RailsConf is happening on 7-9 of May!
And Ufuk is the lead organizer!
He recently joined the Ruby Central board of directors.
He is on the Shopify infrastructure team, working on making Ruby on Rails a better ecosystem 💪
We discuss:
RailsConf is happening on 7-9 of May!
And Ufuk is the lead organizer!
He recently joined the Ruby Central board of directors.
He is on the Shopify infrastructure team, working on making Ruby on Rails a better ecosystem 💪
We discuss:
Hey guys, welcome to the friendly show, the friend list of all the shows. Railsconf is happening in less than two months, on the beginning of May, in Detroit, and recently we talked to Andy Kroll that is organizing this year's edition of RailsConf. And now we also decided to invite Ufuk, who is also a member of Ruby Central and he's also involved in the organization of RailsConf. So welcome, ufuk.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you for inviting me. This is a very friendly show I heard, so I wanted to come on and see it for myself, that's perfect.
Speaker 3:We hope we, you know, reach those highs, those standards. Ufuk, tell us a little bit about yourself because we, like we know, Andy. Andy is, like you know, very passionate about the community, very passionate about conferences, and when we wanted to interview you we didn't really know too much. I think the first time I heard about your name was when you joined the board, which was recently the board of Ruby Central, and then at some point Marco told me like, yeah, but now if Ufuk is involved with Ruby Central, yes, now I got my hopes up, it's gonna be good. So basically, I knew from then like, okay, Ufuk, he has to be the guy. I should have known him. So tell us a little bit about yourself.
Speaker 2:Okay, that's a great story. I'm flattered. Okay, let me quickly introduce myself. My name is Ufuk Ufuk Kayseri Leolo. I'm originally from Turkey. I live in Cyprus.
Speaker 2:I've been working for Shopify for a little over five years now. Currently I'm the engineering manager of the Ruby infrastructure team at Shopify. The Ruby infrastructure team is the team that's been making the improvements in CRuby. We've been building things like Widget, object shapes, improvements in the VM, improvements in the garbage collector. So a lot of the improvements that you've been seeing in Ruby in recent years have been coming from my team.
Speaker 2:So I'm involved with Ruby very closely in that role and I'm working with a lot of the stakeholders in the community, including people at other companies, like at Stripe at GitHub. We're collaborating very closely with multiple different topics with people in those companies. I'm collaborating really closely with Ruby Core, obviously to align with all the things that we want to build and contribute to the Ruby codebase. And, as a final step of all my involvement in those things, once they opened the applications for the Ruby Central board, I thought I could be helpful there and I thought I could make a difference. So I applied and I was accepted to be a new role, board member. So at the end of November I joined Ruby Central as well. So in a nutshell, that's who I am and that's what I do. I'm not as involved as Andy is with a lot of the community things, but a lot of the deep technical stuff you can see my name around.
Speaker 3:That's perfect. I think we need people like you more and teams like that, like from Shopify and Stripe, that do the core work on Ruby. I do see the improvements. I've been using the latest Ruby tooling on VS Code and it's just amazing. I mean it feels like people at Microsoft did that integration. It really works good and I think we deserve it. Ruby deserves this kind of tooling. So thank you so much, you and the team and everybody, because I know it's not easy and it's definitely not easy talking to multiple teams and multiple companies. So thank you for that. Yeah, thank you. That's amazing. Tell us a little bit about RailsConf. How did you and Andy got to or co-chair this year? How was that idea born?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's an interesting story. So I joined the board. Like I said, at the end of November it was finalized at RubyConf in San Diego. The announcement was made there as well, and then basically they were expecting every new board member that joined the board to take on a project like their starter project, so that they know where to start helping the activities that Ruby Central is involved in, because there are many and we can talk about those as well.
Speaker 2:I was invited to co-chair RailsConf because I had ideas about conferences and just prior to that I was on the program committee for RubyConf. So I had some experience with the organization as well and I accepted. But then my co-chair, who was another board member, they had to drop for personal reasons and I was left as the only co-chair and I was like, oh my god, this is so much responsibility, what am I going to do? So I talked to the board. I said is there anyone on the board who's interested in co-chairing this event with me? And people were like we were interested in helping you, but we all have our hands full. So I said is it okay if I reach out to someone outside of the board to help co-chair this event with me, because that wasn't done before, so this is actually brand new. This is the first time we have someone from outside the organization that's co-chairing any of these events RubyConf or RailsConf.
Speaker 2:The board said, yeah, why not? Let's try that. And I had a few names in mind. I initially reached out to Andy, not necessarily to ask him or to convince him, even though I wanted to, of course, but I know he is very busy. But I said one, would you be interested in co-chairing this with me? And two, if you aren't, do you have any names? Like, who do you think would be a good person? So he was like, yeah, I might have names, but I might also be interested in doing it myself, because I know he has a lot of ideas for what RailsConf could be and I knew that our ideas were aligned. So, yeah, anyway, he had a conversation with his family, like he talked to you in the previous recording, and they were at least not against it. So he joined me as the co-chair.
Speaker 3:Oh, that's amazing. So we don't have to thank only you and Andy, but we have to thank Andy's family as well for, Of course, yes, allowing him to do this, enabling him, yeah, thank you, that's amazing. Yeah, so we've been seeing a lot of RailsConf announcements, a lot of speaking announcements. I think the schedule is up or maybe the speakers are presented on the website.
Speaker 2:So yesterday we released the speakers and the schedule. So if you go to railsconforg slash speakers, you can see all of the speakers and I think if you click on their names you can see their talk titles and everything. But there's also a schedule webpage as well. You can see the schedule. Just to walk you through what the schedule looks like, it's a three-day conference. The first day we're going to start with a quick intro from me and Andy and then we're going to kick off with a keynote from Nadia Odunoye. She'll be talking about how Rails is great as a one-person developer company and then we're going to go into talks. We will have a smaller number of checks. So if anybody's been to RailsConf before, recently it had grown into four or five tracks of talks, lots of things happening at the same time, workshops happening at the same time as well. This year we wanted to prune that a little bit, focus it a little bit more so that people aren't distracted. So we only have three tracks of talks and only five talk slots per day, so limited number of talks. And then we're going to finish the first day with another keynote from Irina, and she'll be talking about why startups are a great choice for sorry, rails is a great choice for startups. She's been doing interviews with a lot of startup founders and she's going to be bringing data and talking about why she's hearing that Ruby and Rails is a great choice for startups as well. So that's basically the first day.
Speaker 2:The second day is new for RailsConf. We tried this before at RubyConf. The second day is the whole day is going to be workshops in the morning and the afternoon, but in parallel we'll be running a hack day. The hack day is an opportunity for the community to come together and to work on projects. We're inviting some open source maintainers to come and work with people during the hack day time, but we're also open to people bringing their own projects and gathering a few people around it and just shipping something at the end of the day, hopefully and then the second day will be more talks and then we'll close the conference in customary form with Aaron Patterson's closing keynote.
Speaker 3:That's perfect. I cannot wait for this year's joke.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was asking how many attendees are there expected to be?
Speaker 2:So we are hoping to have something between 600 and 800 people. So the numbers are still changing day to day, but that's our target. So we're looking for people to buy more tickets. Okay and why Detroit.
Speaker 1:Why Detroit?
Speaker 2:I'm not sure, because that decision was made before I even joined the board. I'm not sure why it was chosen, but this is a traveling conference. So I'm not sure why it was chosen, but this is a traveling conference, so every year it's in a different city, and I think some of the criteria that they use are ease of accessibility, like ease of travel, so for it to have lots of options for flying into the place, and Detroit is a big city with lots of flights coming into it. Also, being able to find places to have such a large event isn't easy. It's not possible in every city, so that's another one of the options. So those are the criteria we look at for choosing a city in general, but I don't know why Detroit was picked in particular. I think these things are picked a few years in advance because you have to book everything, and it's not that easy.
Speaker 1:Exactly, and RailsConf and RubyConf. They are exclusive to the US. They are traveling, but within the US, right?
Speaker 2:Yes, I think, but I don't know for sure. I think there were like a few events in Europe historically, but generally those two conferences are always in North America. Ruby Central is an organization that's originated from North America, from the US, so it only makes sense for them to organize conferences in places where it's easier for them to organize conferences. It's a huge undertaking to try to organize a conference in a place where you're not located. Ask me how I know and ask Andy how he knows. So, for example, we had to travel to Detroit to see the event location, but it was going to be really hard for me to do that and it was really helpful for Andy to actually fly on behalf of both of us to do that site visit. And you can't do that more than once or twice, especially if you're like across the Atlantic, and it makes it really hard, yeah, but if you ever want to come to Europe, please do it, because I know there are people here that would join the conference.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you're talking to your viewers, right?
Speaker 2:Because I'm already in Europe.
Speaker 3:Yes, yes, yes, of course. Yeah, I'm talking about the Ruby Central.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I was looking, there are like 36 regular speakers and four keynote speakers. That's like 40 speakers. That's a lot of talks.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we have six workshops. So on the second day we have three workshops in the morning, three workshops in the afternoon and about 30 speakers. So like four keynote speakers and 30 speakers for the normal speaking slots. So yeah, that's a lot of talks, but also not so much for RailsConf, because I think last year we had around 70 speakers or something. It was like almost double the number.
Speaker 2:But we heard from people saying this is quite overwhelming because by default you're missing like a quarter or a fifth of the conference because you obviously can't go to all of these things, and especially with workshops. If you went to a workshop because they're like much longer than talk sessions, you would be losing out on two or sometimes three different talk slots with four or five talks each, and then you're missing a lot of the conference just because you went to a workshop, and then people would not go to workshops and that's not fair on the people who put the effort to organize those workshops. So anyway, there was a lot of complications with the schedule and the program. So RubyCentral is trying new formats and new approaches to this thing, but maybe this doesn't work either. Let us know, come to the conference and tell us what you like, what you don't like. We tried this at RubyConf. We got good feedback on it and we're trying it for RailsConf again, nice.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so with conferences it seems like you cannot please everybody. You really can't. Like I've been hearing from conference organizers who went from a 70 people conference to a 700 people conference and every time like first time it was 70 people came and said, oh, I said like this is the perfect size, and then at 250 and 350 or whatever. So it's really, you know, a matter of taste and you cannot please everybody. But yeah.
Speaker 3:I think it's cool that you're you know Ruby Central is trying out new stuff. This is the only way to know if people want something else. Yeah, and another general question about conferences.
Speaker 1:So there are speakers and there are keynote speakers, and what is the difference between a speaker and keynote speaker? And how, how, yeah?
Speaker 2:So the keynote speaker?
Speaker 2:Well, keynote talking slots are expected to talk about broader topics, Topics that concern, like much of the community higher level talks, for example, or talks that would want that would make you think about things that you wouldn't normally think about, which is also true for talks.
Speaker 2:But talks are like more concentrating on a particular subject, Whereas, like I said, you know, stock, for example, talking about the landscape of startups in San Diego and why they are saying that Rails and Ruby is a good choice for their startups, is a good keynote speaker and that's not a keynote material, because it's not really something that you would hear in any particular talk slot, and so that that's mostly like the keynote slots are longer and again like they're talk about grander trends or themes or bigger things like that. That's generally true, not always true, but that's that's the difference. But you know, other than that, there aren't really that many differences, except also for the fact that you know, during the keynote, there are no other talks that are competing with that. Everyone's listening to the keynote, Whereas with talks, you're in a slot and you know you're competing against other people in your slot.
Speaker 3:Thanks for making that distinction. I didn't know as well.
Speaker 1:Well come on in and you as a conference organizer.
Speaker 3:I'm just starting out, the other just starting out. I still have a lot to learn, so this is why I'm doing these things to try and.
Speaker 2:I heard great things about the conference that you organized. Thank you, thank you, we appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thinking about the friend, the last edition, jeremy's presentation about like in the heck and really stood out Like a like, a closing keynote.
Speaker 3:Yes, yeah, I especially wanted that that talk to be the last one, because I knew it would be refreshing. Jeremy speaks so well. Everybody you know related to that, so it was just a great way to to end the conference. Yeah, we'll have to see what we do this year. We'll figure it out. So tell us a little bit. I'm curious, tell me, actually, about hack day. What? What's happening there? Do you have to come with a project, do you have to announce, or is it just a big room with desks and in Wifi? Are there people there to help organize? How is hack day being being done? Okay, sure.
Speaker 2:So, like I said, this is still a brand new concept and we're still trying to understand how it should be, so we're still learning to.
Speaker 2:So I just want to preface what I'm saying with that, because the first time we did it was at RubyConf in San Diego at the end of November last year. We're doing a few things differently. In San Diego at RubyConf, we did the hack day and the workshops which we called Community Day as the first day of the conference, before any of the talks started, which made it more difficult to organize. That was the feedback we heard from people, because everyone who came to the conference, their first step into the conference area was either to join a workshop or to join hack days. But then it's really hard to talk to attendees or any of the project maintainers before the conference to organize things. So it was a little bit messy. People didn't know what projects were running, what they could join or if they could bring their own projects. So that's one feedback we heard from RubyConf. So that's why this year we're doing it on the second day, so that on the first day we can do signups. So we're already in the process. The program committee is working on this. They have a document. They have a few people, a few open source project maintainers, that they want to invite to take part in the hack day. They're having those conversations but we will invite a few open source project maintainers, but we'll also have a few Rails core members there. I think people will definitely have our Aaron Patterson, eileen Yushitel and John Hothorn. John Hothorn is also a keynote. Actually, I forgot to mention that he's keynoteing on the second day. He begins the second day with a keynote and then we move into the hack day and the workshops. Apologies, I completely missed out on that. So they will be there and they will be working with people on some Rails core related things.
Speaker 2:I don't know what shape that will take. We're leaving it open for them, but it might be like an office hour, like if you have a PR for Rails that needs attention, maybe you can work through it with them. Or if you found a problem and you don't know where to start, you can sit down and pair with them. Whatever they want to do, we're open to them doing something. But, like I said, we'll have other people. But we're also open to people who are attending RailsConf to bring their projects. We'll have a sign up board in person at the event site so people can be like, let's come together and work on this idea and try to collect signups for their project. If they can't find anyone, they can just sit down and work. It will be an open space for anyone to come and sit down and work. Or if they can gather a team around it and they're like, oh, let's build the hot wire for this thing, or let's build this feature in Rails, or let's help Andy build his my first Ruby friend website that he wants to build. Whatever it is, you'll have the space, the infrastructure and the opportunity to work with other people who are at the conference. That's the main thing that we want to bring to the community Because, again, one of the things that we heard from the community was these conferences were too much about people sitting in seats and listening to other people, Whereas we want to make the conference a little bit more experiential. We want to bring the opportunity to come together and work together and learn from each other in that kind of a setting.
Speaker 2:Historically, I was one of the people that suggested something like this to be done, starting from last year's RailsConf. The mindset that I had and my pitch was. Rubygems didn't exist all along. Rubygems was created at some point. It didn't always exist. Interestingly, the first RubyGems code was written at one of these RubyConf or RailsConf events. My pitch was if those people had found the time and the opportunity to work on something like that during a conference, then that means it wasn't just full of talks. But looking at the program, it's like five tracks of talks all throughout the day, three days. We just don't have any time. You either. Just don't go to any of the talks and hang out with people and miss out on valuable content. You need to do a trade-off. That's why we're bringing Hackday Again. It's going to still be a little bit loose. We don't want to impose too much structure in case we get that wrong. We want to see how the community comes together and what they can be working.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that sounds great. I mean I think having it loose it's a good idea. I did that with Friendly and people. They kind of find a way, especially like doing something like Hackday. They find each other, they'll figure it out. I don't think they need too much structure there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I want to say that it's so exciting that it's not just like listening to talks but also like interacting, working, hacking on something together. You know that something I kind of miss on short conferences, like one day conference, two day conference you just like listen to some talks and leave, but it's so exciting to have an opportunity. Like oh, here's this guy, maybe he can help me with something, or maybe I can help with some tool I'm really good at, so like just sit and hack on something together with the people that are like best in something specific, like Steve Makhayim. Like hey, maybe this guy could like help me launch my next app with the SQLite in like half an hour.
Speaker 2:Sure, yeah, we will be reaching out to all of the speakers who are already going to be there, who already maintain open source projects. There's many of them will be asking them if they want to take part in Hackdays just to like lead a project. When I say a project, it doesn't have to be like like let's come together and ship this, but like if Steven has ideas for how his SQLite, like how the SQLite jam could be improved for better performance, but he didn't have the time to look at it, for example, like he can recruit a few people and say, oh, let's look at this. But also at RubyConf, for example, something Gemma is rough did. She was thinking she's a Ruby core committer, so she was thinking about ideas on what she could work with with people about Ruby core. But, as you know, ruby core is like the C Ruby code base is a really hard code base to get into, so it's really hard for someone to make a lot of progress in one day, not even a full day, like you know, four or five hours. So her idea was let's triage open issues on the Ruby bug tracker. Let's look at issues, open issues, and see if they're still valid on the latest version of Ruby, and if they're not, we can close them, and that's a lot of help to maintainers and that's also a very valuable thing people could be doing. So when we say projects, it doesn't have to be like let's build something grandiose or, you know, let's make progress in some open source thing. It can be something as simple as triage or, you know, improve a PR that already exists but was abandoned. It could be many things.
Speaker 2:But I also want to say I also want to talk about the opportunity for Hackday for more junior developers. So developers are like more early career. I sort of saw that they weren't so much willing to join the Hackday, the one we did at RubyConf. I can think of many reasons for why that might be, also because it was the first day and they didn't know anyone and it was like a weird thing to just come in and start working with other people. I get that, but what I would suggest?
Speaker 2:If there are any early career developers who are listening to us and who will be there at RailsConf, I highly suggest that you come to that room and try to work with someone that you can learn from, because there's a lot of value that I've seen in my career. When you sit down with someone who knows their tools or who knows their technology or their stack, you learn so much from them Just by sitting down for a couple of hours and seeing them work. That's a lot of experience and it might be more helpful than the sum total of all the talks that they might be going to. That's one of the things that we want to provide to people that opportunity to come together and work with someone like Aaron Patterson. He's very open to working with people who are new to the community or who are new to a certain technology.
Speaker 2:We have lots of people like that, it's not just Aaron. One of the great things about our community is how welcoming and friendly the community is. Please don't be hesitant. I will be going around the room on the first day. Any early career devs that I see. I will be promising them to come to the Hack Day.
Speaker 1:How do you know that a developer is an early career developer? Are they going to have a yellow badge?
Speaker 2:Yeah, if they're wearing one and they want to say I'm an early career developer, they're fine.
Speaker 1:But I know that I'm new to the community. Sorry, are there going to be actual badges?
Speaker 2:I'm not sure. In some conferences we've had some badges, but it's optional. You should print a sticker.
Speaker 1:I think it's amazing to be able to have flares open to mentoring or looking for a mentor, looking for a job early career developer.
Speaker 1:You should also do it with flares yellow badges that people can stick on their clothes. Also, you mentioned early career developers. I have ideas popping up in my mind. What if you also organize and know there is this first and the first to be a mentor? Maybe some kind of half an hour where people who want to mentor and people who want to be M&T can gather and network and stick together. Also, another thing you could organize is maybe job flares people who have work to offer and meet people who are looking for work.
Speaker 2:We have lots of opportunities for doing things like that to help early career developers get a jumpstart in their career, to get mentorship, or for people who are looking for jobs to be connected with people who are looking for new employees. Definitely, we'll have an exhibition area for our sponsors any of our sponsors that are looking for new people. They'll obviously on the lookout as well. We'll have lots of opportunities for people to come together in those settings. For myself, I don't usually like the forced networking part of it, but there are different opinions on that. I think creating the space for that kind of networking to happen and convincing people that it's good for them to join those kinds of networking spaces is a good idea and we'll definitely be doing more of those things. But yeah, having some kind of badge if people are willing to put them on their name tags is a good idea. I think we should do it.
Speaker 1:A few months ago, me and Adrian visited the Helvetik Ruby and there was a special badge for the people that do not want to be photographed. I never thought about this kind of problem before, but it was interesting to see that there were quite a few people that did not want to have the photos taken and shared.
Speaker 2:That's a good idea.
Speaker 3:Cool Ufuk. Anything else you'd like to share with our listeners today?
Speaker 2:Yes, I want to talk a little bit about Ruby Central, because we talked a lot about the conference but we never talked about the organization that's organizing this conference and I think there's a lot of things that people don't realize about Ruby Central. So, if you don't mind, I want to talk a little bit about it and why I?
Speaker 2:wanted to join in the first place. I wanted to join the board. So Ruby Central is the organization that basically tends to the commons of the Ruby community. The commons so far are the conferences, but mainly the open source projects that we all rely on day in, day out. So that is rubygemsorg, rubygems, the client that you run in your local environment and also bundler. So Ruby Central is the organization that actively invests in all of those platforms.
Speaker 2:So I want your audience to think for a minute if rubygemsorg suddenly disappeared or they weren't able to use the Rubygems client or bundler, how their workflows would change or what that might mean for their business or for the development work that they're doing. I would argue that that would be disastrous. There were times a couple of years ago where there were outages or downtime for rubygemsorg because it's a volunteer project. People who are working on it make some money, but not like a normal developer wage, and that money is coming from Ruby Central. Ruby Central raises those funds through either these conferences or from the donors, the sponsors for Ruby Central. So in that sense I think that part of Ruby Central people don't know about that much. I guess I would never ask who's running this rubygemsorg infrastructure. It's a huge infrastructure. It costs a lot to run. Thankfully we have sponsors and donors that give us infrastructure and provide some free services that make it less expensive. But this is an important benefit to the community and for all of us that these things are running and it's not a private entity that's running it for profit. In other communities some of these central repositories are for profit. Things are private corporations that run it. Off the top of my head, as far as I know, npm was a private company. They were bought by GitHub, etc. This is open source. This is developed in the open and it's maintained by a nonprofit organization like Ruby Central.
Speaker 2:So one of the reasons why I wanted to join the board wasn't to organize conferences, because that's not really my expertise. That's why I'm lucky to have someone like Andy Kochen this conference with me. But I'm more involved in the open source community and I highly value the open source work that Ruby Central is doing, and Ruby Central also has ambitions to do more open source work. So we are thinking of things like if there are projects that no longer have maintainers and if we have the resources to continue those projects or to fund people who might want to continue those projects. That might be a good way for us to help the community by keeping those projects alive, or there are other ideas like that. So we want to grow our ambitions in the open source domain and in the open source community as well.
Speaker 2:So the conferences that we're organizing they're both a good opportunity for people to come together and to talk about how to drive our Ruby and Rails communities forward, but they're also a good opportunity for them to interact with Ruby Central. Come tell us what works, what doesn't, about the things we're doing, about the things we're doing in the open source space. We will have people from the RubyGems bundler projects also participating in the hack day. So if you want to be involved and if you want to contribute, please go find them and join their projects as well. And you can contribute in many ways. You can contribute by sponsoring Ruby Central personally, or you can contribute by contributing code we're all developers or you can contribute by coming to one of these conferences, because every ticket you buy is supporting Ruby Central, which, in turn, is supporting all this shared infrastructure.
Speaker 2:So I think I would really want people to come away from this conversation having a clearer image of what Ruby Central is, and in that sense, we also want to grow our involvement in other areas of Ruby Commons. We're thinking about how we can help more meetups, how we can help more conferences that aren't organized by Ruby Central and many other things like that. Obviously, until now the focus has been mostly in North America, but we're also looking at other places where Europe, etc. That's partially why I'm probably the first board member who's from Europe and I want to grow that representation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean you should definitely find a way to collaborate with the agent on the friendly Ruby and see how you can work as Ruby Central with the friendly Ruby and then come on like you're living in Cyprus, right? Yes, cyprus is like, so close to Romania. You should definitely come visit this year.
Speaker 2:Yeah, my conference schedule is super hectic. I'll try to do it, but for example, right after RailsConf in Detroit. So I'll be flying from Cyprus to Detroit, I'll do RailsConf and then right afterwards I need to fly to Okinawa because Ruby Kaigi is the week after. So I'll go there and then I'll fly back to Cyprus. So I think I'll just be going around the world for the first time in my life.
Speaker 1:Okay, Mr Goldfri. Yeah, that's great.
Speaker 2:I mean, I didn't ask for it, it's just the scheduling happened like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So it's also important that you mention that the ticket price also supports, like the infrastructure as RubyGems and Bundler, because me as a European, looking at the ticket price of $750, it sounds quite a lot, considering the local conferences cost 100 to 200 euros to visit. But, like considering that I'm also like supporting the infrastructure behind RubyGems, bundler makes sense. And it leads me to another question. So let's say, right now I'm looking at my gem file and I see, like source rubygemsorg and, assuming that RubyGems is down or, like I know, stopped working for a month, would it be just viable for me to just switch the source from RubyGems to, like the GitHub or GitHub repositories of their gems? Would it work?
Speaker 2:I never tried it. I don't know if they have all the same versions of all the gems, because I don't think people usually push to those repositories right, Because when I'm publishing a gem I just push to rubygemsorg. I don't know if GitHub is mirroring all the gems or not. I haven't looked into it. I don't think they are. You probably can use it as well, but RubyGems seems to be the de facto place where everyone shares their gems and their code. So yeah, again, I don't think it should go down and it hasn't gone down for years now because we have a great team that's working on it and we have actually around the clock support people that actually have pagers and they can respond to events. We are able to support that and to fund that kind of work to happen.
Speaker 2:So it's a really hard problem to keep up an infrastructure so critical and so heavily used up around the clock, and not just to keep it up but to keep it secure. There's a lot of investment in doing that as well. So Ruby Central actually has raised funds from Shopify in the Ruby Shield program. We've raised funds from AWS, the German sovereign tech funds, and now recently from Alpha Omega to improve the security of RubyGems, so that the packages that you're pulling from RubyGems are the packages that you wanted to pull from RubyGems and also that they don't contain dangerous code etc. Like provenance signing etc. All those things are just table stakes at this point for modern code repositories. So the teams are working on building those things thanks to all the money we were able to raise and the sponsors that we have, so expect improvements in that area as well. It's a really difficult project and I'm really thankful to the people that have been supporting it until now, and I love to have had the chance to work more closely with them in my new role as the board member.
Speaker 1:Talking about funding, you mentioned the German sovereign fund and it reminds me recently I saw some kind of post that the White House listed Ruby as a recommended language, so maybe you should approach them for funding, and actually the UKgov website is built with Ruby Rails view components.
Speaker 2:So maybe you should approach them.
Speaker 1:Maybe they also can have some sovereign funds support.
Speaker 2:Sure, I think the German. Again, that predates my joining the board, but I think the German sovereign tech fund actually had made a call for applications for the fund to invest money in. They were mostly interested in supply chain security, because that affects some of the government workloads that they're running on Ruby and Rails as well. So, like yeah, if the other governments are interested in that too, of course we will be talking to them and sending proposals for some project ideas in the future. Cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thanks a lot for joining us. We're looking forward to RailsConf. Adrian, will you be going?
Speaker 3:I don't know. My schedule is tight as well. I'm leaving on Sunday for Sin City, then Tropical RB, then Balkan. I don't know.
Speaker 2:Hopefully, hopefully. Yeah, I heard great things about Sin City Ruby as well, and I know you're speaking there. Good luck with that and please tell us about it.
Speaker 3:Thank you. Thank you, yeah, definitely, definitely. So I don't know, we'll see Fingers crossed.
Speaker 2:Amazing yeah.
Speaker 1:See you latest at Friendly OBI Cool.
Speaker 2:Okay, perfect.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much, ufuk, for joining, thank you, yaro, and thank you everybody for listening. I'll see you. We'll see you guys on Twitter.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you for inviting me. This has been great, it is. Bye, thank you. See you, so turn on Facebook, twitter, instagram. Thanks for watching, bye.