Speaker 1: 0:00

hey everyone, welcome to another friendly show episode. Uh, this is a quick one at balcony, ruby, and we are here with uh, with our host, genadis, and, yeah, we'd like to have a chat with you. Like uh, personally, as a, as a conference organizer, I would like to know what, what does a conference mean to you, why, why would you go to a conference and, of course, why put this conference on like this amazing platform?

Speaker 2: 0:26

true, thank you for keeping guys. So hello everyone, I'm the nice and curve. I don't talk and really so I don't know. The conferences for me kind of started randomly because I went to oracle in salzburg back in 2015 and I learned that it travels. I was like can you go to sofia? And it did come to something kind of pitched it and it worked, uh, and I really enjoyed that. I really enjoyed the party.

Speaker 2: 0:50

I really enjoyed the you know, enjoy the idea of you know this, learning you know in a very casual setting okay, so you organized a record in soviet in 2016 2016.

Speaker 1: 1:03

2016. Just visiting your first conference and said OK, I want this next year.

Speaker 2: 1:08

Yeah, it was like a gimmick. I was like this thing travels.

Speaker 1: 1:12

Can we try it? I know, let's do it.

Speaker 2: 1:15

I was very proactive and eager and, yes, somehow it happened. People voted for us and with El Ruko 2016, we got hooked. It kind of worked for us. It the work of 2016. We got hooked. It kind of worked for us. It was a good experience and it gave us a lot of good contacts with speakers. I used to do some open source work. I contributed to rails a bit, so I had some contacts with the community and I invited a lot of people and they came okay so that's good so this was like a good, uh good start for me.

Speaker 3: 1:43

No and back in those ancient times how many attendees uh came to sofia for a recall almost 700, so it was so my first event was a very big one but it was just you know it was the same as balcony single track conference, uh, two days, uh, seven talks a day, something like this.

Speaker 2: 2:03

Okay, so I got my start in conference organizing with that and I kind of got hooked because I I really enjoy, enjoy this. It's a lot of work yeah yeah, but face, yeah, it pays emotionally and I just I just like it. Yeah, so I don't have like a super deeper meaning. I don't want to change the world or something. Yeah, do something good for want to change the world or something. Yeah, do something good for ruby. It's more selfish in a bit. Yeah, in a way, I really enjoy. I really enjoy this.

Speaker 1: 2:30

I really enjoy us being here, and now, now that I have kids, it's getting harder and harder for me to travel yeah, so just making this here it kind of kind of makes sense you want to go to conferences, so you run your own, so everybody else comes kind of makes sense.

Speaker 2: 2:45

You want to go to conferences, so you run your own, so everybody else comes closely. Yeah, yeah, I really, I really I really enjoy this and I think it's good for our community because we get to meet you folks and we get to make some contacts. It's not necessarily like a good business for us, but it's good experience for us.

Speaker 3: 2:57

Yeah and what is the bulgarian ruby community like um it's?

Speaker 2: 3:04

it's kind of a small, I think, like everywhere, but not so small. It's pretty good. To be honest, I really, I really enjoy it. Um, as you can see, bosh, the rally in this conference. It's, it's good. It's pretty technical. We have, I think, some very interesting technical work that we do, um, but we don't organize as much. If I don't do it, we probably won't have.

Speaker 1: 3:31

So the meetup is called ruby bonita.

Speaker 2: 3:34

So besides balkan ruby, I run the local meetup which is called ruby banica.

Speaker 3: 3:38

Okay, which is a fun story it's.

Speaker 2: 3:41

But euroco started it as well for europe. You ordered way too much banister, this local pastry, so banister is this local pastry that we have here in bulgaria. Uh, and we, we saw that we weren't gonna eat it, but we already paid for it. So we said to the vendor please don't bake this bun, it's tomorrow. Just leave those 50 kilos and you just have it throughout the year.

Speaker 2: 4:01

Oh my god, that's interesting and for us to have the balance of the year. Oh my God, that's interesting For us to have the Banica throughout the year. We have like 50 kilos of Banica in the back of the building In credit In credit. Yeah, so we started this event and we called it Rui Banica. That's awesome. I think it's a nice name, so it's stuck. So we started having Rui Banica before Balkan Ruby. That's amazing.

Speaker 3: 4:22

How much do we still have?

Speaker 2: 4:26

Oh, no, no, we already ate it.

Speaker 1: 4:29

We ate it throughout one year, maybe Because you had meetup, so that's great we had the meetup.

Speaker 2: 4:35

So we started the meetup in 2017 maybe and, yeah, we went to the Balkan Ruby in 2017, but it was already autumn. So we had another crazy idea. We started another conference called PartialConf. It was about functional programming on the web. I was learning elm all the time. Do you remember this thing?

Speaker 2: 4:54

yes, yes, yes, it's kind of like haskell, like yes yes, uh, for the web and um, I was able to, we were able to pull off, uh, this functional conference for two years and next year, in 2018, it was the first edition of alcan ruby.

Speaker 1: 5:09

Okay, and it's it's all right, did the function? I think I feel like every developer has this functional period where you know I want a new professional program. Did that pass on? And they said, okay, I'm back to ruby. I want to do a ruby in a way.

Speaker 2: 5:23

But what state for me is like maybe the react way of thinking for uh, okay, ux design so I think this was helpful for helpful for me and because of of Ruby, we had good contact with the Elixir community and we had Sasha Juric and Mihael Muskeva. So, yeah, we had a good room with.

Speaker 3: 5:46

Elixir. And talking more about the local community, what are the biggest Bulgarian Ruby companies?

Speaker 2: 5:54

So I work for one of those. I work for Dexcom. We are a product company and we are making software for accountants Not necessarily accounting software, not this one. We found our own niche where we can help accountants and we make software for them.

Speaker 3: 6:09

Not accounting software for accountants.

Speaker 2: 6:12

Really, yeah, what we do. Our biggest product is called Dexprepare and we do data extraction. So we try to automate the most error prone, tedious and boring work of the accountants, which is inputting the client counting data into the accounting system. So we are using machine learning. Before it was cool to extract data out of documents, receipts, invoices, all kinds of documents. We can figure out the currency, the tax, the line items, everything and input it into the system. So we used to have no humans to actually go through it and train our models. But now, with the bigger models, we we're using less and less, you know, human, but we still need some to just to be accurate. You know.

Speaker 3: 6:59

Are you using gpt or yama?

Speaker 2: 7:01

um, not for our main, uh, main work. We have our own for that. Yeah, okay, yeah.

Speaker 1: 7:08

Nice.

Speaker 3: 7:08

Proprietary AI.

Speaker 2: 7:11

Yeah, so yeah, we do utilize some of the Archer models because it helps us get some results quicker, because it reduces our training time, like if a feature training training feature would take us like a half a year.

Speaker 1: 7:29

It can now take us much less because regarding, I want to get back to the conference. Uh again, sure, uh, we haven't seen all the talks.

Speaker 2: 7:40

We have, I think, three left which one did you like the most? I always enjoy borschtar stocks. Okay, I think his uh, uh, his talks are very personal, very straight. How can I say it in English? They're fun and they're also real, real yeah you see, yeah. I was very interested about how he monetizes it and, yeah, he's a very, very fun lecture. Yeah, very fun speakers to be honest.

Speaker 1: 8:09

Yes, and he said it right like there was. Those were like very uh cool subjects that he approached and those are some issues yeah, but I am looking looking forward for next talk I think everybody is looking for next. He should have some, uh, something fun. Something fun, yeah, something to remember for us to remember the other talks as well.

Speaker 2: 8:31

I think, yeah, yeah yeah, so this year we're running this business team, so I don't think that balcony is a business conference. I think we are a ruby conference by hand. Yeah and uh, it was like calling games now. It was like like a marketing trick this business team but I think it was very. It's very timely. It's very timely with the current market.

Speaker 1: 8:49

Yeah, I think it turned on very well I think I was talking with some other friends like, uh, right now there are a lot of layoffs and I think a lot of developers are now thinking, hey, maybe I got laid off, maybe this is my you know, kick in the bottle, maybe start something, start a product, and a lot of people are interested in this business in the business teams. Yeah, I think it's very timely.

Speaker 2: 9:09

I think it's very timely and we have to be more focused now because, because of this, where we spent our attention from like what, what kind of products do we build? And ruby and rails are especially suitable for like, yeah, indie developers, one-man teams, like a lot of talk.

Speaker 1: 9:25

You see, he built it all himself Pretty fucking good, but and he still has time to make talks and build gems and everything that is a gem. I don't know if you've seen his talks.

Speaker 3: 9:39

I really like that. Some conferences are specialized, uh specialize, for example, of Russell RB is like hardcore technical talks and Vulcan is like uh, between the Ruby and business.

Speaker 2: 9:51

Yeah, I think I like to think that we used to be a bit more technical one, but you know, since this is our first event in five years, vulcan Ruby started to happen, to happen in 2018, 2019. We're going to have an event in 2020. But you know, the world changed then. So COVID hit us and we changed, the world changed. We grew up as a people, as people. We have kids now and one of my kids has a disability, so we kind of changed and our interests changed, yes, as well. Yeah, so I think BalkanRubando is kind of a reflection of us and the way we like to run the events. Um, so now we were interested in business. Who knows, uh, maybe next year we'll run something else.

Speaker 3: 10:33

Well, this year we are not having the rail sauce that we had in greece last year, so this is like, uh, the subject. This is a beautiful renaissance for us.

Speaker 2: 10:41

The perfect replacement, yeah, yeah and you see, uh first, uh, the first announcement maybe for for the show we will run back room again.

Speaker 1: 10:52

Wow, that's perfect expressivity, cool. Well, thank you so much, kenadi. Thank you for having us, thank you for this amazing conference together and looking forward to