Evan Light

Hi, I’m Mike. Again, I’m here at Windy City Rails, and I’m talking with Evan Light, who runs the Ruby DCAMP, or you created the Ruby DCAMP. But anyway, can you tell me a little bit about Ruby DCAMP and what you’re doing there? Well, first, hi, because I’m a goofball. Okay, so yeah, DCAMP. I created it, I guess, in 08 for a lot of different reasons. I was frustrated with, I was sitting in the audience at RailsConf, I guess, it was in 08, and Chad Fowler was giving a presentation. He was giving his keynote, and he made one remark. He said, I don’t do well in classroom environments. And so I instantly blocked everything else he was saying after that and thought, well, I don’t really either. I don’t imagine most of the people here either. Why are we listening to this? Yeah. And so I just kept thinking about that. And after that event, I realized, well, then, we’ve got this whole conference model backwards. We shouldn’t have one person standing at the front of the room all the time. A teacher in front of the class. A teacher in front of a seminar, essentially. Sometimes we have genuine experts at the front of the room. Often we just have someone who maybe just learned something and wanted to share about it. So my question is really, what makes these people so qualified to stand on stage? And when you reflect on it, and this is awfully ironic, maybe hypocritical. I’m talking about the set of conferences I’m speaking at. But the speakers at conferences are chosen by a very select few individuals, the people who run these conferences, for any number of reasons. Not necessarily because of some unique special competence. Not necessarily for a reason that necessarily behooves the audience. But it behooves those people who are running the conference. So maybe better to, instead of having a, if you will, an elitist group, or an elite group, an exclusive group, choose who speaks at events, that everyone should come gather together and share what’s interesting to them, what’s important to them, and what they want to learn about, and then grow together as a group, collectively. Yeah, that’s a very interesting perspective about the elitist. I have to give a man. Elitism is a strong word. It’s the, I’ve been guilty of it myself. I’ll use a different word, or a different phrase. Hero worship. Yeah, well, or thinking about who’s going to bring people into the conference. And that was the aspect I was going to go at. Is that I know I’ve sat down and looked and said, you know, this person’s really well known. This person’s going to be somebody that people are going to want to see. And they’re going to bring more audience and make more value for the conference. And which is a silly thing. Especially for a free, well, this is a paid conference. I can’t speak to that. But doing free events, it’s, you know, who am I serving? Well, D-Camp wasn’t originally free. The first year, it was a little more formal. It had the basic format I described, but it was $100 because we had it at a hotel venue. And that added all kinds of complication. And it was Chris Williams from the JavaScript community who had participated in the first D-Camp Fire Call. Actually, he sponsored it, come to think of it. And he said, why not hold it at a campground? And that just hit me like a gold brick in the side of the head. It’s the word camp. Well, no, it’s not just the word camp. It’s just I’m a bit of a tree-hugger, tree-hugging hippie. And yes, so we did it at a state campground. Manassas was the, I don’t see it, the Manassas Battlefield Campground, I guess, or the Battlefield Park has a campground. And we only had maybe 12 people. We stayed overnight. But for those of us who stayed overnight during the camp, it was a hell of an experience. Then I heard about this role-playing game group that a few friends of mine participated in. And they have a yearly gathering at this cabin camp. And I went and investigated it. It actually has a cell phone signal, surprisingly. And I looked at the space and thought, this is just magnificent. The price is $800 for four nights. It has a professional kitchen, a walk-in freezer. A sleeping room for 78 people. How much more perfect? And it had plenty of electricity. We didn’t blow any breakers for two years. We haven’t blown breakers for two years now. How much more perfect could it get? It was so cheap. And it gets people out of their element. And it’s just far enough from civilization. Prince William Forest Park in Virginia, it’s about maybe 30, 40 miles outside D.C. It’s hard for people to leave. It’s just inconvenient enough for people to go home that even the locals tend not to want to. So we have three days. Maybe three and a half days or so of people stuck together in the same place. And that can be really powerful. And also, being out in the greenery, it’s got to be enough of a destruction of what your typical mental state is inside of a building, inside of artificial lighting. You know, you’re out and there’s green and there’s… The big blue room. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s for a comic strip. Yeah, well, yeah, yeah, the big blue room that is the great outdoors, but it sounds like it kind of breaks routine. It breaks a rigid expectation of how a conference should be. And that’s what we try to do across the board. Okay. And do you do anything with trying to bring in local user groups or anything like that? Well, at first, I tried to market, if you will. I sent emails out to user groups up and down the mid-Atlantic. And because I lived in the metro area, I lived in northern Virginia most of my life, I knew, a lot of people in that area, so I would talk to them the most in the first few years, was mostly local people. But I’d always had the intent to try to make it big, not necessarily in size, but in terms of reach, because, again, I feel like the model, the conference model just doesn’t seem right, especially for a group as diverse as the Ruby community. I do think that we are somewhat unique in special snowflakes as a community, for better or worse, in that I feel like Ruby is a very expressive language, it tends to attract slightly unusual people. Maybe a little bit smarter than the average bear, but maybe you could say that about anyone who goes to a conference. Or people who are more interested in the average bear, people who know more than the average bear. And if that’s the case, why are we just lecturing at them? Though I already said that. Yeah, well, it’s an interesting perspective. Knowledge is just knowledge until you put it into action. And a lot of times, you come into a conference and we get knowledge. But no action. But one of the other aspects that’s troubling me about the conference environment is a lot of people, I found this about myself years ago, a lot of people go to the conferences not for the presentations. Because you see, we were talking about this a moment ago before we rolled camera, you see people with laptops open typing away all the time, they’re not really paying attention. So why are they there? They’re not really there for the presentations, they’re there for the other people. Or what sometimes we call the hallway track. So the idea then was, well, let’s make something that’s essentially starting at a hallway track. And then I had a few other people egg me to go in certain directions. I was originally thinking something that was less controlled than a conference, but even then I was still holding on just a little to some control. I have very, very little control. We’re just setting the stage right now for the event. We go so far as to bring supplies, which I used to be solely responsible for acquiring them. Now we have so many people who participate that… I’m just making sure people are talking and I might not even have to go fetch anything this year, which I usually do. So let me back up. Really, the whole metaphor is stone soup. The old… Everybody keeps, I’ll let you tell the story. Okay. So the story of the stone soup, I guess it started in France during some war or another. Some soldiers walk into a town and they have nothing to eat at all. And the people in the town are very poor, but the soldiers say, the soldiers come up with this idea of, well, we’re going to get this big pot, put some water in it. We have this magic stone that will make the food taste really good, but if you put a little bit of something in it, it’s not going to taste good. But if you put something else in there, it’ll make it even better. Yeah. And then, so the townspeople started contributing a little bit, a little bit, a little bit at a time by as individuals, and next thing they had this magnificent meal. DeCamp works exactly like that. The first year, or I guess the second year when we were really in the woods, I went to Costco, loaded up my father’s Subaru Outback, because my car can’t load as much stuff, bought all the supplies at Costco, dragged them out there, dragged, and my father dragged his grill out there. I did a lot of lugging around, but what happened? What happened on site is that I would start to do some work, and then people would say, oh, Evan’s doing this by himself, let’s help. Yeah. And then before I knew it, I could just step back and they would do it. Yeah. And whereas this year, we’ve evolved to the point where occasionally someone would walk up to me and say, do you think I should do so-and-so? I’m like, do you want to? Yeah, yeah. And sometimes, even better, someone would just go into the kitchen and just start cooking because they were hungry. Great. Yeah, yeah. I love it. I don’t want to have to do any of this. I shouldn’t have to do any of this. I try not to be a benevolent dictator. I want people to just do things together. Benevolent facilitator. Well, that’s the goal. That’s the goal. And I think we as a community are mostly there now. And I say community because D-Camp has a tendency to draw a lot of previous attendees back. I’m not the only one who’s very passionate about it. I just started that way. But I guess you could say I’ve sold or they’ve sold each other on the idea that it’s not just my idea now, it’s our idea. And so this year, I have people coordinating on what supplies to buy, what they are going to cook because we’ve got some really amazing people when it comes to making food. Yeah, I think about that a little too much. But really, when you start with hot dog buns and some sugar and some other things, you have a guy come out with this amazing bread pudding. It’s hard not to be blown away by the creativity and love that goes into it. And that was just emblematic of the whole event last year. And that’s pretty much what it’s like now. Everything. Everything. Is a communal effort. And usually I don’t have to start any of it. Now they just, they know something needs to get done. Someone starts doing it. Other people see them. They help. So I’ll say it on a camera now. Oh my God, I don’t think I’ve done this before. It’s basically a socialist experiment that I’ve done for a few days. Yeah, yeah. It’s a little commune. Yeah, it’s a big commune. No, it really is essentially a commune. Just we drop in the supplies at the beginning, occasionally resupply during from a central budget, if you will. I just break the checks to people. Okay. So I just do it. So I handle it. So I’m the public bureau. I control the checkbook, but there really isn’t a no unless we don’t have money. Right. Because people are very reasonable about their expectations usually, collectively, and things get done. Yeah. And, you know, just kind of thinking about going, the conversation also that we had a little bit before, just kind of switching gears. I know that you’re also very involved with looking at and you’ve been vocal about equality at the conversation. I know that you’re also very involved with, you know, having conversations with people at conferences and seeing a mixed audience of people that, you know, traditionally white male, young audience at conferences. Is that something that I’m sure you have an opinion on and could make a comment on? Have you seen like a change over the years with any kind of attitude towards women and people who would otherwise be considered minorities at conferences? I’ve seen collectively over. I’ve seen collectively over. The whole of the conferences in the Ruby community, a trend toward reaching out more. Rails Bridge has been around for a few years now. That’s a women’s outreach group, essentially. I’ve seen more outreach toward minorities. I’m proactively trying to get more minorities involved, more women involved. And it’s not that I shoot for a quota, but I know worthy people. Right. I know people who are passionate, who are interested, and organizations. Or are extremely talented. And there are a lot of people like that in the Ruby community. So we don’t have to bring out representative numbers. We can skew them just a little bit. Why not? Because we’re stronger. I’ve always been a very big believer that we’re stronger for diversity. Monoculture is death. And so having more women involved is a good thing. Having more minorities involved is a good thing. More perspective, more disagreement, as long as it’s constructive, is a good thing. Okay. But I mean, what I was trying to get at is… Well, I actually can’t remember what I was going to say. But that’s okay, because that happens every now and then. But thank you very much, Evan, for taking the time to speak with me. You’re welcome. Thanks, Mike.