Conference Speaking And Presentation Skills: Mike Hall Interviews Jim Remsik | WindyCityRails 2012

• UGtastic Archive
Full Transcript Available
Watch on Vimeo Watch on Youtube
🚀 Discover the magic of Madison Ruby and UX Mad! 🎤 Meet the legends of drumming and learn about creating a successful front-end experience. 🌟 Engage with the Ruby community and leave inspired! 🌟 #MadisonRuby #UXMad #RubyConference #Drummers #UserExperience #FrontEndDev #CTA https://just3ws.github.io/interviews/jim-remsik-windycityrails-2012
The Interviewer

Mike Hall

Interviewer, UGtastic

The Guest

Jim Remsik

conference speaking and presentation skills

The Conversation

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic
Hi I'm Mike, I'm here at WindyCityRails. On behalf of UGtastic, I'm standing here with Jim Remzik, who does Madison Ruby and the UX Mad. 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 of weeks. So can you tell everybody a little bit about what is Madison Ruby? Sure.
Jim Remsik conference speaking and presentation skills
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, sort of get them involved in the community.
Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic
Okay.
Jim Remsik conference speaking and presentation skills
And you know, earlier I had heard that you engage the actual Chamber of Commerce. And so you try to make it like way beyond just a developer conference. 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 who came away inspired. Which was, you know, we were over the moon to hear that. That's a great feeling.
Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic
Yeah. Yeah.
Jim Remsik conference speaking and presentation skills
So it seems like you have kind of a TED format almost. It seemed like you had a -- I remember seeing pictures of big carpeting and a stage. So there's a three-sided -- A little more theatrical.
Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic
Yeah.
Jim Remsik conference speaking and presentation skills
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.
Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic
Okay.
Jim Remsik conference speaking and presentation skills
So it's a very intimate theater. We do shorter talks. We only do 30 minutes. 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 happen 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.
Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic
Yeah.
Jim Remsik conference speaking and presentation skills
Small bands.
Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic
Yeah. And so, yeah, that's -- what was kind of the goal there?
Jim Remsik conference speaking and presentation skills
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 brewer, unfortunately, didn't show up. But 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.
Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic
Yeah.
Jim Remsik conference speaking and presentation skills
So as they come in, they talk about bringing passion to what you do or trying to -- I mean, because what I would imagine is they're great artists, but also they do the same thing day in, day out. Whereas we'd 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. Was 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. But he has a, 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 -- A little bit, yeah. A little bit, yeah.
Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic
Yeah.
Jim Remsik conference speaking and presentation skills
So he actually has a book called Welcome to the Music Business -- welcome to the Music Business, or -- F'd.
Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic
Yeah.
Jim Remsik conference speaking and presentation skills
And I don't know who your audience is, so -- Yeah, yeah. It's Fiji. All right. So -- but I'd like to describe that book as a -- a punk, raw, getting real from 37 Signals, but, you know, from the -- from the perspective of a -- a punk drummer.
Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic
Yeah.
Jim Remsik conference speaking and presentation skills
Because, yeah, people -- 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.
Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic
It's like business, right? Yeah.
Jim Remsik conference speaking and presentation skills
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's just a lot of common sense stuff. They're like, "Oh, right. You know, that makes a ton of sense.
Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic
Why didn't I think of that?
Jim Remsik conference speaking and presentation skills
" Sometimes the common sense just has to kind of snap you in the face, though, to -- Absolutely. -- for it to come through.
Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic
So -- and what is -- what is UX Mad?
Jim Remsik conference speaking and presentation skills
UX Mad is a user experience conference. This is something that -- we actually -- we had a -- 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. " And the book never got finished, but we said, "We want to do another event. " Yes, let's do the conference anyway.
Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic
Exactly.
Jim Remsik conference speaking and presentation skills
So, it's really bringing in user experience, which is a really hard question to answer what it is. But, you know, it's -- it's everything from -- you know, we -- we took the -- the aspect of web user experience. So, everything from page load time, look and feel, content, to, you know, do things, function correctly, all those play a role in user experience. 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. 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 -- at least, what I would perceive to be very different audiences.
Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic
What is -- you know, been some of the trade-offs? What has worked with one, but maybe not worked with the other?
Jim Remsik conference speaking and presentation skills
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. It was definitely -- definitely differences. We have karaoke for the designers.
Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic
Okay.
Jim Remsik conference speaking and presentation skills
Which probably wouldn't play too long at a Ruby conference, but, you know -- How much beer would have been consumed, though, before you would work at a Ruby conference? 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 Ruby community. But, you know, those people just seem a little bit more extroverted. So, I mean, we did focus on that. We had the after-party for UX Mad at a children's museum.
Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic
Oh, really?
Jim Remsik conference speaking and presentation skills
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. I go in the back room, and there's 20 people sitting around a kid-sized table drawing with crayons. I mean, it's just -- it was fantastic.
Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic
Yeah.
Jim Remsik conference speaking and presentation skills
You know, the Madison Ruby conference, you know, again, it's just about people who care about what they do. You happen to be focused on Ruby. So, there are definitely differences. They're largely back-end focused. Not always. But, yeah.
Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic
Okay. Well, thank you very much for taking the time to speak with me. Absolutely. Appreciate it. Cheers.