Steve Klabnik

Hi, I’m Mike. I’m here with Steve Klabnick at Windy City Rails. Steve does, well, if you do Ruby, you’ve probably touched something that he’s touched, but he’s also working with the Hungry Academy to kind of bring people up to speed with programming in a very short period of time and make them employable. Can you talk a little bit about what you do with Hungry Academy exactly? Totally. So Hungry Academy is a partnership between Jumpstart Lab, where I work with Jeff Kazmir and some other folks, and Living Social. Yeah, yeah, and Living Social. So Living Social knows how hard it is to hire developers, and so they decided to take 24 people who had never programmed before, who programmed very little, and essentially we at Jumpstart built them a curriculum, and we went through 40-hour weeks of class and like 30 hours a week of homework to train them into developers, and over the course of five months, they learned everything they needed to know about building Rails apps, and at the end of it, they all went through the Living Social hiring process and all ended up actually being hired, which was something that I really enjoyed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was something that they didn’t actually expect to do. They figured they would take 16 or 20 of them, but they ended up actually taking all 24. So how did you find these 24 people? I mean, were they not developers at all, or people that transitioned? So there was a mixture. So what Living Social did was they put out this website and said, we’re going to do this Hungry Academy thing. If you ever wanted to learn how to program and you want to work at it, let’s do this. And they actually asked people to send in videos of them talking about why they thought it would be fun to learn to program and why they might want to be a programmer. Oh, so kind of they had to do a little video to show their passion. Yeah, kind of like this. Totally. And so then a team at Living Social went through all of those videos and figured out who they thought would fit in well. They sort of went for cultural fit over everything else. So if it was someone they felt like they would like to work with, then they picked those people. At least that’s my understanding. I wasn’t involved directly with that process. So most of the people had not done any programming before. Some of them had only done a little bit. So I know someone, for example, who she had done a little bit of Rails before, but said that they went through everything she knew on the first day. So she had heard about it because she had been dabbling with programming and that’s not like the channel she heard it through, but was not primarily a programmer before doing the Hungry Academy stuff. So that was sort of the typical, I would say, Hungry Academy student was somebody who either knew someone who was a programmer or who had heard about it because it received tons of tweets and retweets from everyone and they were trying to get the word out that we want new people to be developers. Just curious too, as you were teaching these people about the programming, were you also, I mean, the culture at LivingSocial from the people I’ve spoken to is very important and you’re obviously also well engaged with the community. Were you exposing people, hey, you know, there’s this technical aspect, but there’s this other human aspect that… Totally. So I actually was not involved in the day-to-day teaching of Hungry Academy. Jeff, living in D.C. and being in there at their offices, Jeff and Matt Yoho did the actual day-to-day stuff, but I visited a couple different times and that was part of how they ran the programming. The first project or the class was bringing in Ruby developer Smeltide stuff. So they had one of the RSpec core members drop by. You know, like a ton of different people work for LivingSocial and tons of different people are in the D.C. area. So anytime a well-known Rubyist was around, they would bring them in and be like, hey, this guy wrote some of the software you write. Like, let’s talk to him. I think I’m pretty sure that like Aaron Patterson stopped by one time and gave them a, you know, talk about some stuff. I know at least one of the RSpec people did and like, you know, the various other both employees and non-employees of LivingSocial. So that was sort of… one way of doing the cultural stuff. Also, in general, when Jeff and I teach at Jumpstart, part of our standard curriculum is an introduction to Ruby culture. So we teach intro to Rails. We actually start with a history of Rails and a history of Ruby and talk about like, you know, Ruby came from Japan. You know, Rails was invented because this company had a need to build better, you know, software to manage their freelance business and like all that kind of stuff. So a little bit of history. Yeah, yeah. So we emphasize history and culture naturally. And Chunky Bacon. Yeah, Chunky Bacon and a little teeny bit about why. And, you know, so that’s like the first 15 or 20 minutes that new students that we teach always get exposed to because the cultural aspect is one of the best parts about Ruby and it’s one of the most powerful resources that we have. So it’s really important that we let people who are learning the language know about the culture they’re about to join. Yeah, that they’re not taking something that was created in some corporate lab someplace that was incubated just specifically to fit this one target demographic. It was somebody who was brilliant and wanted to… create something new and interesting and kind of was a little fun at first but then seems to have caught on. I don’t know, like one or two people do it. It’s kind of big now. But with the culture though and Ruby being itself actually kind of disruptive. You know, the growth of Ruby and starting to see it in places that aren’t necessarily just startups and really bleeding edge type companies. You know, I relate that back to, you know, user groups and how they’re, I think, a little bit disruptive in that they can change the way you approach having your social network. That you don’t just have it at the corporate office. You have it with people that share similar passions. And you tweet and write heavily about things like Occupy. Have you seen anything like, you know, with Ruby having been disruptive towards programming? Like user groups and technical communities are self-organizing. Has that… Do you see any kind of relationship with like what’s kind of going on now with political movements like Occupy? I mean, ultimately, yeah, user groups are definitely like a grassroot phenomenon, right? Like your town does not have a user group unless someone cared enough to step up and start a user group. And it’s very similar to the way that Occupy organizes with working groups. So, you know, each individual encampment would spin off different groups. So like this is the food group and they handle the food stuff. This is the library group and they’re handling all our donated books. This is the, you know, media group and they handle our Twitter and Facebook account. Anyone that’s interested. Anyone that’s interested in doing those things can sort of self-organize and work in those areas. So the same sort of thing with user groups. They usually follow a similar deal, right? Like, oh, we need to find a place to hold our user group this month. So I’m going to do that because I care about the future of the group. And it’s not because anybody told you to do it. It’s because you want to do it and put the group together. So there’s definitely some degree of communication in the sense of similarity with the like grassroots-ness, you know, of user groups and the way that that sort of stuff is organized for sure. We’re definitely at like a crisis in the Ruby community. I mean, in like a literary sense where it’s a tipping point one way or the other. So we came from a sort of super, like I said, disruptive background, right? And we all hated Java and we’re going against Java. But the problem is, is that now startups are getting more heavily client side. And so we’re actually starting to lose the startup shininess that made us popular. But our hatred of the enterprise is holding back our adoption in the enterprise, too. So we sort of need to choose, like, embracing this new JavaScript-heavy future, which Ruby still has a major part of. And Yehuda’s talk in a little bit is going to be about that. So if you’re watching this later, you should check it out or his talk at RailsConf. And it’s about this kind of thing where the role that Ruby plays in a heavy JavaScript world and how we can make that happen. And that’s the path that needs to happen if we want Rails to keep being in the startup world. If we want to embrace the enterprise, which is something that’s been really successful, too. JRuby is actually a fantastic way for enterprises that have a lot of JVM deployments to use Ruby, but not have to tell their ops people to do stuff differently. So like one of our clients got acquired by IBM. Recently, and their big app was a JRuby on Rails app because their prime technology was in Java. They didn’t want to teach all their ops people something new. So they looked to JRuby to be able to take advantage of Rails’s quick development time while still leveraging their existing technology. So that I think that those two paths, we don’t actually have to choose one or the other, but we should do one or the other of those things. And so if we don’t embrace heavy JavaScript apps and we don’t embrace JRuby and the enterprise and maybe distastefully, you know, do some XML every once in a while. We sort of abandon both, either or both of those futures. And, you know, I’m sort of scared that Rails will not pick one or the other or both, but choosing nothing is not a path forward. So that’s one of the things that I’m concerned about as far as the future of Ruby and Rails. Pick which side you’re going to be on and embrace that whether you’re saying we’re going to go and support the integrations with corporate software and wherever that will take us or we’re going to keep doing what we’re doing and we’re going to go off and do something else. But it’s a clear decision. Yeah, it’s doing doing what we’ve been doing is not going to continue moving forward, right? Like anything that’s static will eventually fall apart, especially in fast paced startup world. So we need to make sure that Rails is adopting to the way that the startup world is moving in order to continue to be the darling of the startup world. And, you know, one of the themes in your talk was don’t be, not that don’t be evil, but, you know, that people look at companies and assign evil, not evil. Labels, you know, like Google’s not evil, or it is, but the point is they send these labels and looking at like user groups and one of the things is it can be expensive to run a group and there’s ongoing costs. Do you have any thoughts on like approaching running a group or conference that where you normally like kind of dependent on on some kind of corporate sponsorship? Sure. You know, so we were in Steel City Ruby recently and we had a couple of corporate sponsors for that, but the big thing is like not letting the money come with too many strings attached. So like if someone wanted to give me, you know, $100,000 for my conference, but they wanted their logo on everything and they wanted to pick the speakers, for example, that’s a totally different beast than like, we want a table sitting off, you know, in the corner and, you know, we’ll give you a little bit of money. So I think that is important that we think about the what the implied strings that the money gives us and make sure that it doesn’t end up being too big of a cost. Like naturally we have to pay for things and so the money has to come from somewhere, but I think that it’s possible to do so in a way that’s relatively inexpensive. So like at Steel City Ruby, we charge 50 bucks for our tickets and we only had like 10 or 15 sponsors and we still made it all work anyway and our sponsors were awesome and we wouldn’t have been able to do it without them. We would have been in the red, but it was not. We had to charge, you know, $1,500 like RailsConf used to be a couple years ago in order to have a reasonable conference and everybody really liked it. We had a beautiful venue and had lots of great speakers and like all that stuff. So I think that it’s just important that you are conscious. I think the underlying theme of most of the stuff that I talk about and do is that it’s important that you are conscious of the choices you’re making and you don’t make them for arbitrary reasons. And so I think that people assume that we need to have a conference where you spend a lot of money and you have these big sponsors and you have these elaborate parties and you have these elaborate. And maybe that’s not always the best thing. And if that’s what you want to do, you know, do it like Nordic Ruby, for example. I love Nordic Ruby. It was amazing, but it was really expensive. And but there are other conferences that are not expensive that are also amazing in a different way. So it’s just important that that choice is made deliberately as opposed to just assuming that this is how you have to run a conference or a user group. And this is not a gotcha question, but after watching your talk here, you’re obviously well read. Do you have any? Recommendations for people who are interested in in organizing or interested in working inside of communities, something that maybe wouldn’t be like there’s not much reading material from a technical like running a technical user group or or leading a community. Do you have anything like you think of? Maybe they’re right. So one of the problems with with reading about this stuff, and especially like if you want to apply the lessons that like Occupy had to user groups, for example, one of the issues is that all of that stuff is very much. So one of the problems with reading about this stuff, and especially like if you want to apply the lessons that like Occupy had to user groups, for example, one of the issues is that all of that stuff is very much an oral tradition. So you learn about these things because you interact with people who had done previous organizing and you hear about their stories and you learn that way. So I’m actually not 100% sure of a good thing to read because so much of it is lessons that I have learned from actually talking with people and their previous histories. So there is some stuff that is written down and you can sort of look up a lot of those histories. But if you look into where all this stuff came from, if you look into Occupy came from the New York General Assembly and a lot of the initial members of it were involved. In the anti-globalization movement in the late 90s. So looking up all of that stuff, like things related to that stuff is the way that you would learn about those things without doing so. But I can’t point at a specific book that is good about this stuff because I learned it by doing it. It’s you go and you see how it’s done and you pay attention. You ask questions. Yeah, that’s that’s how that’s actually one of the big critiques of Occupy is they didn’t learn enough from previous social movements and ended up reinventing those lessons because they weren’t there at the time. So like nothing. Is ever perfect or beyond critique, but you know, it’s important that we continue trying to strive to be better and we keep refactoring everything that we’re doing to like be better at whatever it is because you’ll never be perfect, but you can always get better. Okay. Well, thank you very much, Steve. Totally really appreciate it.