Noel Rappin

Hi, I’m Mike. I’m here again at Windy City Rails with Noel Rappin. Hi, everybody. Noel is also another one of those people that have been around pretty much forever inside of the Ruby community. That’s frightening. Yeah. And particularly here in Chicago, and you know, he often teaches, you often teach workshops as well as speak at a conference, and just kind of like, you know, the differences between speaking and teaching a workshop at a conference. Well, yeah, I think there are differences of scale. You know, you go to, there’s two differences really. One is the scale of it. When you’re doing a regular conference presentation, you’re speaking in front of, you know, 150, 200 people in a large room for not as much time, and those workshops tend to be around a dozen people, and they tend to be more intimate in scale, and you have a longer time to interact with people. And also the workshops typically are people who are specifically choosing to be in that time. It’s an extra cost, it’s a time, it’s certainly a time investment. Whereas in a conference talk, people are coming to the conference more than they’re coming to see you in specific, so you normally, you have to maybe do a little bit more of a job of explaining why you’re there and what’s important to it. The people that come to a day-long workshop, they’re self-selected. They already think this is important because they’re spending a day on it. And I mean, I’ve heard people kind of describing the person who’s standing up in front of the audience teaching as being kind of the school mentor, I mean, excuse me, the school teacher standing up in front of an audience lecturing the audience of the students versus, you know, the hands-on person who’s down with the student teaching a lesson. Well, yeah. I mean, the workshop is effective generally in proportion to the extent that I’m not talking, you know. I’m as guilty of this in teaching as I am of anything else. If I’m spending the whole time talking, you know, that’s maybe not the most effective use of the time. You know, if somebody is asking a question, then even if it is sort of a digression, then, you know, for the course of that question, at the very least, I’m answering something that is of interest to somebody in the room because they’ve asked it, but even better is when people have the opportunity to really try something and have questions that emerge out of their experience. As they’re working through something rather than trying to impose an experience on them, which is something that I could stand to get better at. And it also leads me to think about how an open laptop in a class is a good thing. An open laptop during a session, you know, listening to Steve Klabnick’s talk, which was very, it was a very thoughtful presentation and seeing all the laptops open. Well, you know. So there’s a lap, you know, there are, there are, there are different scales of that. You know, I’m looking around and I’m seeing people who are, their laptops are open, but they’re taking notes or they’re using a mind map software to really try and engage with the material while the present, presenter’s doing it, or people are, you know, checking Twitter. You know, those are, those are different levels of engagement and, and, but you can often tell from the other side of the laptop, even if you can’t see the laptop screen, whether somebody is really engaging with what you’re trying to say or not. Yeah. I saw a lot of code on screens. You always, yeah, that, you know, one thing definitely, a lot of people are, a lot of people are still working on code. So, I mean, has that ever been something that’s been distracting for you on stage or? It’s only distracting, as a, as a presenter in a large room, it’s generally not distracting unless they’re distracting other people, usually, or unless there’s such a critical mass of people that have checked out that, but, but that, that doesn’t usually happen. Yeah. In a small room, it’s much more obvious. If a couple people have checked out, and, and that can be distracting if you’re, you know, if you’re, if you’re doing a workshop to even like 12 people and, and two or three of them have, maybe they have valid reasons, you know, maybe something genuinely important came up, but they’re, they’ve checked out, like that, that stands out in a small room in a way that it doesn’t necessarily. Do you ever, have you ever had that happen where you’ve been up on a stage and seen a bunch of laptops opening up and you’re like, maybe I should alter, you know? Um, in a, in a, in a short form presentation, then I don’t, I don’t normally have a, a leeway really to, to do that necessarily. In a, in a small room, I’ll usually joke about it. Yeah. You know, I, I’ll make it, make it obvious that, or make it clear that I can kind of tell that they’ve, that they’ve checked out. Um, a lot of times, you know, in a workshop situation, um, there, there’s two ways to look at it. I mean, I could be not doing a good job. Um, they could be not paying attention. Like, I, I don’t necessarily know. Um, you know, these, you know, if people come voluntarily to come sit in the room and they think the best use of their time is to sit in the room and, and write code, I don’t know, maybe it is. Um, I try not to get, I’ve done this enough that I try very hard not to take it personally. Um, except to the extent that I try to think about what I might not be, what I might be doing not to, to, to not be serving. And, you know, speaking more about the, because you’ve done so much teaching, you were, you were, you were a teacher before. Well, you taught at the college level. Only a little bit. I only, only the extent that I was a graduate student, but I, I, I did run some classes. Is, have you seen any, over the years, have you seen any kind of an evolution in the audience dynamic at a conference? Not, not that I could say over time. I think that the regional conferences have gotten, you know, sort of bigger and more structured. Um, that there’s, you know, even just, but even just the idea of having training days as something that’s a regular thing is really only a couple of years old. It’s probably a little too soon to think of that as something that’s evolving. I think that what has happened in the Ruby community is that the, the regional conference, the regional conferences have become, you know, more established and, and, and, uh, more professional and sort of better organized just in general, and I think, and larger. And I think that that has, uh, that has more of an effect on, on, on what happens than, than the community changing over time. Yeah, because the, the one thing with that, kind of what makes me think about with the structure is, is it, uh, people are too much on a, on a, uh, I mean, we use the word track to describe, you know, a series of, of presentations, but, um, the people tend to move on tracks and that they are almost like a school. I mean, if you think about it, it’s almost like you go to class and then you have a break and then you go to the next class and then you have a launch. Right, and that’s, that’s, you know, there’s a limit, you know, I think that in a single track conference like this one, you know, there’s, it’s not quite a school, but I, I, I think of it as kind of like a chance, as much as anything, it’s a chance to hear perspectives that you wouldn’t otherwise hear. Like, I’m not normally going to, um, maybe to my detriment, I’m not normally going to spend 45 minutes thinking about philosophy as it relates to my work, but it’s a really interesting perspective to have and now maybe I might seek it out. Um, I, I think that, that, uh, you know, lecture, which is what these day-long conferences tend to be, um, it has its strengths. Weaknesses and weaknesses is a teaching tool, but it’s a really good way to introduce, introduce things, uh, it’s a really good way to get a, a, a, a sense that something might be interesting to you to explore, you know, I really like, there have been a couple talks today and yesterday that, um, have had some practical things that I can, you know, actually start using right now. Right. And I think that that’s really great, too. Yeah, I think it’s nice at a conference to have a mixture of the practical and the theoretical. Yeah, I think that, yeah, I agree. Okay, well, thank you very much, Noel, for taking the time. Thanks, Mike. All right. We’ll have a link to your book, too, as well. Oh, great. Thank you.