MountainWest RubyConf 2007
Keynote: ...then what?
Keynote: ...then what?
by Chad FowlerIn this keynote speech titled "...then what?" delivered by Chad Fowler at the Mountain West Ruby Conference in 2007, the speaker reflects on the evolution of the Ruby programming community, addressing both its successes and its challenges ahead.
Key Points Discussed:
- The Evolution of Ruby: Fowler recounts his long history with Ruby, starting in 2000, and highlights the growth of the community from its humble beginnings at the first International Ruby Conference with 40 attendees to larger regional events like Mountain West RubyConf.
- Dangerous Crossroads: He emphasizes the precarious position the community finds itself in as it navigates from being a niche player to a more mainstream option in the software industry. The need to adapt and embrace change is crucial to avoid stagnation.
- Cultural Identity Crisis: Fowler expresses concern that the Ruby community may uncritically defend its past rather than innovating. He argues that the community must avoid becoming rigid and should instead focus on embracing diverse insights from newcomers.
- Perceived Success vs. Actual Winning: He revisits the famous quote by Gandhi, suggesting that even though Ruby may be perceived as having 'won', the real challenge is to define what winning means and not to settle into complacency.
- Community Melting Pot: The influx of developers from various backgrounds, including PHP and Java, has enriched the Ruby community. Fowler alerts against the risk of losing Ruby's unique qualities as it opens to these new influences.
- Call to Action: In closing, Fowler encourages community members to actively engage with the changes around them and to sustain the excitement of innovation and relevance in their work.
Conclusion:
Chad Fowler’s keynote serves as both a celebration of the Ruby community’s past victories and a cautionary tale about the dangers of stagnation. He urges attendees to find joy in innovation and to heed the lessons from their journey, emphasizing that continuous growth and openness to change are essential for ongoing relevance in the technology landscape.
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All right, I was really looking forward to hearing Pat's story about when we met in 2002 in Seattle, since it would have been new to everyone.
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It's also funny that Pat was looking forward to hearing my talk based on what I told her about it.
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When I told her about it, I didn't actually know what I was going to talk about to some extent, and I don't now.
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That's why I don't have any slides because I don't want to be locked into some rigid structure that doesn’t connect.
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Thank you.
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I've been doing Ruby programming since about the year 2000, which is about the same time as most people who speak English.
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Not all people were studying English, but most who do.
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Since 2001, I have been co-organizing the International Ruby Conference.
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So, I've been co-organizing the International Ruby Conference since 2001, which is why Pat thought we met at the conference in 2002.
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However, in 2002 I was actually in India.
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It's a long, complex, sordid story, but that was the one Ruby Conference that I missed.
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So even though I've been organizing them since the beginning, when you have the conferences and always ask people to raise their hands if they've been to all of them, I have not been raising my hand since the first one.
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Unfortunately.
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I come from an enterprise Java background or, before that, I was a musician.
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So I sort of just locked into this software development world.
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This means I can't really teach most of you anything, especially during the implementers panel.
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I don't know how to do that kind of thing.
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I wish I did; it would be really exciting to be able to implement my own Ruby PM.
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Instead, I can just sit next to them and say, 'Well, how would I have meant to array for you?' and frustrate you.
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I dropped out of music school to become a programmer; I was a classical composer.
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I sort of saw it as a natural direction to go after that.
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I come to this conference with two perspectives to share.
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I'm not really going to teach you how to do anything; I'm just going to raise a bunch of questions and discuss some things that scare me.
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I feel like I am at a dangerous crossroads in my own career.
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We, as a community, are at a very dangerous crossroads as well, and we need to act appropriately now to avoid failure.
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The two perspectives that I have are: first, I'm a Ruby programmer.
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I'm a part of Ruby Central Incorporated, which is the equivalent of the Girl Foundation or the Matthew Foundation for Ruby, started by David Black.
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They promised to be the driving force behind the Ruby conferences.
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We're slowly expanding our scope, trying to help foster conferences such as this, approval Summer of Code sponsorship, and drive advocacy and acceptance for the Ruby language.
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I've been involved in the Ruby community since before I could write a disability program.
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The other perspective is, as I mentioned, I lived in India.
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While living there, I was actually trying to take your jobs and offshore and steal projects so that you would be unemployed.
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It's not exactly true, but I started a software development center in India and tried to make that kind of offshore model work.
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I learned a lot while I was there; I even wrote a book about the experience.
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Not just of being in India, but about what it teaches us as software developers in the United States and Western Europe.
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We need to behave so that we remain relevant in the industry.
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Those are the two perspectives that I bring to you, coming from the Ruby community as a programmer, and as an individual living here in the United States.
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From both perspectives, Greg Brown said earlier that we are at a special place.
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Things are changing rapidly; they have already changed rapidly and continue to change.
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The over-quoted Gandhi reference that comes to mind is, 'You could probably recite it with me because it's so overused'.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
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People love to hear that whenever they're thinking of their own special little cause.
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You know, the Linux community uses it, the open-source software community uses it, for all communities.
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Oscar 2005 was kind of like an industry coming-of-age party for Ruby.
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Someone in a keynote actually said, "You know, they use this like everyone does in those sorts of conferences," and everyone laughed and applauded.
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To me, the interesting question now is: If people perceive us as having won, what does winning mean?
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I'm going to go back a little bit in time to October 11, 2001, a month after September 11.
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At the first International Ruby Conference, Dave Thomas delivered the opening talk.
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He said something that was really impactful for everyone there.
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He told all 39 or 40 of us at the first international Ruby Conference, 'All of you are pioneers.'
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We were not only here in Ruby, but the whole dynamic language movement.
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The fact that you all believe there's something better, you're all pioneers.
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That's actually still kind of true today.
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If you look at our numbers versus the J2EE world, many of them don't go to conferences unless their work makes them.
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They're of course not interested in it, but there are many of them.
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We still are pioneers; the International Ruby Conference had around 39 people, maybe 40.
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They were from all over the globe.
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I think about half of them had written books that I had read and enjoyed in the last six months before the conference.
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With 39 people attending, no one was interested in sponsoring that conference.
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I told Pat, it's amazing for this Mountain West Ruby Conference, because of the timing.
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The team here has, I don't know, five times the sponsorship that RubyCon has ever had.
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The real International Ruby Conference is the one that Max comes to and makes big announcements.
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That's because things are continuing to progress even since October of last year.
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It's amazing; the first conference we had 40 people, and here we are with over three times that number.
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That's a regional event, you know, that's great.
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That's sort of what winning is, right?
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Winning is also this kind of feeling that you get.
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We're not really measuring things like Ruby adoption in a very real number.
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We have things like the Coyote Index that give some indicators, but all the indicators say that, unlike before, we are getting mentioned in the press.
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In 2001, nobody was doing Ruby professionally, except for Mats, who was the only person at the International Ruby Conference.
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All the way through 2004, there were maybe two people doing Ruby professionally at that conference.
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Then, all of a sudden, in 2005, it was 50 people out of a room of 200.
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Something happened between 2004 and 2005.
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We were winning because of a specific framework and the marketing that came from that.
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So yes, we're winning, but it doesn't mean we're winning the industry.
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Winning means I have to go to work every day in my day job and do my Java stuff or my C# stuff, and then go home at night.
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I do Ruby and wish every day that I was doing Ruby stuff.
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Last time I worried about it, I had Microsoft companies like that starting to get in the game.
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They're hiring people to work on Ruby and to think about Ruby.
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The funny thing is that as soon as they do, we started.
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Back in 2002, we were thinking, man, if we could just talk with Microsoft, if someone would be interested to help us drive this thing, the industry would see it.
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Now, Microsoft is recruiting to do something.
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Some idiot walked by the desk—I’m sorry if you’re in here now—but they walked by the desk and said, 'Oh cool, a Ruby conference! I didn’t know about this.'
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'Maybe I should come in; I’m doing Ruby!'
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They went, they looked at the program, and they saw the word Microsoft on the program.
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There is a point where Microsoft's involvement means, to some extent, that we’ve won.
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Back in 2002, a bunch of us that were involved in the community tried to contact ActiveState and get them to do something with Ruby.
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Everyone thought it'd be great if they would make something like ActiveRuby like they did with Perl.
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That had been a big success in the Windows community.
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We couldn't get them to do anything with Ruby, so there was clearly a desire for this kind of stuff to happen, and now it's happening.
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Now you have notes going around the country evangelizing Ruby to Java developers, even though that's not its agenda.
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People are demoing and installing Ruby apps in J2B containers. Wonderful stuff!
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So we can start doing Ruby whenever we like at our jobs.
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The word 'win' means something kind of dangerous.
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Of course, we’re still sort of in that fighting mode.
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We're not just lying back and relaxing and saying, 'Okay, we've won!'
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But probably some of us are.
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The word 'win' implies that the game is over, and that's a dangerous thing.
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That's dangerous for us as both a culture and a community and as individual software developers.
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What I'm going to talk about tonight is how that's dangerous and some ways that I think we should come back from those dangers.
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That come with having won.
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As I said, I don't really have a solution to these problems.
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What I really want to express is that I'm afraid, and I'm building a fault.
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I'm going to provide you with my perspective on how we should move forward.
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The biggest thing that comes to mind when I think about the Ruby community and the danger of where it stands right now is: for so long we've been a niche player.
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We've been fighting to be perceived as relevant, much less actually adopted.
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We are in a situation where people like us can happily program productively during the day.
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When you spend all this time just fighting, the fear I have is that when you actually gain some traction and success,
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your community culture continues to fight and fight.
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You defensively defend yourself instead of embracing change.
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You go from being pioneers as we think of ourselves now, as slightly smarter than the rest of the industry.
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You pride yourselves on being a community of experts and pioneers, but if you push, what you'll end up doing is turning what used to be a very forward-thinking, change-friendly environment into a rigid institutional environment.
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What I’ve observed is the arguments have remained the same since the year 2000, when we were talking about why you should use Ruby.
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We say some of the same things now.
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What’s really telling is that not only did we say them, but the people who started using Ruby from C#, PHP, or Java are saying the exact same things that were said in 2000.
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This preoccupation with fighting has become built into our culture.
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We view arguments and discourse as an act of war.
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We close our ears and minds as we discuss alternatives.
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So, the first step I think is if you're of that mindset, you must stop thinking in terms of defending yourself.
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Dave Thomas did a keynote at RailsConf Euro.
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He talked about fun and compared the software industry's tactics toward forward progress to that of terrorists.
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We are currently reacting to that industry and the terrorists within it.
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The terrorism is seen in terms of whether things scale or if they haven’t been proven.
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Now we can back it up with confidence that does not have to be experimental.
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We have these patterns we like to mock about the conversations.
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Do they scale? It doesn’t really perform; the answer is sort of no, not really.
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Compare it to Java or C# running on CLR, it really doesn’t perform well.
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But is it good enough as a trade-off? Certainly, you spend less development time because machines can scale.
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Programmers can't, they haven’t really changed much in the last many years.
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So using a tool like Ruby is a good trade-off because CPU cycles are cheap, but programmers aren’t.
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We say that so many times.
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The first time you hear it, you think, 'Oh that’s clever' and it sounds right, just like things that don't scale.”},{
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We say these things without thinking.
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But we must start uncovering the challenges right now.
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Things that we’ve won shouldn’t be covered up. If we don’t deal with them, we won’t be able to move forward.
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Winning means we have only kind of taken jobs away from programmers.
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Paul Graham mentions it because it’s what he believes. It’s a blessing and a curse.
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There are many jobs that exist today, and more people started to get involved.
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Of course, that’s a rash generalization, but offshoring jobs is a great thing.
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If you try to offer the right job, it just bounces right back.
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If you try to offshore the right job and it sticks, why did you do it anyway? It’s hard.
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So anyway, the fascinating thing about the Ruby community today.
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In fact, we can hop around. Please interject if you have a question.
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The Ruby community today, unlike back in 2000, is a very extreme melting pot of language communities.
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The most obvious example is the Rails community.
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What does the Rails community need?
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From one perspective, it’s the people who started doing Ruby because of Rails.
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A lot of them don’t know that Ruby is a different language than Rails.
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That’s partially due to the naming issues.
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You have this melting pot of communities from PHP and .NET, ASP programmers, J2EE programmers, and of course, all sorts of languages.
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You have entrenched free software foundation types and system administrators.
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When you think of those two, you have agile community as well.
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They are farther ahead, for the most part, just a bunch of crazy religious zealots ringing their own alarms.
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You start adding all of these things up, and you have a group of really smart people.
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Back at the first International Ruby Conference, we had 40 people.
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We were talking about language and imagination.
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We had David Simmons, who worked on a small script that was just a badass VM language designer.
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There were people like him setting the tone for the conference and community.
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And then these PHP people started leaking in.
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And I thought, 'How could they do this for a living?'
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They started creating all kinds of nasty code, and they did.
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But this person, look at them—they start looking at our code.
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It's like they're just throwing it away!
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They come in with these different backgrounds that are just wildly different.
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We must ensure that the community doesn’t start destroying the best parts.
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The terrifying thing about this melting pot is that it’s growing; believe me, that’s a good thing.
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We have not been a melting pot; we have focused on being a big bureaucracy.
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We see ourselves as a whole bunch of smart people and hope to keep it that way.
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What’s next is how we continue some growth across the language.
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What happens in Ruby is pretty simple: we pride ourselves on being community experts and forward thinkers.
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But what happens if we continue to fight? The community tips to a rigid institution.
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Since becoming pioneers, what if we turn back into the systems of yesteryear?
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Most of you haven’t seen this for quite a while but understand that said.
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What I am truly scared of is that the Ruby community has become like the food in the hole for me.
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I start to build my life using Ruby, and I can’t let go of the food.
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But the point is, we may stumble and further build ourselves into an institution.
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So after standing here, thinking I have knowledge, I become obsessed with that knowledge until it blinds me.
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What I'm worried about is that with winnings comes fears.
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In summary, I say look for ways, both inside and outside the community, to experience the same exciting feeling as often as possible.
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So lastly, if I can encourage all of you, take this leap!
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Thank you for your attention, and I hope to meet you all!
