Interview with Evan Light on DCamp and developer community building at RailsConf 2014

Hi, it’s Mike with UGtastic. I’m at RailsConf 2014, and I ‘m standing here with Evan Light. Evan is the founder and lead organizer for DCAMP, which is in Washington, D.C. Just outside. Just outside of Washington, D.C., and he’s also an active contributor to open source for a long time in the Ruby community. Thank you for taking the time to talk. Sure. So we had spoken about DCAMP a few years ago at Windy City Rails. Where’s DCAMP now? Same place it was to be. Same place. But as far as organization, is it growing? Do you have more people coming? I know you manage, you like to curate your audience. I don’t let it grow. We have different people. We don’t have more people. I have some rules of thumb I use for that, and one of them is if I can’t memorize everyone’s name, it’s too big. So how many people can you memorize? I know I can do 77. I don’t know about more than that, but I know I can do 77, and I can keep them in my head for a few days. Okay. Not necessarily after that. Right, right. But at least when you’re at the event, you like to keep it personal. Yes. Exactly. That DCAMP is more community than conference. Yeah. Well, so for people who might not know what DCAMP is, what is different than, like, we’re at RailsConf, we’re at a hotel. This is a conference. People talk at you at conferences. You have breaks where you talk to other people. That’s all very informal and structured and lots of crowds. DCAMP is a nerd commune in the woods. Okay, so it’s out and away from civilization. Sort of. It’s a Prince William Forest park. Stone’s throw from civilization. Yeah, except you were in the DC area, so Stone’s throw is a long way because of traffic. Oh, okay. It’s just off of Route 95 South and Prince William Forest Park, which is a national park. And they have these cabin camps that are kind of like the kind of thing you might have spent time in over the summer as a kid. They actually have historical significance. They’re left over from the precursor to the CIA. I forget the name of it off the top of my head. They trained in these camps. So we use Cabin Camp 3. It supports 78 people. So for what other reason do you stay in 77? 77 and me. 78 people, that’s the number of people who can sleep there overnight. We could technically have more during the day, but I’m adam ant that everyone who comes, they have to stay the whole time. So yeah, the point is to get away from civilization. Yes, there’s internet, but only if you bring it. I don’t actually supply it at the venue. But the whole point is to get away from civilization. Yes, there’s internet, but only if you bring it. Yes, there’s internet, but only if you bring it. Yes, there’s internet, but only if you bring it. You can’t get away from civilization to isolate that group for three days and the community forums. Okay, get some sunshine, get a little fresh air. Not so much sunshine. No? No, trees, lots of trees. But yes. You get the idea. Yeah, lots of fresh air. Yeah. Okay, so how do people go? Do they do an open call for people to join, or how do you manage the attendees? So one of the aspects of D-Camp is while it’s exclusive, and I went with that word a little, I try to be even-handed about having people come in. And to do that, I don’t choose the vast majority of people who come. I take advantage of Eventbrite. They have a system of creating promotional codes. Oh, okay. And so what I do is I create a bunch of different promotional codes that are good for two to five regist rations. And I seed those with people I know and trust. And I trust in the community. I feel a little bit bad doing that sometimes because over time, a lot of these people have become close friends of mine. I don’t want it to be friends of Evan’s camp. I want it to be something more than just that. But these are people who I trust. So I tell them, find talented, passionate, amazing people. And I’m explicit with them. It doesn’t mean experts. It doesn’t mean novices. It doesn’t mean intermediate. It means all. And I also ask them, try not to… Try not to find all of one or all of the other. Let’s get a mix. Different skill sets, different perspectives are important. It’s how we avoid becoming a monoculture, hopefully. And then I kind of do that, I guess, as a few rounds. See how many people gobble up codes after the first round of codes go out. And then do it until we fill up. Okay. And then if somebody can’t show, do you open that spot back up? Ideally. A few people push back against this. Most people supported this, though. Up until a few years ago, we would only have two-thirds attendance. Because a lot of people would just not show up. Right. So I decided at that point… Sorry, to be clear, DKAM is free. Right. You just have to get there. So I think people hear free, and they get a code, and they sign up, and then they don’t feel any obligation to cancel. But DKAMs cost money to produce. The sponsors pay money. They don’t… Frankly, they don’t get any particular influence by sponsoring. They get their name attached. The ones who spend the most money get on a T-shirt. I’m thinking about having scholarship sponsors to pay for travel expenses for some people who can’t afford to come, but who really ought to come, who would benefit from coming. But the sponsors don’t get that much out of it. So not having people show up means that that’s money left on the table. That’s money wasted. Sponsors are losing out. And the participants lose out that way. DKAM’s content is driven by everyone who comes. If it’s anemic attendance, then there’s… If it’s anemic content, exactly, then we’re all less for it . So what I’ve said is if you cancel within less than two weeks of the event, you’re banned. You don’t get to come back for at least two years. Oh, wow. Yeah. So the lights are fired for people to be aware. And it also lets people know that, hey, this does kind of … We invited you as a friend. And you kind of snubbed us. Yeah. So since I’ve done that, we’ve had, I think, only one no- show a year for two years now. So it’s pretty much worked. Great. And to segue into your open-source work, right now you’re with Rackspace. When you’re working with their open-source outreach, what is that? What are they doing? Well, I guess I’m a lot of the face of the Ruby community in Rackspace. And I’m part of the so-called developer relations group. And our job is a few different fold. As far as code goes, I’m working on a lot of our Ruby SDKs. So Fog is our official SDK. Okay. And that is that we work with the other developers in Fog, because Fog is a community unto itself. Right. And then we have other tools that either work with Fog or just in other ways integrate with our cloud. Like we have favorite Rackspace, which under the hood, uses Fog, yes, and Knife Rackspace, which I actually haven ‘t touched yet. Paper Clipping, Carrier Wave, I think we’re only just finally starting to realize that we get a lot of traffic from that probably. So we’re trying to work with those to better support Fog and Rackspace. So a lot of my involvement is driven by Rackspace’s interest in open-source, but to that extent, that’s just where I’m involved. How I’m involved, though, I was hired with the understanding that I’d be trying to look out not just for R ackspace, but for the Ruby community. And Fog has been around for several years, and it’s used by lots of people. But any project that’s been around for several years, there ‘s lots of cruft. And we’re trying to make things better. For right now, I’m collaborating with some guys at HP on writing a new OpenStack front end for Fog. We call it Provider. Okay. I guess. Not really front end, which is, you could say, plug-in. But it’s just how you interact through Fog to OpenStack. And going forward, also, we, Rackspace, are hosting a summit for some of the top contributors in Fog to try to create more of a roadmap and get more consensus around where Fog will go as a project over time. I’ve talked to Wes Berry a little bit, the GMAS, the guy who created Fog. He’s indicated Fog kind of grew by accretion. He started with a fairly modest goal, but a lot of people have adopted it and thrown lots of code at it. But there hasn’t been a whole lot of stopping, catching the breath, and trying to figure out what to do next. So it’s gotten kind of hairy. And so the hope is with this summit that we’ll reestablish a sense of direction and have some plan for going forward. So by having you at Rackspace, you’re able to be that intermediary who understands and has been a participant. And in the community for a long time. Yeah, I go between engineering and management. I’m a people person. I’ve got people skills. You got it. Yeah, OK. Well, thank you very much for taking the time to speak. I appreciate it. You bet. User groups with lots to say, interviews and more. No way. Sharing great ideas in the tech community. Fascinating conversations, a plethora of information. Find out for yourself today at ucdastic.com. ucdastic.com.