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Welcome to the talk on second acts.
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Going back to my high school English teacher, Mr. Gasal, he had a thing to say: whenever you're accepting an opinion, you must remember that an opinion is not a fact. This is not data.
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The first thing is you've got to understand the person giving you that opinion. So, the first step in our play is: who's in it? Hi, I'm John.
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I'm a former.NET programmer. I joined the Ruby community in the mid-2000s. I have organized a Rails camp on my own and with John Barton at one point.
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I carpooled with John Barton to the very first Rails camp way back in the day. Shout out to Ben Askins—you're amazing! So yeah, I'm not just Pat; I'm John.
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But I'm basically 'evil Pat.' If you remember the movie 'Sliding Doors,' it's like Pat and I were Gwyneth Paltrow. Pat continued in his career of programming, being a nice person, and doing awesome community work, while I became a development manager. So, from being a developer, I've gone full dark side.
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That's the first thing you need to know to understand my point of view: I am post-technical. I currently work at 99design, which is a polyglot shop. I believe that's polite language, because we make all our money on a large PHP application, but we also have a bit of Ruby, a bit of Go, and a bit of PHP in the mix.
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I feel like I've gained a good perspective on a number of different communities at various phases of their lives. If PHP is in Act 3 and Ruby is in Act 2, this is where we currently stand. Also, how great was CS's talk this morning? This is my side project: it is a web-scale do-nothing web service, born out of frustration with opaque enterprise sales copy and an obsession with microservices. Check it out; it's great.
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So, Act One: the setup. Traditionally, there are three acts in a narrative. Does anyone remember a time before iPhones? Approximately 50% of all toilets were factory-issued with a book like this, while the other 50% included tedious anecdotes about cricket.
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Anyway, while I was in my thinking zone reading this, I started weighing up the different programming communities. There are a couple of quotes in here that I really love: 'There are no second acts in American lives.' I think of it as an American programmer's context, and something really started ticking for me.
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Another quote, from Anton Chekhov, is about if there is a pistol on the wall in the first act, it must go off in the next. That's interesting. If we're in Act Two, what was our pistol in Act One? Let's think about that.
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I'm going to tell you a true story. A few years ago, I was involved in founding a tech startup. Startup investment means getting funding, and did you know that investors are often rich? It sounds really stupid, but I'm an overthinker—you might be too.
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I remember the first time I bought a beer for a millionaire after having taken money from him to work on this startup. I thought, should I buy a craft beer to show him I take his money seriously, or is that inappropriate? Mind blown at the business dynamics of this.
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However, you get to know a lot of business people, people who start startups—non-technical founders who hire engineers. You meet these folks because you tend to move around the same meetups and live events. I was sitting down for coffee with one of these founders; they were paying engineers to do stuff.
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We talked about his product coming out of MVP. They noticed a need, recognized a market, but were asking for advice on what technology to continue with, whom to hire, and how to best position themselves for the present and future. As someone who loves Ruby—having been programming with it since 2007—I suggested they could consider Python.
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This was painful for me, as I remember the great Python Wars of the mid-2000s. I didn't like saying it, but you have to look at supply and demand, especially regarding talented experienced engineers, necessary for laying the groundwork for startups.
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If you're not venture-funded, you can't have Rubyists, and that just doesn't happen. It also hurt to say that the economically rational thing for this founder to do was to continue down the Python path.
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In narrative structure, there's an incident in Act One, the inciting incident. Now we must consider how disappointing it is that what motivated me to give this talk was realizing that the rational thing to say was not 'Ruby.' This is problematic for a couple of reasons.
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One reason is that the Australian tech and startup community is relatively small. The health of our ecosystem needs to maintain a very fine balance between diversity and monoculture.
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Some degree of commercial exploitation requires monoculture, but not so much that it becomes like America with corn. Suddenly, by that startup becoming a Python one, they're cut off from us as Rubyists.
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As people move between jobs, sharing experiences and learning from one another is vital to lifting all our boats together. But if that connection breaks, you can talk about technology all you want, but it does not make those cross-technology communications happen.
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The other frustrating aspect is now there is an employer that will never hire a Rails Girls graduate—our community has a structural problem.
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We can all agree this is true, and don’t need a slide to show it. So, even though our community does great work to help address this problem, new businesses that could be hiring us—hiring graduates, doing something great to push our community aims forward—are gone.
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We're in a senior developer trap. There are two readings I don't have time to go into deeply, but I have links at the end to some insights.
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The trap lies in startups relying only on senior engineers. It reinforces structural problems with gender and various issues we face. This is a huge problem because we can only address the issue at the front of the funnel, while most companies are focused on hiring at the other end.
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Did anyone see the blog post on HN a few weeks ago about the crisis of the modern Perl programmer? It essentially states that Perl was everywhere—it was even a part of us. We could go that way if we don’t have a good growth plan.
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We could be writing these sad blog posts about the crisis of the modern Ruby developer, and I don't want that for us.
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Another part of the supply-demand issue we face is that we haven't been the most gracious winners on the supply-demand curve, which is not a good thing.
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It's likely that many people would be quite glad to knock us off our perch. We've been in a dominant position for a long-time.
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How do we move forward? Many are thinking about it and working to improve our community, and everyone likes to talk about how nice Matt is.
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Yes, we are nice, and that’s special. However, it's not what grew our community, nor what made it special. We must want to impress new people and encourage growth.
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This brings me to Rails—the component that has enabled Matt's amazing attitude to spread throughout the programming world. We're really 'Rails' developers; this is 'Rails Conf,' after all.
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Let's think about how we translate ourselves. When Rails was invented, it disrupted the framework landscape and was a systemic change, allowing developers to be more efficient.
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It's about being in the right position with the right leverage and the way that it shaped how we think about development and business models. It should encourage meaningful development instead of getting lost in non-essential tasks.
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Rails led to a fuller stack of developers than we had seen before, and from there into a realm of devops and multiple roles, which we often mistake for separate skill sets.
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We can design these systems in ways that they are mutually beneficial, meaning legacy systems can sync with new development methods.
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With Rails, it also completely reshaped how the business can be structured, allowing for more agile and efficient operations.
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Now, I challenge us to consider whether we could advance our concept of management similarly with the goal of equality and effective community building.
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There are great examples of how management styles shift but lack training contributes to an inability to handle interpersonal issues.
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Some will undoubtedly choose to use emacs against any better advice! That's among the least of our problems, but it encapsulates some of the challenges we face in this community.
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Ultimately, I hope that at least five or ten of you consider stepping into leadership among your peer developers to help guide this community for growth.
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To not only push our industry but to help develop what we have on offer, I urge you to allow equal opportunity and growth in this sector.
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If we can't be manageable by ourselves, we will ultimately see those opportunities filled by others who may not have as clear of perspectives regarding what we matter as a culture.
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Now, looking back on this—we must ensure the second act of this community is stepping into leadership positions, rather than leaving for other roles.
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We need leaders that are aware of our ongoing issues. In the end, those challenges shouldn't deter us but instead encourage us to take action and grow.
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Recognize our place in this community and stand committed to making substantial contributions. Thank you.
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Join me at the conclusion, stay connected as there will be links and excellent reads discussed further.
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Together, let's address our Ruby community’s issues and thrive rather than mirror the path that has led to Perl's retreat.
