Dcamp And Developer Community Building: Mike Hall Interviews Evan Light | RailsConf 2014
Dcamp And Developer Community Building: Mike Hall Interviews Evan Light | RailsConf 2014
🚀 Decamp is a unique conference experience in Prince William Forest Park. Evan Light explains the process of managing attendees and the importance of maintaining a diverse community. Don't miss this opportunity to connect with like-minded developers! 🌳💻 #Decamp #RailsConf2014 #DeveloperCommunity #EvanLight #TechConference
The Interviewer
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
The Guest
Evan Light
DCamp and developer community building
The Conversation
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
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 Decamp, which is in in Washington DC, just outside of Washington DC, 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 Decamp a few years ago at WindyCityRails. Where is Decamp now?
Evan Light
DCamp and developer community building
Same place it was.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
But as far as organization, is it growing? Do you have more people coming?
Evan Light
DCamp and developer community building
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.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Yeah. So, how many people can you memorize?
Evan Light
DCamp and developer community building
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.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Okay.
Evan Light
DCamp and developer community building
Not necessarily after that. Right, right. But at least when you're at the event, you like to keep it personal. Yes, exactly. Decamp is more community than conference.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Yeah. Okay.
Evan Light
DCamp and developer community building
Well, so for people who might not know what Decamp 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. Decamp is a nerd commune in the woods. Okay, so it's out and away from civilization. Sort of. It's at Prince William Forest Park. Stone's Throw from civilization. Yeah, except you were in the D. C. area, so Stone's Throw is a long way because of traffic. Oh, okay. It's just off of Route 95 South in 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. I trained in these camps. So, we use cabin camp three. It supports 78 people. For the other reason, you stay 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 adamant 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.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Okay.
Evan Light
DCamp and developer community building
I don't actually supply it at the venue. But the whole point is to get away from civilization, to isolate that group for three days and the community forms. Okay, get some sunshine, get a little fresh air. Not so much sunshine.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
No?
Evan Light
DCamp and developer community building
No, trees, lots of trees. But yes. You get the idea. Yeah, lots of fresh air.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Yeah. Okay. So, how do people go? Do they do you like an open call for people to join? Or how do you manage the attendees?
Evan Light
DCamp and developer community building
So, one of the aspects of dCamp is, while it's an exclusive event, and I wince with that word a little, I try to be even-handed about having people come in 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.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Okay.
Evan Light
DCamp and developer community building
And so, what I do is, I create a bunch of different promotional codes that are good for two to five registrations. And I cede those with people I know and 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 find all of one or all of the other. Let's get a mix. Different skill sets and perspectives are important. That'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 and after the first round of codes, go out and then do it until we fill up.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Okay. And then if somebody can't show, do you open that spot back up?
Evan Light
DCamp and developer community building
Ideally. I've gotten a few people pushed 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.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Right.
Evan Light
DCamp and developer community building
So, I decided at that point, sorry, to be clear, DKM is free.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Right.
Evan Light
DCamp and developer community building
You just have to get there. So, I think people, you're free and they get a code and they sign up and then they don't feel any obligation to cancel. But DKM costs 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 benefit from coming.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Right. Right.
Evan Light
DCamp and developer community building
But the sponsors don't get that much out of it. And so, not having people show up means that that's money left on the table. That's money wasted. And sponsors are losing out that way. And the participants lose out that way. DKM's content is driven by everyone who comes.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Right.
Evan Light
DCamp and developer community building
So, for a first... If it's anemic attendance, then there's... Then it's anemic content.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Exactly.
Evan Light
DCamp and developer community building
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.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Yeah.
Evan Light
DCamp and developer community building
So, the lights are fire for people to be aware. And it also lets people know, hey, this does kind of, we invited you as a friend and you kind of snubbed us. So...
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Yeah.
Evan Light
DCamp and developer community building
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.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Great.
Evan Light
DCamp and developer community building
And to segue into your open source work, right now you're with Rackspace and you're working with their open source outreach.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
What is that? What are they doing?
Evan Light
DCamp and developer community building
Well, I guess I'm a lot of the face to the Ruby community at 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, that's... Fog is our official SDK.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Okay.
Evan Light
DCamp and developer community building
And that is that we work with the other developers in Fog, because Fog is a community unto itself.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Right.
Evan Light
DCamp and developer community building
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.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Right.
Evan Light
DCamp and developer community building
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 Rackspace, Facebook for the Ruby community.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Right.
Evan Light
DCamp and developer community building
And Fog has been around for several years and it's used by lots of people. But for any project that's been around for several years, there's lots of cruft. And we're trying to make things better. Like, for right now, I'm working, I'm collaborating with some guys at HP on writing a new OpenStack front-end for Fog. We call it provider.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Okay.
Evan Light
DCamp and developer community building
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, GMS, the guy who created Fog. And he's indicated, Fog kind of grew by accretion, that 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, there hasn't been a whole lot of stopping, catching me, 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 the 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 in the community for a long time. Yeah, I go between engineering and management. See, I'm a people person. I've got people skills. You got it. Yeah, okay.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
Well, thank you very much for taking the time to speak. I appreciate it. You bet. You bet. [Music]