Jim Remsik

Hi, I’m Mike. I’m here at Windy City Rails on behalf of uTasic. I’m standing here with Jim Remsick, who does Madison Ruby and the UXMAD. So Jim, thanks for taking the time to talk with me. My pleasure. Madison Ruby has been on the lips of everybody at Groupon this past couple weeks. So can you tell everybody a little bit about what is Madison Ruby? Sure. So Madison Ruby was the event that I wanted to go to. We had a couple of goals. We wanted to introduce the Ruby community to Madison, and we’ve had several people say, “Wow, Madison. Maybe we’ll relocate.” But also introduce Madison to the Ruby community because there were a ton of people that I knew from attending conferences that were awesome people, and we just wanted to introduce the Madison people to them and sort of get them involved in the community. Okay. And earlier I had heard that you engage the actual Chamber of Commerce. So you try to make it way beyond just Madison. So to some degree, yes. We want to bring in people who are interested in Ruby and entertain them and give them things to take away that showcase their passion and inspire them. And really that wasn’t really a goal going in, but the single most word that I’ve used here to describe this year’s conference was “people came away inspired,” which was, you know, we were over the moon to hear that. Yeah. Yeah. So it seems like you have kind of a TED format, almost. It seemed like you had the – I remember seeing pictures of big carpeting and a stage. So there’s a three-side – More theatrical. Yeah. It’s a playhouse theater, and it’s a three-sided stage, which is just fantastic because from the center of the stage, I don’t think that you’re more than like 15 feet from any individual person in the theater. Okay. So it’s a very intimate theater. We do shorter talks. We only do 30-minute talks. We do 30-minute talks. We actually had some 20-minute talks this year. And we don’t do only ruby. We don’t do only technical. And so this year we happened to have two legendary drummers. We had Clyde Stubblefield, who’s James Brown’s drummer, and we had Martin Atkins, who’s a legendary punk drummer, been in little bands like Ministry, Big Face, Killing Joke. Yeah. Small, small bands. Yeah. So yeah, that’s – what was kind of the goal there? I mean – It’s simple. And so this year it happened to be drummers. Not because we sought out drummers, just because those were the people that we found locally. We had a – since our first conference, we’ve always included a local flavor session, which is we wanted to showcase Madison. And so we had – the first year we had a chocolatier, a cheesemaker, and the brewer unfortunately didn’t show up. Yeah. So we wanted to showcase people that are in Madison who are passionate about what they do and that are doing awesome things. So, you know, you can’t get – you can’t get much more passionate than Martin Atkins and Clyde Stubblefield. And they just came in and they’re entertainers, and they killed their sessions. So as they come in, they talk about bringing passion to what you do? Or trying to – because what I would imagine is they’re great artists, but also they do the same thing. Yeah. Yeah. So they do the same thing day in, day out. Whereas we like to imagine that we’re creating art or – we are being creative in our industry, but we do it day in and day out. Is that kind of – Yeah. So particularly with those two, we just said, you know, come in and tell us why you do what you do. And, you know, Clyde told more of a story about how he, you know, started out playing two sticks on a trash can lid and how he got to where he is today. And, Martin, a little bit more entertaining. Yeah. But he has, you know, how to do what you do and be successful at it. And, you know, it’s – It’s a little more entrepreneurial from my – A little bit, yeah. Yeah. So he actually has a book called “Welcome to the Music Business” – or “EFT.” And – Yeah. I don’t know who your audience is, so – Yeah. Yeah. It’s PG. All right. So – but I’d like to do that. Yeah. But I’d like to do that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I’d like to describe that book as a punk, raw, getting real from 37 Signals, but, you know, from the perspective of a punk drummer. Yeah. Because, yeah, people think about what they create, the music, the playing. But there’s a lot that goes in. You know, it’s like running a conference. It’s like business. Yeah. Right. So a punk band is a small business. And he has been successful for a number of years through, you know, multiple iterations. And it just – a lot of it is, like, you know, it’s just a lot of common sense stuff. They’re like, “Oh, right.” You know, that makes a ton of sense. Yeah. Why didn’t I think of that? Sometimes the common sense just has to kind of snap you in the face, though, to – Absolutely. – for it to come through. So – and what is UX Mad? UX Mad is a user experience conference. This is something that we actually – we had a person living with us who is a user experience expert. And he said, “When I finish my book, let’s do a UX conference.” Mm-hmm. And he said, “You know, my book never got finished.” But we said, “We want to do another event.” Yes, let’s do the conference anyway. Exactly. So it’s really bringing in user experience, which is a really hard question to answer what it is. But, you know, it’s everything from, you know – we took the aspect of web user experience. Mm-hmm. So everything from page load time, look and feel, content, to – Mm-hmm. – you know, do things function correctly. All of those play a role in user experience. Okay. And so our goal was to sort of put on an awesome front-end conference. And, again, people didn’t really know what to expect, I think, from that conference. Mm-hmm. But everybody left with great feedback. So what would be – I mean, you know, designers have very different goals and different – at least in my experience, have different mentality towards their work than programmers do. What – you know, run into different conferences that are targeting these very – or at least what I would perceive to be very different audiences. What has, you know, been some of the tradeoffs? What has worked with one but maybe not worked with the other? Well, I mean, at the end of the day, there’s still people, and there are people who care about what they do. Those are the type of people that we’re looking to draw in. So it’s not – it’s not terribly hard to say, “Okay, you know, put it in this bubble and then frame it in the context of a person who cares about what they do.” There’s definitely – definitely differences. We have karaoke for the designers. Okay. Which probably wouldn’t play too well at a – at a Ruby conference, but, you know, that’s – How much – how much beer would have been consumed, though, before you would work at a Ruby conference? When? Maybe if you had the brewer that showed up, that would have – We actually – so that’s – I do want to say that that’s stereotyping, that there are plenty of karaoke people in the – in the Ruby community. But, you know, those people just seem a little bit more extroverted. So – but, I mean, we – we did focus on that. We had the afterparty for UX Mad at a children’s museum. Oh, really? Just so interactive and one of my favorite – one of my favorite highlights from UX Mad was we had rock band set up. We had an entire children’s museum full of exhibits for people to play with. room and there’s 20 people sitting around a kid-sized table drawing with crayons yeah it’s just it was fantastic yeah you know the Madison Ruby conference you know again it’s just about people who care about what they do happen to be focused on Ruby so there are definitely differences they’re largely back-end focused not always but yeah okay well thank you very much for for taking the time to speak with me.

• Absolutely.
• Appreciate it.
• Cheers.