.
Federico Ramallo (46:18.776) events. Yeah.
Chris Oliver (46:32.973) wherever I can, like if there’s something not well documented, seems like a great opportunity for me to go help the rest of the community learn, you know?
Federico Ramallo (46:44.088) Right, right. That’s interesting. Yeah. I didn’t know that you could do that. You could mention stuff on this action text. I will look it up.
Chris Oliver (46:52.463) Yeah, yeah, it should be once the new editor is built, should be much easier because it’ll have some of the functionality built in. Because right now you have to use like your own JavaScript or a tool where you can type like the at symbol and then some characters and then have it intercept that and then query and build a dropdown and then you select something and then it needs to insert.
into the editor, but it needs to have a special format for that, because it’s technically, if you mention a user, it’s like an attachment, even though an attachment could also be like an image you drag and drop in there. So it’s complicated, which is why it wasn’t well documented, but it’s still complicated today. So the new editor hopefully should make that much, simpler, because I think they want to make it really easy.
to do that because it’s something that at this point, you know, that used to be a nice to have feature when you’re building web applications. Now that’s like a baseline requirement. Every text box should be able to mention a user or, you know, if you’re in Basecamp, it’s like maybe you want to reference a calendar event or a message board post or a to do or something. You need to be able to reference things in your applications these days like
Go use Notion, you can reference anything, anywhere, any way, you know? And that is just kind of table stakes today. So I’m hoping that that becomes really easy here in the next, hopefully, month or two or whatever. We’ll see.
Federico Ramallo (48:34.956) that’s nice. Yes, because I tried to implement as mentioned on Action Text. And when I started getting into it, it was always, it’s getting too complicated. I’ll put it on the backlog and I’ll do it later, right? Because I had the dropdown and the users were already using that on the search boxes. So yeah, I like that. I tried to do that, but yeah, it was…
Chris Oliver (48:41.561) Mm-hmm.
Chris Oliver (48:49.198) Yep, yep.
Federico Ramallo (49:04.792) too much effort for the little time that I have to do that.
Chris Oliver (49:07.853) Yeah, yeah, that’s one of the features that we put in jumpstart to save people time. It’s like we already have all the users wired up so you can easily do that. But like the JavaScript library that I use, Zurb Tribute, like it’s archived. Like they don’t maintain it anymore, which works fine still. But like if there are bugs, they’re not getting fixed. And I need to go fix it at some point, but I don’t want to maintain their code base.
And it’s written however they wanted to do it. And I might want to use vanilla JavaScript or something. So hopefully that becomes not a problem for us. Or the new lexical-based editor should have most of that kind of stuff built in. I think that a lot of the front end stuff has got a lot of learnings between now and then. There are many different approaches that have been tried and tested.
Now people understand like here’s the better way of doing this on the front end without a ton and browsers have gotten a lot better too. So you can do dialogues now, which is like magical, way simpler than if you’ve ever had to build the dialogue from scratch in HTML and CSS. Like you don’t want, you open the dialogue, you need an animation to open it. Then you need to lock the page from scrolling. But if you do that, then the sidebar
Federico Ramallo (50:23.466) It’s too much work. Yeah.
Chris Oliver (50:34.253) the scroll bar disappears, so then you have to add padding, and then you have to find some way to calculate the padding of the scroll bar so the page layout doesn’t shift. And the size of the scroll bar is different on macOS and Windows, but also every browser is a little different. And so every little detail of building a dialogue is super tricky. And then thankfully now the browsers have that built in, and you can just say, show this dialogue, and voila, you’re done, for the most part. It’s not perfect, but.
You know, it’s way simpler than it used to be. And those are the things that we like have today that we can take advantage of and save a ton of time. Cause you could get stuck doing that. And if you’re trying to make it perfect, that could take you a month at least, you know, to deal with every browser, every little edge case. I’m sure that even today bootstrap is still merging in, you know, bug fixes on their, their custom modals that they had. So yeah.
It’s wild. Those are the things that really make like Rails great as a tool because you can get so much done. Like you were listing off my projects earlier and it’s like, that’s crazy amount of stuff to look back that I built as one person, you know, just tinkering with things. And I guess I kind of have a good, I’m lucky in the sense that like I love doing open source and tinkering with these projects. And if I learn something,
building one of those projects, I can turn it into a video and make it for Go Rails. If I build a feature for one of our apps, I can then extract it into Jumpstart and then I might need it in Go Rails and it’s already in the template so I can use it everywhere. And I kind of made it so that my own business can feed itself from all these different angles, which is really great in the long run of.
keeping it sustainable, but it probably is some of the superpowers of how I can get so many different projects built and stuff over the years. Because I just have a nice sort of way of intertwining all of them together, you know?
Federico Ramallo (52:50.104) Right, right. Yeah, because it’s a win-win. You get the audience and you also get to launch the open source project. Yes, I understand. I’m working on my app. For drop downs, I use Choice.js. I have to review your kit. And one of the things I wanted to do is not use jQuery. I didn’t want to build a…
Chris Oliver (52:58.957) Yep. Yep.
Chris Oliver (53:10.469) huh, yep.
Federico Ramallo (53:20.384) a full-fledged React select, which I’ve done before, and it’s a pain to keep up, right? And it works. I mean, it’s like 50 lines of code or whatever, and it works, right? It’s solid, right? And it’s vanilla JavaScript. So I love the simplicity of that. And I actually did a talk, I think it was in March, where I kind of talk about that, like, how much you can get away with stimulus without getting into React, right?
Chris Oliver (53:26.477) Yep.
Chris Oliver (53:48.461) Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (53:49.836) Basically, you can do a lot of stuff, right? So we had to build a feature for calendar booking meetings. So we built a calendar scheduling thing, all with stimulus, right? And the DOM, and it works great, right? So yeah, I think that Vanilla JS or stimulus and some libraries is the way to go, yeah.
Chris Oliver (54:21.175) Yeah, if you can get away with vanilla JavaScript and simple tools, it’s the same thing on the backend. The simpler you can, the fewer dependencies and the simpler you can build something, the longer you can run it without having to touch it. Stuff isn’t going to break. But if you use React, React decides to change their framework every, every other month or something, you know, it’s whatever React.
Federico Ramallo (54:48.716) Yes.
Chris Oliver (54:50.795) It’s gonna be like the, now that’s what I call music, you know, CDs, remember those, where it’s like every few months there’s another number and it’s like they’re up to, I don’t know, several hundred or something. It’s like React releases are just the same thing and they break so much stuff. But if you use very simple things like the browser’s modal, that’s not gonna change for a long, long time, like in any breaking way.
So you might get some new features in the long term, but you are going to use that feature in the browser, and your code’s just gonna run for a long time, and you’re not gonna have to touch it unless you want to, to add a new feature or to improve it in some way. So for all of these projects I’m doing, the thing I learned the most was like, yeah, I used to grab a gem to do something for me.
And now I will say like, how hard is this? Do I need a ton of these complicated things? say for pagination, that can be kind of tricky to do. It doesn’t seem that hard, but it’s actually like a painful problem sometimes. so grab a gem for that. They’ve gone through the trouble of making that performant and handling all the edge cases and everything that you don’t have to worry about. But if it’s something,
you know, like an API client for some API that you use. You can grab that gem off the shelf, but you do that once, then you need another API. You do it again. That API gem is a little different. It’s set up differently. The interface is not the same. It’s kind of clunky. And you start to realize like, if I do this five more times, I’m going to have all these different dependencies.
They’re gonna break when this external API changes and I don’t even need half of it. I only need this one feature from each one, like for Hatchbox when we create a server. I really don’t need the Hetzner gem, the AWS gem, the DigitalOcean gem, the Linode gem. If I did that, then we’re just going to end up with a mess trying to maintain all of those. Somebody’s gonna abandon one of them and then I’m gonna have to take over it.
Chris Oliver (57:10.595) and I only use the create server feature of it or whatever. Like I only use a tiny thing. So rather than doing that, like in Hatchbox started building our own API clients from scratch in plain Ruby. We don’t even use you know, Faraday or anything. We just use net HTTP, keep it super easy, because that’s not likely to change very much. And then we just built those integrations for
all of those APIs. I think we may still use AWS’s or whatever, because we have some of them, we do a little more deep integration with different things. But for the most part, I write the code once and I don’t have to touch it unless those APIs change. And those companies don’t really want to change their APIs because they’re going to break all their customers, you know, integrations. So they don’t want to do that. So now my code is way more reliable because I don’t have to worry about these things.
Federico Ramallo (57:47.138) Right.
Chris Oliver (58:07.097) hardly changing at all and it makes it so that we can maintain stuff for the long term with minimal maintenance. And I think that’s really important. It’s one of those where I decide to take on a little extra burden at the beginning because I’ve got to read the docs and build all this stuff from scratch. But I made some tools. I made an API client class and then I was like, you know what, this might be handy to have for other things.
Federico Ramallo (58:32.824) Thank
Chris Oliver (58:35.735) let’s put it in Jumpstart. Now we use it in Go Rails and Jumpstart and Hatchbox and like all of our apps. And I don’t ever pull in any API clients gems anymore because those are dependencies that all work differently. So there’s nothing consistent between them. But when I do it my way, they’re all exactly consistent. You know, the APIs are a little bit different in some cases, but for the most part, it’s…
Federico Ramallo (58:46.753) it.
Federico Ramallo (58:50.232) Great.
Chris Oliver (59:02.719) as consistent as can be and it’s going to be, you know, minimal changes for as long as possible, which is a huge win in my book, I think.
Federico Ramallo (59:07.554) every house.
Federico Ramallo (59:14.262) Yes, yes, in particular these small projects as you were talking about, about RailsBytes, right? That you can keep it running and forget. You don’t want to have to update it every single month, whatever, you know. You just want to, it’s working, so why change it, right?
Chris Oliver (59:21.613) Yep. Yep.
Chris Oliver (59:32.693) Exactly. Yep.
Federico Ramallo (59:34.71) Very interesting. It’s amazing. Yeah. I think we’re running a little bit out of time. I don’t want to take much more of your time. Yeah, but it’s been great to have you here, Chris. I really appreciate it. Yeah. Yeah. I’m looking forward to hear your thoughts on Railsworld, how it went. Yeah, and we’ll stay in touch.
Chris Oliver (59:37.582) Yeah.
Chris Oliver (59:43.533) Yeah.
Chris Oliver (59:54.095) Thanks for having me, yeah.
Chris Oliver (01:00:04.771) I’m sure it will be good. The first two rails worlds have been phenomenal. we’re going back to Amsterdam this year, so that’ll be fun. And, yeah, it’s traveling for conferences is so much fun. Like that was my first time like in Europe at a conference for programming, you know, and like I’ve been to Europe just for a vacation type stuff, but there were so many people from Europe that.
Federico Ramallo (01:00:09.919) Yes.
Chris Oliver (01:00:34.095) don’t make, they don’t have the chance to come to the US for a conference. I didn’t have the chance to go to Europe for a conference. So when I did, it was just two days of nonstop talking to people and saying hi. It’s like, we’ve met on Twitter or email or something, but we’ve never actually met in person. So it was a lot of fun, but it was exhausting. Like both days, first day I tried to go get lunch and got.
Federico Ramallo (01:00:52.408) nice
Chris Oliver (01:01:02.671) stopped by so many people and then I’m watching them take the food away. I was like, uh-oh. then the second day I got the Rails Luminary Award at the very beginning of the day. So then my talk was right after that, I think, too. So then after that, I went to go get lunch early and I was like, I’m not going to make that mistake again. And I made it three quarters of the way.
Federico Ramallo (01:01:08.959) Hahaha!
Chris Oliver (01:01:31.531) there, but I still didn’t eat food the entire day. They took it away because I got distracted talking to people again. And I was like, I gotta learn. Like, I need to like bring snacks with me or something, you know? But it was so much fun because there was so many people that, you know, I didn’t want to, you know, I needed to stop and talk to them. I met them online, wanted to actually say hi in person, and it was a blast. So.
Federico Ramallo (01:01:36.433) no.
Federico Ramallo (01:01:45.024) hahahaha
Chris Oliver (01:02:00.961) if anybody is thinking about going. Well, the tickets are sold out, so I guess you can’t, but next year, yeah. And we won’t have another RailsConf this coming year, so RailsWorld will be the big one.
Federico Ramallo (01:02:07.032) It’s too late now, but for next year, yes. Yes, I want.
Federico Ramallo (01:02:17.784) Yes, yes. mean, I, so I, I, I promised my wife to go to Europe. So if I go to Europe, I have to, I should bring her with me and my son. So, you know, it becomes a whole thing, you know, so.
Chris Oliver (01:02:29.441) Yeah, yeah. Yep. That’s what we did that the first year my wife came and Jason Charnes and his wife came too. And so our wives went out exploring Amsterdam and stuff while we were at the conference. And then I think we had an extra day or two to go, you know, explore together. But that that’s a good way to do it. And it’s a good excuse because you can use your ticket for work.
you know, but you get a little extra vacation days and the family can join you.
Federico Ramallo (01:03:03.798) Yes, yes, but you know the days didn’t work out so we we that’s why I haven’t bought a ticket for Redsworth and bought a ticket for the Rubik’s know the RedsConf that happened what a month ago or so right and because it was easier for me you know politically better if I go to the RedsConf you know yeah so I make the mistake go ahead
Chris Oliver (01:03:08.621) Mm.
Chris Oliver (01:03:21.582) Yeah.
Chris Oliver (01:03:26.295) Yep, yep. Well, next year, I think next year, they’re trying to alternate North America and Europe for Railsworld. So next year, it should be in North America somewhere. It was in Toronto last year, so that’ll be easier for you to get to, hopefully.
Federico Ramallo (01:03:46.188) Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that will be easier. Yeah. I promised my wife to take her to Bad Kissingen in Germany. instead of that, I took her to Flagstaff, Arizona, right? Which, you know, this was for an Overland conference, right? But this happened, I don’t know, many years ago.
Chris Oliver (01:03:56.719) Eugh.
Chris Oliver (01:04:03.169) Okay, okay.
Federico Ramallo (01:04:14.54) five years ago, six years ago, and she still reminds me and says, you promised me Germany, you took me to Arizona, right? It’s not the same. So, yeah. So that’s why, you know, if I go to Europe, I have to take her with me. Yeah, yeah. But I’m going to be on the RubyConf in November, I think it is, that Idina is organizing.
Chris Oliver (01:04:20.495) Yep, yep. No, not really. Yeah. Yeah, well, you’ll have to do that.
Definitely, definitely.
Federico Ramallo (01:04:44.29) here in the Bay Area. Yes. SF Ruby, that’s the one, yeah.
Chris Oliver (01:04:44.747) yeah. Yes, F Ruby. Yeah. Yeah, I would love to make it to that. I think that’ll be a special one too, because it’s kind of focused not on the framework or code as much as it’s code, but in the context of startups, you know, and building businesses. I think that’s something that was the core of Rails back in the day, but not…
Federico Ramallo (01:05:04.118) Yes.
Chris Oliver (01:05:11.755) Not as much anymore, like at conferences at least. It used to be very focused around, know, they used Rails to build Basecamp and Rails was a framework used for GitHub and Airbnb and like YC startups all the time and things have changed but it’s important for us to get Rails back into the entrepreneurial, you know, communities and, you know, with colleges and stuff and get.
new people using Rails to build stuff. Cause it’s the best framework for building a business with a small team compared to if you use JavaScript, they’re like, well, you should outsource your database to super base. You should use clerk for authentication cause we don’t trust you to build that yourself and whatever else. And you gotta pay for all these services. And it’s like, you could have just done it with Rails and like done everything by yourself.
and used open source tools for everything. The communities are very different now, but yeah, I think I really am looking forward to that. I won’t get to go because I’ll have a fresh new baby at home, but I’m hoping next year I get to. So you’ll have to let me know how that conference goes, because that is probably one of the ones I’m most excited about.
Federico Ramallo (01:06:23.073) that’s right.
Federico Ramallo (01:06:31.82) Yes, yes, I’ll let you know. Yeah. And congratulations on the new baby. Yeah. I’ll send.
Chris Oliver (01:06:36.771) Thank you. Yeah, very soon I’ll be sleepless nights.
Federico Ramallo (01:06:41.312) Yes, yes. But you know what? My son now has 10, so we went through that phase. at the moment, it’s a lot of painful process. But when you remember it again, you don’t remember the bad stuff. You remember the good stuff. It’s interesting how it works. Yes, yes. So it’s going to be fine.
Chris Oliver (01:07:01.527) right. It’s totally true.
Federico Ramallo (01:07:10.848) Yeah.
Chris Oliver (01:07:10.861) Yep, yeah, we’ll get through it. It’s going to be a few sleepless months, but you know, the time goes by so fast and they learn so quickly. So it really is, I don’t know, it’s very temporary pain.
Federico Ramallo (01:07:28.982) Yes, yes, but very, very rewarding. yeah, kudos, kudos on that. Yeah. I’ll send you some, some tips of my experience on raising a baby. So, so you can, you can take, take, take that, you know, insights. Yeah.
Chris Oliver (01:07:33.719) Yes, exactly. Well, thanks, yeah?
Chris Oliver (01:07:42.247) good.
Chris Oliver (01:07:49.207) Yeah, we’re excited. It’ll be our second one. So we’ve got a little bit of expertise now, but you know, they’re all so different. So you never know, like one may sleep well, one may not. We’ll see.
Federico Ramallo (01:08:05.888) I heard, I only have one so I don’t know, but I heard that you know, parents get a lot of pictures for the first one, but very little pictures for the second one.
Chris Oliver (01:08:16.067) Yeah, that’s probably true. We have tons of pictures of our first one. So we’ll have to be deliberate and make sure we don’t fall into that mistake.
Federico Ramallo (01:08:18.232) So, you
Federico Ramallo (01:08:28.406) Yes, yes. Thank you very much, Chris. Great to have you. Yeah.
Chris Oliver (01:08:31.587) Love it. Yeah, thank you for having me.