Interview: Irina Nazarova (Organizer)

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Transcript

Travis Dockter: Okay. Well, welcome, Irina, to my, conference chat. I am speaking to you today because of… SF Ruby, and you are, CEO of Evil Martians, and Evil Martians is an agency that is known for the blog, open source contributions, and now for the SF Ruby Conference. So, just to kind of… Give the… the quick… recap of that, it was 3 days of 30-plus talks, 25 demos, 400-plus attendees, 30 sponsors, this was a… a very… big, complex event that you put on in a pretty short amount of time. What was… could you give us, like, the timeline of… when you were kind of like, okay, we're gonna do this, we're gonna make a conference, until, November? Because I think that was only a couple months, right?

Irina Nazarova: Oh, yeah, hey Travis. Thank you so much for having me. I remember we… you mentioned we will have this talk, and I think it's going to be useful for me as well to kind of, like. Go back to it and think about it together.

Travis Dockter: Yeah, do some reflection.

Irina Nazarova: Yeah, reflections. We did some reflections internally, but of course, it actually evolves, kind of, like, right after the conference, what do you feel, and then, you know, two weeks after, and then, like, a month after. So we had, yeah, we've had a shorter, shorter, kind of, like, period of time to ourselves. We gave ourselves shorter periods to prepare, but it was not 2 months, let me try to bring it back… so the conference was in November. I think we announced it… the very first announcement that I'm sure not many people remember, or saw. I think it was maybe 5 months before? yeah, I think around 5 months before. And then… the… I… I remember… You know, why we're gonna decide it. it was… when I learned that RailsConf is gonna be the final RailsConf, And… I… I… I was already thinking about the conference, because I'm running a monthly meetup, and I thought, well, we… we need this kind of, like. You know, extra events, you know, for… for the meetup to also, you know, once… In a while to then, like, become something bigger. Something more noticeable, so that, of course, our friends would come over, people would come over from other places as well, and We'll… we'll… we do it… You know, more professionally, hopefully, and on a bigger scale, and with, you know, all the… all the fancy stuff, and then That would also energize the meetup group in some sense, right? So that's… those are my thoughts, and… But when I learned that Trails Conf was gonna be the last one, this is when I thought, look. how about we do it this year? Because I always thought of it as something like 2026, idea, and then I thought, okay. I want to have something… I don't want to be sad at RailsConf that… like, goes away, and I… I don't know. Of course, there's Rails… there's Rails World. By the way, I did not know that Rails World is gonna be in the US. And I did not know that for… Like, up until, basically, they announced. And then, so, maybe I spoke with Amanda a little bit before that, but basically, yeah. And, what am I trying to say? I wanted to have something to look forward to, and this is what, yeah, I remember. So we announced, and… yeah, it's… it actually kind of, like, started moving pretty fast from there. Yeah, I think kind of, like, similar, maybe, to what you were doing, I was already… I was… I started with The venue, and the speakers, and then… Yeah, the rest followed.

Travis Dockter: Did you know in… so, in July… I think Rails Conf was in July?

Irina Nazarova: Did you know…

Travis Dockter: at that point, you had already decided you were gonna do the conference? Yeah. Okay, gotcha.

Irina Nazarova: Yeah. I think… and at TrailsConf, we… We already had stickers of a Safrubian.

Travis Dockter: Okay, yeah.

Irina Nazarova: We were talking about the conference. I think it… I think we, Jesus, might, maybe I should have prepared the timeline, but it, if I'm not mistaken, at RailsConf, we had early birds. So while we were at RailsConf, we were selling early birds.

Travis Dockter: Yes, okay, I think I do remember that.

Irina Nazarova: And we had CFP open. So, yeah, we tried to… to use that chance, and we closed the CFP exactly one week after Rails, kind of, so the idea was that, you know, we can, like, tell everybody to submit their talks, and we got, like, for example, I met Rachel, Chill, she's… on the web, she calls herself Chill Codes. So, I met her at Trails Conf, I saw her lightning talk about to, like, programming games, and using, kind of, using the experience in programming games to to look at our developer experiences, to look at the developer experiences we are building, and she, you know, she meant… like, it just was so fantastic, so I inv… I just… so I was responsible for inviting the speakers, so I invited her to… And I gotta say, she's a total keynote material. She is… she's a keynote speaker.

Travis Dockter: Yeah. How… how… Do you know, like, how many of the… or what proportion, maybe, were… of the speakers were invited versus just came in through the CFP?

Irina Nazarova: Right, so in our case, we had a bunch of speakers, we, like you mentioned, a bunch of talks. In total, Jesus, it's more than 50 people, just because I can explain myself, it's, we're not crazy. We just, So we had this thing that we're… had the main stage, we had the second stage. We had workshops, a special place for workshops. And this was all necessary, you know? I kind of, like, I felt, look. There's so many people that we want, you know, to have. We want people… so many people to come, and… I… I'm gonna say so many people agreed. Not everybody agreed. Some people, of course, had personal, reasons that, you know, maybe they couldn't travel to the US, maybe they had some other plans, totally understandable, but so many people agreed to, I think. maybe, yeah, a bunch of people are locals in Bay Area, a bunch of people, you know, just like San Francisco, and they said, oh, it's gonna be nice, and then… Anyway, so we had about, kind of, like, a lot of opportunity from… from that side, and that's… and… and we thought, okay. we'll do all of that, but at the same time, I really wanted to have demos from startups, because this is very unique to of course, to San Francisco, to Bay Area startup culture, but also I think it's unique to Ruby, in some sense. So, Ruby, Ruby on Rails is… is the framework for startups. Of course, 10 years ago, it was THE framework for startups, right? Now, of course not. We are not… we are in… Let's say a minority, of course, but… We're… this is exactly what we are trying to… you know, open people up to. And, like, we're trying to say, look, there's so many startups today. they are at Y Combinator today, they're building with Ruben Rails, and they are successful, because they are now spending time And, like, you know, attaching 20 JavaScript services to each other, to one another, and then… or, you know, reinventing the whole thing on Rust, and without really needing it, and all of that. So, So we really wanted startups, startup founders, you know, to be there, and also thought it's going to be great for them to connect to… because for them, for founders of startups, the number one problem often is hiring. And if you think about this, they can get… They almost get, like. take a step outside, they will find the Python engineer and the Java TypeScript engineer right there, just on the street.

Travis Dockter: You know?

Irina Nazarova: drinking coffee. But, to find a great ruby engineer, and of course, they'll there's all the matching problems, everybody's looking for different people, so it's difficult, right? It's not as easy, and if you think about this, so… what I was trying to say, I was trying to bring together this group where it's engineers, it's founders, it's big companies, engineers from big companies, and people from big companies. So it's all together, and they all help each other. That's, right? That's the whole connection. And then open source, authors of open source, people, you know, building the tooling, they… They all learn from each other in different, you know, angles. So that… that was the hope, and that's because… and that's why we kind of had to bring those founders, right? We had to… we wanted to give them the stage, and so it became, like, a whole big thing because of that.

Travis Dockter: Yeah, yeah, it was, you know, the 30-plus talks, but then also the 25 demos.

Irina Nazarova: Right.

Travis Dockter: And that was really cool, because you, you got to bring together, those different kind of networks of people, because I feel like… A lot of founders… Unless they're, like, a product company, and even then, the founder just probably feels like they don't have time to go to conferences, but this kind of made it, about them and, gave them, like, a more warm invitation To come to this conference, and more of a reason for them.

Irina Nazarova: To come. So I really liked that. I thought that was really cool. Yeah, I gotta say, I think Rails… yeah, sorry, sorry to interrupt. I think Rails World is also doing a good job inviting Kind of, like, attracting this, this type of people, founders. And it's interesting, because they don't… specifically kind of invite them, right? Right. But you're… I… I was thinking about this, kind of how this happens, it's more… more about… I like the vibes, I guess. I don't know. It's difficult, right? Difficult to explain, but yeah, I feel like Reels World was also doing a good job inviting, kind of, like, bringing together People like that.

Travis Dockter: Yeah. Do you know, you talked a little bit about, like, trying to, bring the locals, but also bring, all the… your friends from, you know, and people from outside. Do you know the proportions of, like, locals to people who traveled for the conference?

Irina Nazarova: Yeah, good question. By the way, I have this data. Yeah, so I'm looking it up, but… from what I… It, like, felt like it was probably… More than half are locals. But… Yeah, Trace, let's talk about something else. I'll pull the files.

Travis Dockter: Okay, yeah. No, I was, I was actually, like, surprised, to find, like, some people were like, oh yeah, I'm local to San Francisco, so I'm definitely going. I'm like, oh, I didn't know that person lived in San Francisco. There was a couple people that I was like, oh, that's really cool, that they're already out there. But… kind of along the same lines of, local, Fort Mason was your venue, and that was a super cool, unique. venue. You know, a lot of times, conferences will be in hotels or, you know.

Irina Nazarova: mention…

Travis Dockter: kind of spaces in the center of cities, but this was, like, on the water. Very cool, very cool space. So how did you, did you look at a bunch of different venues and decide on that one? How did, how did that come about?

Irina Nazarova: Yeah, I think… You know how… again, so the thing is, it's really difficult to… to even answer the question, okay, was it the best venue or not? It… I loved it. At the same time, it was… it was the venue that was extremely difficult to work with.

Travis Dockter: Yeah, it was a unique space, just because it was kind of all open, and in one line, kind of.

Irina Nazarova: one online, etc. But… but it was unique. So, okay, what… what you said is. Of course, there's a clear difference between two… two types of spaces, kind of like the convention centers that They have everything, sort of, ready for you. But at the same time, they are the most, like, Soulless. Experiences. Well… And… And… Well, I gotta say, like, when you travel to a conference that is in such… in, you know, a convention center like that. And you… sometimes you don't have much time to explore around, and then… you can't even tell if it's San Francisco, or, you know, Atlanta, or Chicago, like, Oh… O? The old American downtowns look… Kind of similar to Rome.

Travis Dockter: Yeah.

Irina Nazarova: Also, Canada, but still kind of has the same… Toronto had, oh my god, some problems, but no, it was… it was cool, it was… place, but also, like, it was weird, in some places. But as… as all of them are, right, what I'm… what am I trying to say? I am not a big fan of downtown convention centers, just in general. When I travel. I don't enjoy being there. Maybe it is convenient, I gotta say, and…

Travis Dockter: Yeah.

Irina Nazarova: You have food, you have the conference, you have all in one place, you can kind of even usually can, like, do some shopping if you want to, like, for souvenirs. But… Boom. It's, Do you know this guy? Oh my god, I have this book, it's a very, very nice one, from… It's, like, a very small one, it's… Jean Baudrillard, like, the guy from France who… Kind of, like, created the whole… He… he was thinking about… stuff like Similacra, like, you know, kind of, like, how we as culture are are… Creating, kind of, like. Jesus, okay, I was not ready to talk about philosophy in this bucket, but we are kind of… we are… it's called… this is irrelevant, this is very irrelevant, we are creating We're not… you know, when we are recreating reality, we are creating air. A, kind of, almost a parody on it. What I'm trying to say, those convention centers, they look As if it's not real life, and it's kind of like… real stuff. They look, like, very invented and very artificial. I'm very… .

Travis Dockter: Like a, like a parody of what a conference should be, almost.

Irina Nazarova: what even, like, a human experience should be like. It's almost like you are in… a non-existing space, in some sense, in a non-existing… And, I mean… Of course. the whole… this whole kind of, like, philosophy will tell you that everything is like that, you know? If you… if you think about those, like, French coffee places from the, like, 18th century, they're still, you know, a… everything is.

Travis Dockter: and then.

Irina Nazarova: Nothing, right? Yeah, yeah, nothing is, like, real, real, but… But it's just, like, the… how you feel, you know, how you experience that. So basically, those… those downtown convention centers, they… it's… you can even… you can even… I think you can even, like. look at them and see something else in them, like art. You can look at… you can actually look at it and think. oh, wow, it's so crazy that I love it. Like, it's so artificial.

Travis Dockter: That I absolutely love it, because of how.

Irina Nazarova: How can, like, brand new, like, or how… like… how… how can I, can I, can I, you know, how extremely artificial, you know, something like that. So you can, you can experience it like that, you know, with a certain kind, like, artistic, take, you know? And then you can… you can look at it as art, that's what I'm… I guess I'm trying to say. But… But at the same time, it also influences you as a human being, and if you cannot be this kind of artist who's, experiencing it all differently with you, you know, your own angle, and then you just take it as a… at a face value, then at a face value, it kind of… it removes you out of, kind of, like, real space, and brings you into this, like, very artificial space. Yeah, enough about that, but I don't like, experiencing that. What I wanted to do with, you know, people, my, you know, kind of, like, I feel like the Rubic community is, like, everybody's my friend, like, you know, like, I kind of think of the I think of the conference line was the place where It's me and my 400 friends, you know, Quebec. So, where do I want to go with me and my, you know, my 400 friends? Where do I want to bring them, right? So this is the question, and I want them to feel comfortable, but I also want them to experience, you know, what San Francisco has, right? And… And it costs, like, so much. And also, by the way, of course. when you live here, you hear so much bad stuff about… and, I mean, some of it is true, but at the same time, it's not only… it's not the only thing that you have here. You have, like, an amazingly beautiful city, and of course, most people know it. It's, like, surrounded by water on three sides. amazing hills, just, like, amazing nature, like the Golden Gate Bridge, and Fort Mason is just the place where you get to see all, like, all of that. Yeah. And we don't have… the problem is, and maybe it's in… tell me how… maybe you can tell me a bit more about, you know, like, New Mexico, how it's… How you have it there. But here, most… the majority, like, 95% of infrastructure is In downtown. And… Hotels and venues and everything, and there's not that much to choose from if you want to be in other parts of the city that are more walkable, livable.

Travis Dockter: Right. Interesting, kind of like…

Irina Nazarova: unique, and there was another option that I considered. It's called the Internet Archive. It's a… it's a very cool place where they… they actually have these servers, these machines where… where the Wayback Machine is, you know, the server…

Travis Dockter: Yeah.

Irina Nazarova: Yeah, the serpent of the Internet Archive, so when you go to kind of, like, look up the archived version of some web page. So they're actually running in… on… on those servers, and they… they are located in a very nice, part of town, close to the Golden Gate Park. it's very nice, but it's smaller. I think that there are two… the main problem is it's… it's quite small. It basically has one big, like. Auditorium for maybe 200 people. But, yeah, I was looking at, kind of, interesting, unique, Spaces like that.

Travis Dockter: Yeah, I really, I really enjoyed the… the part of town that it was in, and I stayed, in a, like. Pretty cheap motel that was. like, a 10-minute walk away, but I loved it. It was a nice walk. And, yeah, loves being able to be on the water and see the Golden Gate Bridge and everything, so I thought it was.

Irina Nazarova: Right.

Travis Dockter: And I kind of liked the space, too, where you could just kind of, like, walk from one end to the other, and just see everything that was happening, and you could, kind of, like. duck into a talk here, or duck into a workshop over there, like, I really enjoyed that.

Irina Nazarova: It's so good to hear, yeah.

Travis Dockter: Yeah, so what, how did you split up the responsibilities of doing this whole thing, because I know that, that you had a lot of help, so what were you kind of, delegating, and what were you doing specifically? Can you kind of explain some of that?

Irina Nazarova: Yeah, let's go. By the way, I tried to look at the data, so I basically asked everybody when they were purchasing the ticket to put the… where they're from, and of course, everybody's putting… San Francisco, and, like, their… the Bay Area is huge, and there are many different places here. So, but I would say from I don't have, like, hard numbers, because I… this needs to be processed better. But, I think definitely the majority is from the Bay Area, so from what I'm looking, yeah, 60, 70, maybe percentages. Over here, there's also Los Angeles. Okay, yeah. But then, yeah, but then… but then… but then there's New York, there's Chicago, there's Austin. Pittsburgh, and then there were people… we had to… we had to… different, like, representatives of two different Rubik shops from Uruguay.

Travis Dockter: Yeah.

Irina Nazarova: Uruguay is incredible. I wonder what it's like in Uruguay, because it's a very small country. Montevideo is, like, the one big city, and they have the meetup, they have… it looks like the concentration of ruby in Uruguay is pretty high. Yeah, I do hear about it every once in a while. Yeah, so, but yeah, and, people from Romania, people from India. But, going back to your question about help, so originally, I… I tried to… And I cannot… maybe it was a mistake, but at the beginning, I was kind of trying to do more stuff myself, and not to… bug, other people. I think it's also… it's also because… it's also helped me in some sense, because I was just… it was… I was just trying to figure it out. I could not gather a team and tell them, look, this is what we're doing, these are our priorities. You know, it's all taken care of, just execute. No, it was very unclear. And they still needed to have, kind of, some… wiggle room to… figure things out. Even, for example, even the split between invited and CFP, so we ended up having half of the speakers were invited, and half of them through… went through CFP. And the reason for that is… I… I was just super excited to invite like, some of the, like, amazing speakers that… I don't know, like, if you think about, like, Kakashi, who's in charge of YJ, He lives in the Bay Area. Which not many people know. He's kind of Japanese, originally, and I'm not sure if he would even… like, submit a CFP. Because…

Travis Dockter: Yeah.

Irina Nazarova: the SBC, etc. So I invited a lot of people, and… A lot of speakers. So anyway, this was… this was kind of like, you could say my decision. And then we had the CFP board with the normal Process, due process for people, committee, all of that. And I did not interfere in… in that. So, that's how… that's how… That's how it worked, now, for help, I… I was still in charge of I was in charge of the, okay, website. The sponsors, invited speakers, so… So, I would say maybe I regret not having help with sponsors, because I had, like, a big list of sponsors, more than 30, and I… I was, you know, the person that… the only person that communicated with them. And… I tried to… And also, you know, doing, like, a bunch of other stuff, So, maybe I wish I had also a… somebody who… Would make sure that sponsors have And, like, a certain, like, clear communications, maybe, maybe that would have helped. At the same time. At the same time, having, like, working with sponsors is tricky, because some of them have unique demands, and it's more… it's not… our… I just want to say our sponsors were all fantastic. I think it was mostly just about For example, at the venue, whose booth is where, stuff like that. So… Some, like, some… also, of course, some sponsors can, like, hesitate Between the packages. And… guess what? I was convincing them to get a bigger one, so… Well… kind of got to do what you gotta do, obviously, but I was also kind of like… this is when I came up with the idea of a job board. Actually, I did not, like, one of our sponsors came up with this idea that we can have a job board So that… I noticed, like, every single one of our sponsors was hiring Ruby developers. Even Temporal, there is not a ruby shop. They… Maybe the only non-Ruby shop that sponsored our conference. And they were hiring Ruby developers, because they have a lot of success with their Ruby SDK, and they were hiring to the Ruby team. So… everybody was hiring. It's even, like, mind-blowing in some sense. Like, everybody in the, kind of, like, not the smallest, package. In the smallest package, it's a bit more mixed. Some are agencies, some are… they're different categories, but… everybody with the booths were hiring, and that's why they had a booth, right? Because they… Wanted to be there on the ground, talk to people, etc. Even if they couldn't, for example, Fetch could not come, but they sent us a bunch of merch, and, etc. So, and we tried to give them a lot of, like, shoutouts to make sure that people know that they are here, and that they… they don't have a booth. But they had a speaker, and they had, I mean, a demo presenter, and then they had A job, right, on our job board. So, and that's how I can, like, convince them to get this, like, bigger package. So… what am I trying to say? I think working with sponsors is important. then I… I was doing marketing for… Up until maybe 2 weeks before the conference. And I regret not having more help on that. So they… Where we definitely did not do our best was marketing the conference, and I think… and… Trace, you probably saw, because, you know, we interact on social media, so you probably saw, you know, my posts and stuff like that. And we tried a lot of creative ideas with marketing. We recorded a whole commercial, by the way, video, which was very funny, very, very fun, thing to do. Then we had SF Ruby Cloud Cards, which was this kind of, like, Custom limitations, so… Actually, I would say… I think this idea worked. I would say the… video. Commercial. I'm not sure it helped, because… it was fun. We did not spend a lot of time on it, I gotta say. We were very efficient. We only shoot it for about an hour, and then my colleague Vika, Victoria, she edited the video while driving in an Uber. While writing the number. So she edited the whole thing on… Epcot, something like that. On, on her phone. It's like, God, how? Whatever. Yeah, and we just… she just published to YouTube, but I'm not sure if it really brought us a lot of new views, maybe it didn't. a lot of, kind of, like, new traffic on the website, but I think the cloud cards helped, because So to those who don't know what… we were… actually, it was Victoria's idea. A bunch of companies, a bunch of conferences, Now have something Like, a link where, when you have a ticket, you also get this kind of, like, link. Where it shows, like, a ticket? It says, like, this person is coming to this conference. And maybe there's a coupon or some kind of code, so you can, like, are… Sharing it with your audience, that you're going somewhere. We took it. I think one step further, because we created the Rails app, If I coded it, then Volvo Dimit if he refactored it into a better shape. But we have a Rails app. And, that… where you… if you have a ticket, you get an email notification. to cut go. Open the website, upload your photo. And then we generate a custom image, in our, kind of, branding. So it has all the clouds, and our character, you know, so for me, kind of. It's Carl the Fog with the ruby. And, like, with a little bridge, red, Delmate Bridge. And, so… So all those images… so it generates this image… it also generated a, I gotta say… The, the title, it says, something like, join me, join, Travis at the San Francisco Conference 2025. And then it made so many spelling mistakes. And you have no idea how many times, you know, I tried to prompt it into a better, like, shape, and like, I think the only way to do this is to actually have where now… now we know we need an agentic flow where one model is kind of, like, generating the image, but then the other model is reviewing it and kind of, like, discarding it if it finds any problems, and then, of course, you're going to be spending more tokens and stuff like that, but I think that's kind of the only way to make it more stable, to have a model that will Look at the image and discard it if… It has albums, maybe, yeah, we should try it.

Travis Dockter: Yeah.

Irina Nazarova: But, so that's… I think we op… we… open-sourced it. Yeah, the project. Let me check. Yeah, we did, we open sourced it, because, I remember it, because before we… Oh. before we published it, I… I asked… I asked Carmine probably not to… made some changes in Ruby LLM to support,

Travis Dockter: Oh, yeah.

Irina Nazarova: Yeah, to support Nana Banana, and he was like, next morning, it's done, it's ready. Yeah, yeah, I just emailed him, I was like, you know, we really want to use RubyLLM, but, you know, it doesn't support this, like, little thing, and he was like. No.

Travis Dockter: I really, I have to say, I really loved, the marketing that you guys did. The… the… I really liked the video, because I feel like… I haven't seen… I feel like I haven't seen something like that, from… conferences before, and I… I don't know, I like that. kind of, marketing. Maybe, like… I feel like for regional conferences especially, they're usually… organized by a developer, and developers are just not marketers, or they, like, that's one of their least favorite activities, right? About, organizing a conference. And I feel like, yeah, you guys did some really cool things that I think… will raise, raise the bar a little bit, and I'm hoping to, to, be able to… Get to… to that point as well.

Irina Nazarova: Yeah. when Blast of Rail's, promotional video went.

Travis Dockter: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Irina Nazarova: But… but I gotta say, I… I did it because, because, Adrian… Adrian asked me to… Adrienne told me that Adrian Marin, the founder of Avar. and the organizer of Friendly RB in Romania, he said, look, you gotta be recording videos, which was right. And he's been… he's recording a lot, he's very good at it, and The problem is, he's very good at talking in front of the camera. I'm not that good at it, especially if… especially if I'm, like, on my own, I… I don't know, for some reason, I'm having a hard time recording myself. Yeah, just talking without anybody else present. So… It, it is… I gotta say. I'm thinking maybe we should learn, maybe I should learn to do that, because it looks like Like, kind of, almost like the skill that you have to have, like, to treat the sexy. Regardless if you're promoting you know, whatever you're… You're building things, but you also have to talk about them. with the audience, it… Like you said, developers don't like it, but at the same time, people who Of course, if you are, you know, like, an engineer in a big company, maybe you don't need to, right? But if you are more of, kind of, like, entrepreneurial, more of, kind of, like, on your own. you have to learn that, right? If, of course, I'm kind of, like, thinking of Aaron… Aaron Francis. For example, like, a great example of somebody who took He's now doing, like, you know, the whole kind of courses. But he's also doing, like, a lot of video… videos in his own style, and he's not… why… the reason I'm thinking about him is he's not doing the, kind of, typical YouTuber… style videos, which I hate. Like, I mean, I don't hate, but… okay, I don't hate, I don't see myself in that… in that style.

Travis Dockter: Right.

Irina Nazarova: the reason I said hate is because I… if he's gonna ask me to do this, like, I will… I will buy it, like, I will…

Travis Dockter: Yeah, yeah.

Irina Nazarova: Yeah. That's not you.

Travis Dockter: Your… your style.

Irina Nazarova: Yeah, yeah, and I'll try to con… Avoided, but… So, and that's… maybe that's why… so, Adrian told me, you gotta record videos, you gotta show the venue, you gotta show San Francisco, you gotta show people where they are headed.

Travis Dockter: And…

Irina Nazarova: the… in my head, it's all kind of, like. lined up into a series of scenes that… that are here, that… that basically… So, I… I actually had some… some… I think I had an idea that I would be hiding, or, like, I would be kind of, like, looking for little rubies, I would have a map, so we would do it in Wes Anderson style, so I would, like. have some map, and I would be, like, looking for those little rubies, because I have them from I have… I have a bunch of little rubies from… Yeah, I'm like a stereotypical, you know, a ruby person with, like, a bunch of rubies, and yeah. So, I would be kind of, like, looking at them hidden in different parts of, you know, that part of San Francisco, and… We did… we, we simplified it a bit, because we only recorded for a bit more than an hour, and we just went with kind of the idea that I'm… I'm just in, like, going to the venue and put in the flyer on it. That's it. It's a very, like, there's no, action, in that sense. But it's still kind of shot in this, like, still… but I was really looking at how Wes Anderson, kind of, like. Movies are framed, and there's the… there's this kind of symmetry in the frame. And… it was, like, super fun for… for both of us, so it was me and Vika, we… Victoria, we are… we did it together. It was, like, super fun. We… We're looking for the right places, and we were looking for the places that also had this kind of burgundy, reddish colors, items in them. So… It was a lot of fun. I would recommend it to everybody. Especially if you don't… so what I'm trying to say, I didn't want to just be this kind of talking head. And this is why we had to kind of film a little movie.

Travis Dockter: Yeah.

Irina Nazarova: Be creative, well, yeah, I think it's… it was fun, yeah.

Travis Dockter: Yeah, I think you… I think you guys nailed it. It was… it was fun to watch, and it's something different from, like. I just… I don't know, I tend to, like… I think a lot of people tend to tune out, certain types of promotion, and if you're just posting, like, a picture of the details and, like, maybe a picture of, like, the Golden Gate Bridge or something, if it's just that, people are probably… they'll see it.

Irina Nazarova: But…

Travis Dockter: They'll just kind of scroll past it.

Irina Nazarova: And…

Travis Dockter: Because you had that video, it's just unique, and people can actually watch it, and enjoy it for… just enjoying it instead of, getting… like, requiring them to get, like, conference information out of it, right? It's just a fun…

Irina Nazarova: Yeah, right, right, and yeah, information is always gonna be on, you know, the website, etc.

Travis Dockter: Right, yeah.

Irina Nazarova: Yeah, you just made me realize that I removed that video from the website. I'll bring it back. So we just… we just published all the conference videos. Finally, we published the workshops yesterday. So, I will add that, that video on that page as well, somewhere, you know, in the bottom, maybe, or, you know, just, just for it to be there somewhere, because it, yeah, it was, it was very fun, yeah. Yeah. So, everybody should film, I think.

Travis Dockter: Well, and the other thing, too, that I feel like is such a… obvious thing that I really haven't seen conferences do is building fun engaging… tools in Ruby or Rails, like the cloud cards thing. Like, that's such a… to me, like, that's such an obvious thing that it's like, wow, how has, nobody done that before? Like, because it was… it was really creative, and that, to me, like, went really viral online, because, maybe, like, it hit at the right time, too, when, like, AI images were just kind of.

Irina Nazarova: That's like…

Travis Dockter: good.

Irina Nazarova: Yeah.

Travis Dockter: realizing how good they were getting, and then you guys came out with that, so people were, like… people that hadn't experimented with it before were… were very, excited by it and stuff, you know what I mean? So, that felt like it was good timing, but also it's like, hey, here's this thing that we built. in Ruby on Rails for a Ruby conference.

Irina Nazarova: Yeah.

Travis Dockter: And that just, like, makes it even more engaging to me, to see that. It's like, oh, okay, this conference is being put on by people who walk the walk, and are not just… you know what I mean?

Irina Nazarova: Yeah.

Travis Dockter: I really loved that.

Irina Nazarova: it's a good chance, like, if you think about this, we could… I mean, I still… I'm still hoping we'll… I'm hoping we'll do it again, and maybe this year, and then I'm still thinking of, like, printing the flyers and putting them, around town. But for bringing people from broader U.S, you have to do something. and… Yeah, I think… I can't… by the way, I can… I can, it's… it's not a secret, because it's open source, you can all… you can look all of it up, but I think one reason… like, the few reasons it worked, is we give Nano Banana a bunch of, images, imagery, you know, so that it generates the final image in the same style, so that everybody's kind of, like. has the same vibe, the same kind of character, and you can look at all of them, right? You can, like, look at… and then when you… you come across, like. one of those images, you immediately recognize, oh, this is about a Saaf Ruby, or did I get a ticket?

Travis Dockter: You know, that's kind of like…

Irina Nazarova: So it needs to be, like, certain branding, and something, of course, that you enjoy, that people can enjoy, something nice. And then, Well, I gotta say, the prompt mentions, it says, make a flattering image. It, it asks, it, we are specifically asking it to generate the character that looks nice.

Travis Dockter: Yeah.

Irina Nazarova: This is… this… I think it's important, seriously, it's cute, it's kind of like, oh god, You, you, you want to share it, because, like, all…

Travis Dockter: Yeah, yeah.

Irina Nazarova: It's good. Yeah.

Travis Dockter: Yeah, I really, I really enjoyed that. And it was… yeah, not only is it, like. hey, we're building this thing in Ruby on Rails for Ruby Conference, that's really cool, but then the result that you get, you want to share it, and it, yeah, just really, holds on itself.

Irina Nazarova: So if you upload a photo with a pet, like a cat, or a dog, or a capybara, or… what else do you have? It's just so amazing, like, it's the best one. Like, you should have a cat cat. I have some, like, your… Yep. Very friends with you. It's just… oh my god, it's the best.

Travis Dockter: Yeah, that was really awesome. Is there… so, maybe… maybe that is… along the… the same lines of this… this question, but, I ask everybody, can you think of something small that you did.

Irina Nazarova: That…

Travis Dockter: had a big impact that you maybe weren't expecting. Like, you did something, and you didn't really think about it, but then a bunch of people, came up to you afterwards, and they were like, we loved that.

Irina Nazarova: Yeah, I mean, first of all, I did not talk about the team and the team's effort, and this was where I, in some sense. So, we had a team. We had Amanda, she was in charge of our organization. on the ground, Alexander, the other Martian, was helping But he could not come, in person. And then… then we had, Orally, Harash, who was in charge of working with speakers. Stephen was in charge of working with volunteers. Gary, was in charge of working with students, we also had students program, and more. And, each of those people was, like, invaluable. We also had a bunch of motions, etc, but… definitely, these are the people that made it happen. I… what I was trying to say, I just worked on, kind of. The periphery, in some sense. You know, marketing here and there, and stuff like that. Yeah. And then… and then those people really worked to actually make it happen. So we needed… we had 30 volunteers, so we need many volunteers We needed, of course, we need the speakers to have everything they need. By the way, I really loved… so something I didn't expect was… it was coming from… from Gary's work. So… Gary actually works at Hack Club. Have you heard about this? It's, Tech Club is a Ruby Rouse shop where It was originally, I think, either co-founded… co-founded, I think, by one… by one of the GitHub, co-founders. Definitely funded, and supported by him. And then… So, Hack Club is a platform where teenagers, like, well, Okay, students. Oh. high schoolers Students organize… most of the high schoolers… high schoolers organize Hackathons. So… but what they need from Hack Club, they… what they get from High Club is they get, their own virtual bank account and a credit card for expenses. So basically, they get a virtual bank account where they can collect donations from whoever, from, like, parents and stuff, and they can't… imagine they collect, like, $2,000, and then they have a credit card, they can use it to buy this, buy that, you know, for… organize something. So they… because they don't have, of course, You know, entities and… And that is… Stuff like that. So, Hack Club is providing this kind of, like, financial infrastructure for high schoolers organizing hackathons, which is great. They organize fantastic events. And Hack Club is built on Rubin Rails, and it's built… they just open-sourced it last year, actually. It was just kind of crazy for financial infrastructure, but they open-sourced it. They have the whole kind of ledger and stuff, and it's built in a major way by High schoolers and kind of, like, ex-high schoolers, so young students. Very young people, and they came to the conference, and so I chatted with a few 17-year-olds. And I gotta say, I was blown away. First of all, people are… rubies already, they're built in Ruben Royals, and they… they just can, like… we discussed things at such a level that I did not expect. And they are completely… like, fully aware of everything happening in, you know, in the community, in the ecosystem, fully aware of the, you know, the place of Ruby versus other technologies, fully aware of the, you know, the pros and cons, and what's going on, and… and… Oh my god, that was fantastic. So, I think interacting with those Like, new, new generation. This was… this was fantastic. This is something I… I never… I didn't expect, enjoyed it. So they were… basically what we did, we asked them to be in charge of our game room, where We… we had Ruby Warrior. They tweaked, they tweaked Ruby Warrior. It's a game where, you know, like a Ruby game, programming game, he passed levels by writing some Ruby, and then they adapted it to the conference created… so… and we also ran it on WebAssembly, of course. Anyway, there was, like, a bunch of stuff, but… so they were in charge of that room, and… I know it was a quiet room, we did not want it to be loud, we wanted to be, like, a bit quiet, like, in a more relaxing space for introverts, and But those folks and… yeah, just kind of interactions with Hack Club. This was… this was definitely something I did not expect, and something I enjoyed a lot. So, yeah, in terms of also, I… geez, I asked… can you believe it? So I asked Brittany Martin, Brittany Martin Spring Springer, you know, the host of the Ruben Rails podcast in the past, and then she kind of went away. Like, she went… I mean, she kind of, like. Boom. She… she said she focused on her job and family and stuff. Or… Like, 2 years, maybe? So she hasn't been around. And then I reached out. I was… I was gonna reach out to her a little bit, over, you know, this period of time, because during this period of time, I moved into the United States. So actually, as I just moved, I wrote her an email saying, like, you know, I'm in the United States now, maybe we should hang out. And then, of course, I don't know. It's not that easy.

Travis Dockter: That's right.

Irina Nazarova: But, anyway, then I reached out again and asked, look. would you come? And, like, would he be the MC? And she agreed. And I mean, that was the big highlight for me, like, a huge one, really. Because I, I really longed to see her. And I was just so proud of myself that I wrote this email. Yeah, invited by asking her, yeah. Cause yeah, that was great. It was fantastic. So, something like that, What else? I mean, I gotta say, I think… I think reaching out to… I would say… Jesus, what am I trying to say? I think, I think, A lot of it, a lot of that… that experience was, you know, reaching out to somebody, not expecting anything, and then, bam! People are, like, we want to… You know, we want to support it, we want to do it, and… I don't know, Bold.new did it, Chime did it, Cisco did it, like, big… our big sponsors, and… they were like, where do we send? Where do we send money? Again, like. super supported by, you know, the companies that… and it was magical, because without them, we could not… Really be able to make it. The… on the other side, people, like, like the startups, we had, we had links somewhere, and then, at some point. you know, usually I reach out to people, and I just send them the link to fill out after they already agreed with me, you know? So, it's not organic, you know?

Travis Dockter: Yeah.

Irina Nazarova: Rachel. to startup founders, but then some… a few of them, like, a few of the fantastic founders just found out about it, and that's what I felt, okay. something is working a little bit. But I can tell you that I had, I gotta say. maybe it's my personality, I always find, you know, things I could do better. And, I think… we could do a bigger conference. Like, I wanted 600 people, for the record. I wanted 600 people. So you could say, okay, 400 people is good, but great, yeah, but I wanted 600 people. So, and I wanted… because I wanted people… I think. I'm still not at the place where people really know what San Francisco Ruby, you know, is, and all the opportunities they have there. And I… I still fall short of, really. really reaching people with… with marketing. That's mostly… water this, and… Yeah, gotta do more stuff. I, I tried, by the way, okay, in more technical, more technical side, I tried… automated LinkedIn outreach. Finally, in the last, like, Like, maybe 4 weeks before. Because I was doing a lot of manual LinkedIn outreach. It is very time-consuming. To be honest, I did not have much time to do it, closer to the conference, so… basically, usually what I do, I go to LinkedIn. I have a paid account, I think, and then… I search for ribbon Rails in my geography, so usually it's just the Bay Area, and then I can, like, send them direct messages saying, we have a meetup, come join us, you know, stuff like that. And this was very efficient for the MESAP group. And then, for the conference. If you go, like, and search across the United States, it's just… it's just overwhelming. There's so many people, you don't even know what, you know, what to do, like, how… And, I tried… I tried a tool that kind of automates that, and what I did, I wrote a message, and I said, this message is automated, but I will respond personally, because I see all… of course, I see the responses, I will respond personally. Because I wanted people to know that, well, there might be some kind of, like, mistakes in the message, in… maybe I re-approached the wrong person when it's automated, or something like that. But I gotta say, I think I… Maybe I should have tried it earlier and more. So… So, I hate SPOM. I mean, seriously, I hate SPOM, it's not… it's… it's true. But I think… If you think about How can we engage people? Rubyists?

Travis Dockter: Right.

Irina Nazarova: what are… what other tools do we have to reach out to them? There are not many tools I want them to at least get one email or message somewhere from me inviting them to this, and to… this conference, and…

Travis Dockter: Yeah.

Irina Nazarova: Yeah, I think maybe we gotta use some automated tools for that. I usually hate those tools, and again, I do it manually, but I do a lot of, like. I… sometimes, okay, sometimes I would kind of, like, automate, I would get the list of emails, I would send them with Google Script. You know, from my inbox. But… So, it's always kind of like, you always have to be very… You know. Aware of what you're doing.

Travis Dockter: I like… I like that you put in the message, this is an automated message, but you can respond to it, and I will… I will read it. Because I think, yeah, a lot, like, on LinkedIn or… or over email, if I get something that's obviously an automated message. I will… I'm more likely to discount it, Even if I maybe am interested, you know, in whatever they're.

Irina Nazarova: Yeah.

Travis Dockter: they're sending me information about, but I'm like, oh, it's automated, archive it, whatever. And I… I do like that, at least saying, like, hey, this is automated, but here's why I'm reaching out to you, and you can respond.

Irina Nazarova: And I go.

Travis Dockter: read it. I feel like I would respond better to that.

Irina Nazarova: Yeah, and people responded, so that's why I'm mentioning it. It was good. That was a good campaign, because people responded. It was not a big campaign. It actually was taking a lot of time from that tool, from me working with it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it was not super efficient.

Travis Dockter: And there are… there are people that are not, you know, on social media, and they're not, like, scrolling through LinkedIn and seeing these posts that… that, we're putting out, so… Yeah, sometimes a direct message is the only way that they might hear about, the conference, or, you know, or it's the thing that will, get them Over the, you know, whatever resistance they have. To… to deciding to go, or whatever it is. Yeah.

Irina Nazarova: Yeah.

Travis Dockter: Yeah, I think that that's… I haven't, thought about that, but that… I think that is something to, to think about, because I do also like… The idea of… inviting people… I guess you can't say personally if it's automated, but… like, kind of, you know, coming up with a list of people that you think would really enjoy this conference, and saying, like, hey, this is something that I'm putting on, and… It's for… it is for you.

Irina Nazarova: Yeah, right, that's the invitation. Here's the invitation. Yeah, exactly, yeah, so… And I gotta say something that we, again, also kind of failed, and I want you to learn from this experience, is that some people said they were not sure that this is gonna be a big conference. it was Avi of someone on Twitter, he said, I didn't realize it's gonna be a conference. Why didn't you all kind of tell me it's gonna be a real one?

Travis Dockter: I would have come, like.

Irina Nazarova: Yeah, but we kind of put out so much, kind of, spam and stuff about the conference, kind of, like. The speakers and everything.

Travis Dockter: Yeah.

Irina Nazarova: But… just learn… maybe learn… maybe look at what I'm doing, and realize, like, Travis, look at what I was doing, and realize that it was not enough.

Travis Dockter: Yeah.

Irina Nazarova: just look at what I was doing, and realized that it still doesn't look like a big enough conference in messaging.

Travis Dockter: Yeah.

Irina Nazarova: So… this… Yeah, something to think about, like, also, perhaps we should be just bold enough, should say, oh, you know, it's gonna be the largest conference in the universe.

Travis Dockter: Okay, yeah, I, I… It is really… Interesting, if nothing else, that, yeah, you can put all of this, Effort into the marketing, and then even some people that are… that are engaged on social media will still not see it, and you're like. How do I… what did I do wrong? How do I get to these, people?

Irina Nazarova: Yeah, you kept thinking that. It's… And, yeah, and again, I… I think… I think we should probably just approach it as more of experimentation. So, mmm. what am I trying to say? I think… so, I think my key learnings are there was not enough marketing, really, and maybe we're… maybe it was… we should have… we just… maybe we need more time, but anyway, time is never enough. Regardless, even if you start, like, 12 months before. whatever. It's never enough, because first you think, oh, it's… we're not there yet, you know, people don't care yet, etc, and then, boom, it's over. And, I think… the idea that we should really be approaching marketing as a series of small experiments is very… is very real. It's like, it's true. For example, you… you might… sometimes you might, like, kind of, like, meet somebody, and somebody will say, look, I know what to do, like, this is, like, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. No, it's bullshit. Nobody knows what to do. So I would say, if you can do something small, you can, like, okay. what I liked about some of our experiments, like cloud cars, we spent Less than a week, like, from the idea to public release. the video. We spent literally 3 days, from the idea to public release. we released… the next day after we recorded, for God's sake, like, I… I didn't know what it was. It was all Victoria, like, I was like, oh my god, she's very… she's, like, super efficient. I would have spent, you know, more time on that, some, you know? Kind of procrastinating and… doubted myself, etc. You just… you don't have time for that, like… The, the only way to do, again, outreach campaigns, some, some, some, some, some things. We have to, we have to do a lot of that, and I think with different messaging. To really… and again, it should go… we should… we should be… we should try the bigger channels, like, even, like, kind of Hacker News, with, like, find angles. How to talk about stuff? I could… I did not, like, for example, we were never kind of, like, viral or anything with SF Ruby on Hacker News yet. So I kind of followed that, so far. So, there's, I… I would… the way I would approach marketing, and I think I will, is kind of like. Okay, every week, we have to have a new idea. We have, let's say, 40 weeks out. every week counts. And then… and also, another mistake, kind of, I think I made is A bunch of people told me that everybody will buy a ticket last minute. is bullshit.

Travis Dockter: ulcer?

Irina Nazarova: it's not helping, like, some people did… we rejected some people at the door, to be honest. The reason… If people don't understand, I can explain. We ordered Very, very custom badges. For example, and we ordered a specific amount of them. They actually have your name on it, but we ordered some of the blank ones, but we only ordered, like, whatever, 20 blank ones, and then they went, people immediately kind of like, we needed them for something, either new ticket buyers, or some sponsors needed something. So. It's… it's not as elastic as you think it is. Yeah. Because… because you also have… t-shirts, you also have, other stuff. It's all pre-ordered. Even, like, in our case, we were renting chairs.

Travis Dockter: Yeah.

Irina Nazarova: So, for example, so we… I cannot, like, add another even, like, 100 seats, last minute, last day. Not to say that we did not have 100 ticket sales on the last day. But also, this would not be possible, just logistically. You don't believe, like, those badges we had, we ordered them. They…

Travis Dockter: They're very cool badges.

Irina Nazarova: Yeah, anyway, they were, like, semi-transparent. this might be a little weird, but I kind of like it. So, and we ordered… they came from China. I didn't realize… nobody realized that they actually produced them in China, and then they sent them to the United States through the customs and stuff, so…

Travis Dockter: Yeah. Yeah, you can't do that week of…

Irina Nazarova: Yeah, the week of the conference, nothing… yeah, so I would say don't, like, count on, like, last minute. I know everybody says that, that everybody buys a ticket last minute, but… was not my experience. So, yeah. I did…

Travis Dockter: I like this shirt, too, like… did that kind of help, though, with the shirts? Because those were made on-site, so was that a little bit flexible? Because I liked that idea because of… Like, maybe you don't… you're… at least you're not making a bunch of shirts extra that… just in case, and then they don't get used, or something like that.

Irina Nazarova: The thing is, I still have a bunch of extra shirts.

Travis Dockter: Oh, really?

Irina Nazarova: Yeah, so we had live, screen printing of the shirts, and I actually, like, most of all, I just liked the process, and that they were, like, kind of, like, printed, Mechanic, mechanical.

Travis Dockter: It was really cool.

Irina Nazarova: But then, yes, theoretically, you're right. But in reality, we ordered, In, like, blank shirts of certain sizes. and what… I think what also happened is… Those shorts were run bigger, were running bigger. And everybody wanted a smaller size in our case, and now we have a bunch of L and XL shirts.

Travis Dockter: Yeah.

Irina Nazarova: I will use them somehow, if…

Travis Dockter: Well, if you do it the same way next year, you could use them for next year, right? Maybe?

Irina Nazarova: Well, no, no, no, this, this is, like, it says 2025, and stuff.

Travis Dockter: Oh, okay.

Irina Nazarova: But yeah, I think I will, I will, yeah, I will just, find cool ways to use them at the meetup. Okay.

Travis Dockter: Yep.

Irina Nazarova: Yeah, so it's, it's all, it's all good. But, But, what else was I trying to say? Yeah, it's still… it's still not as elastic as you think, and…

Travis Dockter: Right.

Irina Nazarova: yeah.

Travis Dockter: We want people to buy tickets earlier. The earlier is the better for the organizers, for sure.

Irina Nazarova: Right, and so… and then, so it becomes… and of course, they need a reason to buy it earlier, and I don't want to complain, but one big company, well, not say, because it's a bit negative, told me they want 10 tickets. They told me, kind of, like, 2 months before, 3 months before, and then they only bought them, kind of, like, literally 2 days before the conference.

Travis Dockter: Wow.

Irina Nazarova: It's like… What's up, folks? I mean, come on! And they're like, oh, we are finalizing whatever, budgeting, or… because, you know, those companies, they need to kind of, I think, have a special Budget line, and somewhere…

Travis Dockter: Yeah.

Irina Nazarova: Somewhere in this…

Travis Dockter: The expense approved.

Irina Nazarova: Yeah, yeah, maybe the conference itself has to be approved in some of those, companies. Anyway, I… I was surprised, the way.

Travis Dockter: Yeah.

Irina Nazarova: So, even, even those kind of, like, big organizations sometimes, suck at planning. So…

Travis Dockter: Yeah. I was actually thinking about that as, marketing, like, reaching out to… big companies and saying, hey, we're doing this conference, would you spread the word to your employees? Something like that, because that's like a, maybe a nicer way to…

Irina Nazarova: Yeah, this…

Travis Dockter: as well.

Irina Nazarova: That's a nice way, and I know for a fact. That a bunch of companies, are looking, like, They would… they would have a group of people come into a conference, and it's kind of like… It's a cool thing for them to do.

Travis Dockter: Yeah.

Irina Nazarova: to kind of, like, travel together, and stuff like that. So yeah, you should do that. I… I did some of it. But no, I think not enough, also.

Travis Dockter: Yeah, I, yeah, could always do more.

Irina Nazarova: Yeah.

Travis Dockter: Do you have… so, outside of SF Ruby now, do you have a favorite conference that you've been to, or maybe just a favorite conference experience?

Irina Nazarova: Mmm. Yeah, I gotta say, okay, I have an answer. The answer is the very first Rails World where I was a speaker, and my colleague Vladimir was also a speaker. And it was just a fantastic experience for a bunch of reasons, but also… so we arrived in Amsterdam, and there was this very cute hotel for speakers. And you check in into your room, and in the room, there was this, like, Rails-branded bag. With a bunch of swag in it, so it was ready for you, like, in your room. It was all… and there was this paper, kind of like newspaper that, Go Rails folks created, I think, well, yeah. or… or maybe the, remote Ruby folks, I think it was Chris and, anyway, so… why it was great, because you felt, like, I… let me say totally this. I did not go to many conferences, that many conferences, because I only became… I only first visited there at American… conference. A few years back, 2023. Yeah, so it's all very recent, and I did not… I'm not, like… I cannot tell you, like, okay, 10 years ago, the grass was greener, the sky was bluer, and…

Travis Dockter: Yeah.

Irina Nazarova: Conferences were just fantastic, and Leanne, yeah, I have no idea. So every time I went to a conference, it was… fantastic. Like, every conference I went to, it was fantastic. I met great people every time. I think, especially in Ruby Community, you meet people that are… that are kind of very open. very open, kind of, like, emotional, so kind of, like, and you… you connect, you're gonna… You meet somebody, I don't know, I remember, for some reason, I remembered how me and Xavier, Noria. from the core of Rails, we went to drink champagne in Athens before… before Rails sass in Athens. So I knew a champagne bar in Nathan's, I mean, champagne and sparkling wine, and I took him there, and it was fantastic, because we just had the time. That's awesome. And, you know, the tiny, the tiny street, and like, every… every… and the… and that… and also we then, with a bigger group, we… walked in Athens, and… it was fantastic. It was all just an amazing experience, also. Yeah, real size and their… But yeah, I think… And… but again, even when I went to conferences that were held in those big convention centers, I still mostly… I still enjoy them. I still enjoyed every Ruby conference, at least. I did not enjoy… I can tell you what I did not enjoy. Web Summit is just… so it's… it's a conference in Lisbon that… that gathers something like 40,000 people.

Travis Dockter: Whoa.

Irina Nazarova: Never go to Web Summit.

Travis Dockter: That's too big.

Irina Nazarova: That's inhumane. That completely kind of goes against, you know, what Your… your brain tells you to run, and you have to go in.

Travis Dockter: Oh, gosh.

Irina Nazarova: Because it's just to be… can you believe it? So I went to a conference with 40,000 people, and they met the only two people I knew there, randomly, I bumped into them.

Travis Dockter: Huh.

Irina Nazarova: kind of, like, my old classmate from, like, 20 years, like, 20 years back, and stuff like that. So, Anyway, but it was a bad experience just because of how big it is, and again, here in San Francisco, we also have By the way, KubeCon, I kind of enjoyed it, although KubeCon is also kind of too big, and I don't know almost anybody at KubeCon, but then I knew some people, and it was interesting. I also liked… so Kube, it's Kubernetes, right? But they have a whole floor of startups, and, like, with the booths. So it's a… it's like a startup player. So I think what happens is those… those startups are building products that they want to sell to enterprise. Those could be security for Kubernetes… like, this could… this is not Kubernetes-specific, to be honest. It's… it's just dev tooling. Any tooling you know, all those, like, small… smaller companies that build dev tooling, so they… they all get a booth, and then… the reason they got a booth is they want to sell their product to those, kind of, people from bigger companies, bigger organizations that are at KubeCon. Why they are at KubeCon? Because they get drinks and, you know, they hang out with They kind of sell each other something, and .

Travis Dockter: Yeah.

Irina Nazarova: hang out at KubeCon, you know, as their, it's part of their job, whatever they.

Travis Dockter: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Irina Nazarova: Yeah, and then there are all those startups that want to sell them their products, and I enjoyed, kind of, like, discovering all the products and talking to people, so kind of like that in some sense. But I did not… yeah, I even… Figma Config was the other conference that was kind of, like, very well organized in terms of like, you know, they have, like, this amazing, like, stage setups. I even spoke to my config folks. I spoke about colors, colors, pieces, with my colleague from Evil Martians. Yeah, we got… we gave a talk about, okay, LCH. So, if you're still using RGB, you're… too old, and, should educate ourselves. Anyway, so, But it was still too large. It… I think it was something about 4,000? So, I think maybe around 1,000 people, or around that, is the size of the conference that starts being a bit too large.

Travis Dockter: Right.

Irina Nazarova: And how, for example, if you are… If you're saying everybody should go to one place. And it's, like, 4,000 people go into one place, it's a bad idea. Because it becomes… it just becomes this kind of, like, reverse of people.

Travis Dockter: Huh.

Irina Nazarova: is… it just crushes you, in some sense. Like, cr…

Travis Dockter: Yeah.

Irina Nazarova: that breaks the whole experience, because the experience is connecting to people. You cannot connect when it's a river of people. It's not…

Travis Dockter: Yeah.

Irina Nazarova: So this is something to think about. And that's why I like, Ruby conferences, they are usually under, like. maybe around 1,000 people, but it could be, like, trails kind of, but… Or maybe, what was it, maybe 800, I think?

Travis Dockter: Yeah, I think they were 800.

Irina Nazarova: 800, 800, yeah. But, it's all good. I think it was good. Like, RailsConf, by the way, the last RailsConf, I really enjoyed it. Yeah, I really, I really enjoyed the last Rails count. Yeah, I liked paying for it. I liked Sin City Ruby, by the way.

Travis Dockter: Yeah, yeah. I think that goes full circle to what you said in the very beginning of, like, the venue is part of the experience because, like, the smaller venues or the more unique venues feel more special. Like, the experience feels more real, when it's unique or special like that. And when you get to a certain size, you cannot create that special experience. at a certain scale. It's just impossible, because you have to, at that point, go to the big convention center, otherwise.

Irina Nazarova: Yeah.

Travis Dockter: You know, fit all the people.

Irina Nazarova: And I guess, right, and it's also about, do you have the space for people to connect, right? And what is it like? Like, what is… because if you and I want to connect, we'll go to a nice coffee shop, right? We will not go into a hallway.

Travis Dockter: Yeah, that's loud, and there's just… crowded…

Irina Nazarova: Nothing there, the light is, like, getting, like, directly from the top. look like zombies. So we will go to a nice… so this is… this is how I want to think about conferences, how to organize this kind of nice setup. you know, almost like a coffee shop, but, where people would still… but then again, of course, they need to be at the talks, and then, you know, but still kind of some… Someplace where they can feel, a bit more humane, cozy, and yeah.

Travis Dockter: Yeah. I want to tell you, one of my favorite conference experiences, because my first, conference ever was Atlanta Rails Conf. And…

Irina Nazarova: Hmm.

Travis Dockter: I went with, my coworkers, so that was, like, a really fun, like, bonding experience with them. I think I had been at the company for 1 or 2 years at that point, but it was really fun to travel with them and get to know them a little bit better. And, you, the first time I ever talked to you, you approached me at that conference, I think I… because I was wearing a YC hat or sweater or something, and you were like, oh, hey, like, what's your… Relation to YC. And I had… I knew about, Evil Martians, and we, like, talked to you for a little bit, and afterwards, I was like, whoa, like, I know that person from the internet, and I just, like… interacted with them at a conference, and that was, like, that was the coolest experience. So, yeah, that was, that was a fun, fun memo.

Irina Nazarova: that I have.

Travis Dockter: And…

Irina Nazarova: Yes. They're so good, yeah. That is really good. But remember also at RailsConv? In Detroit, were there? Detroit.

Travis Dockter: But yes.

Irina Nazarova: I might… by the way, I might be confusing, and that's why some members kind of, like, I don't know… blur into… into one. But I remember this image when… I think it wasn't Detroit, and then… I… I went… after the… after the conference, they had an after-party on a… on a terrace.

Travis Dockter: Yep.

Irina Nazarova: And so that terrace was just like a… so imagine you died, and you went to heaven, and all of your friends are there.

Travis Dockter: This is what the terrace looked like.

Irina Nazarova: So…

Travis Dockter: Yeah, yeah, it was nice. It was nice.

Irina Nazarova: So, there was… there was… everybody was, like, happy, smiling, there was some music, some food, everybody was chill, everybody was, oh my god, it just… and I saw everybody kind of, like, chatting in those groups, and those were, like, open groups, you know? People move between those groups, because everybody's, you know, connected in some sense. Oh my god, it was…

Travis Dockter: Yeah.

Irina Nazarova: By the way, Eurocore, last year was, like, also kind of like that, like, very fantastic, so if you, if you're, if you can, go to European conferences, folks, you should also go, because I mean, I heard great things about Japanese culture. I know, it's like, you know, I almost sound like… I think people underestimate how, how much your… Kind of experiencing, and how much of… you know, for me, it's a personal experience. It's the life I want to have, kind of travel somewhere with friends, meet new people, and do something kind of, like, work-related, but, but also learn, and… And it's… it's not a job, but by the way, many of those things, I just go on my own. I'm not, you know, doing anything work-related. Because I… it's just enjoyable, it's, it's… it's something unique. I would never go to Vienna de Castella in Portugal on my own, and turns out it's this kind of fantastic little town. It was just absolutely incredible, like a… like in a movie, like, you know, like, medieval city, all in stone, at the same time, very, very, very beautiful. Like, I… I would even think it's, like, from Switzerland, but it was from Portugal for some… like, it's… it was, like, this… just super, super beautiful, and people are there, and I think I just enjoy seeing people that I know, or know of, or, you know. kind of bigger group. Seeing them hyping, seeing them connecting, and…

Travis Dockter: Yeah. And it's not, like…

Irina Nazarova: you know, when you're on the beach, you know, not doing… kind of… it's different, right? It's like… Yeah. You're learning something, you're connecting for… It is useful, but at the same time, it is enjoyable, so…

Travis Dockter: Dude. I love that.

Irina Nazarova: I love that.

Travis Dockter: Okay, we've been going for, like, an hour and a half. I want to end there, because I love that, like, positive conference note that we can end on there. So, thank you so much for spending all this time, and I guess the last thing I'll ask you is, have you started planning for next year? Or for this year.

Irina Nazarova: This year, it's already this year. Travis, I… so today is January 23, and January 31, I have an opening keynote at, Rubiconf Thailand in Bangkok.

Travis Dockter: Wow, okay.

Irina Nazarova: So, it is… it is starting, kind of, very, very soon. And also, I had the first… we had the first SF Ruby meetup yesterday, last night. It was fantastic, I really enjoyed it, yeah.

Travis Dockter: Seriously.

Irina Nazarova: starting the year off strong. Yes, it is. It's already… it is here. It is here, it is happening, there's no way around it. Maybe I'm not super ready for… But, I will be. Yeah, I'm, I'm planning… I'm planning, quite a lot of things. There, there are many… I gotta say, there are many more, kind of, conferences in the US, it seems, this year. There's, RBQ, that I'm making.

Travis Dockter: You, Blue Ridge…

Irina Nazarova: Blue Ridge.

Travis Dockter: Yep, Winnie Comp is back this year.

Irina Nazarova: Rubiconf, and then, well, Rails World, then your conference, and Blast of Rails. So I will, I will try to… be a Muslim, and then I'm… I also want to go to… Actually, I want to go through Bikaigi, just… just to see, you know, and it… and also kind of to… because I have… we have team at… in Japan, and our team, 5 people that are in Osaka, they… every year they go to Rubikaige, and this year I just want to join them.

Travis Dockter: Nice.

Irina Nazarova: I hope so. I hope it works out. I want to go to Brazil, I want to go to Tropical.

Travis Dockter: Yep. And I want to go to…

Irina Nazarova: Rubicon of Austria in Vienna. This is… this is a new one. So… It's all more, like. It might happen, might not happen, you know?

Travis Dockter: Yeah, you're gonna have so much inspiration for, for us at Fruby Conference.

Irina Nazarova: Yeah, and I want to do a soft ruby also, but I'll need… I still need to connect. Put my ducks in order and check out, like. basically, yeah, for full disclosure, yeah, I need to… I need to figure out a way to host a Safroit, bringing So that we're bringing more people. Making it a better experience? And ulcer, not… burning ourselves out in the process. Yeah, yeah. So, that's the challenge, yeah. So, that's the… the problem to solve, yeah.

Travis Dockter: Yep. Alright, well, I wish you the best of luck, and thank you again for your time, and I hope we'll talk again soon.

Irina Nazarova: Thank you, Charles. Yeah, hope to see you soon, and I'm super excited to see what you have coming, and for Blast of Rails, and… you know, the experiments, maybe, that you would run, and I'll be looking at all of that, then try to support, so…

Travis Dockter: Awesome, absolutely. Alrighty, take care.