Friendly Show
Yaro and Adrian are online and conference buddies that enjoy speaking about development, tech, SaaS, and product development.
Let's be friends!
Friendly Show
Celebrating Rails World 2024 with Tom Rossi from Buzzsprout. Rails conventions
Tom Rossi runs HigherPixels and Buzzsprout - the best podcasting app.
We actually use Buzzsprout for this podcast!
Buzzsprout has a very professional podcasting booth at Rails World. We are recording this episode from there!
Buzzsprout also recently launched a mobile app using Hotwire/Turbo Native!
Ever wondered how a tech company thrives by prioritizing teachability over experience? Higher Pixels' commitment to Ruby on Rails reveals the magic behind their rapid and successful app development. Learn about their trust in Rails conventions and their exciting adoption of Hotwire Native, which led to a seamless, native-feeling mobile app in just nine months. We also explore the dynamic partnership between designers and developers, akin to architects and engineers, pushing each other toward better product outcomes. Join us as we celebrate the exceptional organization of the Rails World conference, making it feel like a festival and leaving us eagerly anticipating next year's potential venues—Berlin or Spain, anyone?
Say that again. It's like a pork knuckle. It's like a pork knuckle on a chicken, on a chicken. It's a chicken wing. We're going to wing it, we're going to wing it. Hey everyone, this is Adrian, and with me is Tom Rossi from BuzzFroad. Hey Tom, hey Adrian. Perfect. So just so you know this is going on the show.
Speaker 2:So everything the pork knuckle, Okay, the pork knuckle. Let's tell people a little bit the death cake.
Speaker 1:The death cake. You want to tell people about the death cake. Let's first tell people why are we talking about these things this way?
Speaker 2:It's a promo. It's a promo for Friendly.
Speaker 1:It's a promo for.
Speaker 2:Friendly. We had so much fun at Friendly and I was educated. I learned about the pork knuckle, which I enjoyed thoroughly. I learned about death Cake, which is only a thing in. Is it Romania?
Speaker 1:I think it's only just.
Speaker 2:Romania yes, because I've never heard of this and yeah, so it was a very educational experience, very friendly, definitely the most fun I've had at a conference this year.
Speaker 1:Awesome, awesome. Thanks for that. Yeah, so one of the things that we like to do as Romanians is keep people fed. That's the quintessential job of a grandma, or maybe a mother-in-law or future mother-in-law. If you find a nice girl and you go to their place, the mother-in-law will cook everything for you. What do you like? How do you like it? Do you like pork knuckle? I never made it but I'll make the best pork knuckle for you.
Speaker 1:Like are you coming over with your fiancé? I'll make everything, well, everything he loves. So we like keeping people fed.
Speaker 2:And so wait, so aptly, you gave, as a speaker, a friendly. You gave me a recipe book. Yes, because Romanian food. Yes, because Romanian food.
Speaker 1:Yeah, from the area. Have you had a hard time? I've been going through it.
Speaker 2:No, I haven't cooked anything, but my daughter has been flipping through it and picking out what we're going to make Awesome, awesome awesome.
Speaker 1:If she needs any help, give me a call. I like it, I'll have a call. So yeah, I'm glad you had fun in Romania right, yeah, for sure Right. Cool. What do you think about this? We are at Rails World 2024 in Toronto, toronto, very exciting.
Speaker 2:Very exciting. I mean there's so much energy. I love the intimacy at Friendly Like. You get to have a lot of extended periods of time with people, very friendly people. It's great.
Speaker 1:This is different.
Speaker 2:Right, you don't have as much of that, but there's so much energy around all of the different things that are happening in the Rails community. It's exciting. I think DHH's keynote set the stage yeah. I loved it. Phenomenal, I loved it.
Speaker 1:And, like I was talking to Sirtis, this venue is an old brick factory and it's actually more buildings, multiple buildings, like three or four buildings and like three brick factory and it's actually it's actually more buildings, multiple things, like three or four buildings and like three or four or five spaces and it doesn't feel like, you know, there's one large hole where everybody goes in, everybody talks, that it's like multiple spaces where you can find your own people and have like different conversations or like new people and have like these kind of. So it feels a little bit intimate. It feels kind of like kind of like that. It definitely a little bit intimate. It feels kind of like kind of like that it definitely doesn't feel like a convention center, or you know something like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, it's not boring, yeah, which which I love. I really enjoyed. Have you seen any talks outside of the opening keynote? Only a couple.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've been working, working the recording studio, making sure that everybody could use the Buzzsprout recording studio without any issue.
Speaker 1:We love it. So I did a couple of these interviews here and I already feel kind of, you know, like a little DJ radio DJ person, like okay, that's great. You know primetime radio, here I come. It's totally different from shooting, like recording in your like in my office, at my desk or anything. It's definitely different. It's cooler in person. So thank you for that. I've seen a lot of cool people you know taking and giving interviews, like doing podcast episodes here. So thank you for that.
Speaker 2:We're having it's great, glad to have you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure, and everybody at home that's listening. I think this will give them that vibe about what's happening.
Speaker 2:I'm so glad it came together the way it did, because when we talked about doing it for Amsterdam, we weren't sure We've done this at podcasting conferences but never at a Rails conference. But we love Rails and we love podcasting, and so what a cool way to bring it together and I think it's working. It's so much fun to see Rails podcasters using the space and being able to interview people. It's great.
Speaker 1:It's definitely different, it's definitely something new. Tell us a little bit about Buzzsprout, about Higher Pixels, the big company, because I know you're a big Rails fan. Because you're doing this, you're not only supporting the podcasting community but also the Rails community and I know you're a big supporter of Rails and with Rails, defaults and everything. Tell us how deep is this rooted into the team and the culture, dev culture at the company.
Speaker 2:Sure, I think it's definitely deep in the culture and it comes from the idea that we don't know everything we don't know a lot of things, and there are people that are so much smarter than we are and I just want to trust them, and so a lot of it comes down to when uh, when I first started building apps with rails, I just trusted rails. I'm like I don't anytime. I tried to override rails with my own conventions and my own thoughts, it always blew up, and so I'm like I'm just, I'm, I'm vanilla as vanilla can be, I'm just going to use it the way that rails is is using it.
Speaker 2:If I know anything about 37signals, since they're obviously the biggest contributor to Rails, I'm going to do it the way that they're doing. And you know that's continued to work for us. I think a lot of people get too confident. You get your first product out and then you start to think you know what. I'm going to kind of do my own thing.
Speaker 1:I'm pretty smart, right? I'm an engineer, I can build, I can think about stuff, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:And we don't. And it's funny because you'll have you know, guys on the team, that at the beginning they're like I don't know how I feel about this because I'm not explaining a lot of why we do it this way, other than this is Rails opinion, this is the way we're going to do it, and they're like well, but why, why, why, why, and I'm like I don't know and I don't want to explore it and there's a certain freedom that comes from that, and then at some point like ActiveStorage.
Speaker 2:I've been talking a ton to people about ActiveStorage and that's like the first time where Rails opinion kind of led us astray, where it's just so different than what we need from buzzsprout in terms of public assets that we're serving up and Things like that. But for the most part it served us so well. We are so thankful that All that work was done for us so that we didn't have to do that ourselves.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I agree. I agree Getting back a little bit about getting new team members. I remember when David was speaking was talking about we prefer junior people or we prefer people that are still malleable. It's more difficult to have somebody with a strong will and a way of doing things and then bringing them to do it like you do it. So if you bring somebody that's like a fresh slate, a blank slate, you can model them in the right way yeah, yeah, 100, 100.
Speaker 2:It's a longer commit, yeah, to be able to get them up to speed, but the payoff is so great and, honestly, I mean it's the number one thing that we look for. We don't hire often, but if we're going to hire somebody, the number one thing you're looking for is are they teachable? Yeah, teachable coachable? Yeah, definitely if they're not willing to to learn new things and be challenged to do things differently, then they're not. They're just not going to make it that's awesome.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. Uh, what are you excited about from these new announcements? Rails 8, 8.1, the new frameworks, all the new frameworks.
Speaker 2:We've been playing with all the solid queue, solid cache, all the solid stuff. We haven't played with solid kibble yet. We've been doing that on some of our smaller apps. So we have some smaller products that are not actively being developed, but we use them as great test beds Kamal being able to deploy apps with Kamal introducing the solid. Once we do that, we can experiment to decide if we want to bring it into Buzzsprout, because Buzzsprout is really the main it's our biggest product and you don't want to roll it out there until you're, because Buzzsprout is really the main.
Speaker 1:It's our biggest.
Speaker 2:It's our big product and you don't want to roll it out there until you're pretty familiar with it Of course, of course, of course.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think it's awesome and one of the things that really kind of it's something that like David and like nobody really discussed this, this result, because they just announced it is like Hotwire Native. This new framework, it's actually, like you know, multiple frameworks like brought together. It's like Turbo native. There's like the Navigator and. Strata yeah, all together, and it's like having all that glue to just, you know, have your Rails app make and make it a real iOS or Android app, which is really good.
Speaker 2:What was your experience with Turbo Native and Strata, Because I know you just launched I mean not just launched, but it was amazing and I think it's a great example of the fact that we were vanilla Rails and we weren't messing around with different types of front ends. I know it's so tempting to be able to bring in React or some other type of JavaScript framework. We've always resisted the urge. We're like we're just not going to do it and because of that we were able to take advantage of all the hot. When Hotwire came out, we were immediately doing Hotwire. When Turbo Native came out, when Strata came out, we were immediately able to do that and it was awesome. We were able to launch a mobile app from nothing at all to having a designed app that feels native. I mean, it feels like a native app. I was showing some people even here, and they just couldn't believe it.
Speaker 2:It feels native and we were able to do that in less than nine months. We could have never done that. I think it took eight months to do the iOS only because we had to design it. We didn't even know, what was the mobile experience?
Speaker 1:going to be.
Speaker 2:But then, once we had that done, it only took us a month to do the Android, and our Android users have told us we're not used to this. We're used to an Android app that feels like an Apple app that somebody ported over to Android.
Speaker 2:This feels like an Android app, and the reason we're able to do that is because we build on top of just all the native stuff that comes from Rails. We're excited about what that means for Hotwire Native rolling it all together because we use them as independent libraries. I think it's only going to make our life easier, awesome.
Speaker 1:I think this word like feels it's a very good description. It's a good word to describe what happens, because I was checking some apps with Yaro and I was trying to figure some things out and like, you go, you navigate through it and this is exactly what you do. It feels differently. It's not like oh, this is wrong because of this. This is wrong. Like, because there are different patterns. You have to learn that as a web developer not necessarily as a Rails, but as a web developer there are different patterns of navigation and stuff. But I think it's awesome that the people that want to take this step and make their apps take them native. It's another cool thing that they can learn right. It's another cool thing that they can experiment.
Speaker 2:One thing thing that the cool thing that they can learn right, yeah, it's another cool thing that they can experiment, one one thing that we've always benefited from um.
Speaker 1:I think that I've always recognized I'm not a design guy like you don't want me to design anything.
Speaker 2:Uh, right, it's gonna look. It's gonna look like real scaffolding, right, like it's not gonna, it's not gonna look very good. And so I've always had a separation between our designers and our back-end software writers, coders, and because of that it creates a tension. There's always a tension between the person who wants it to look and feel a certain way and then the coder who's like, but that's really hard, right. But that tension is something that you, you want in your, in your software environment, because it's going to help you get a better product. Yeah, and a lot of what you're describing in terms of feel is driven by those designers pushing back on can we make it feel better? Can we make it feel better? What if we did this? And the coder's going, no, no, no, well, actually, maybe, actually, we can do that. And that conversation happens so much in the building of features all the time for higher pixels.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this is the coachability part of that developer where you want to see it flourish.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think it's. It's tension. There should be a tension. The designers should be pushing the programmers and the programmers should be pushing the designers Rather than one dominating. The designers shouldn't just design and then throw it over the cube, and then the programmers just have to hook it up. There needs to be a tension between the two.
Speaker 1:It's kind of like you know architects and engineers, the engineers want everything to be like a square building. You know architects and engineers, the engineers want everything to be like a square building because, then the architect. No, no, we want a rounded corner here, like, oh well, we could do it. So it's always you know that back and forth, because everybody's fighting for their own thing, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's perfect. Architect and engineer. Same kind of yeah, yeah, yeah, that exists, that's awesome. And so we talk about that in the office all the time, Like if there's not attention, then we're doing something wrong.
Speaker 1:We're not passionate about it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:We're not doing our jobs, basically kind of right, Healthy tension. That should be. You know, a quote, a big quote on the wall. Yeah, I'm going to remember that. Cool, what are your plans? Rest of the day.
Speaker 2:I'm going to hang out here at the conference, record some more podcasts and then after party.
Speaker 1:I'm looking forward to that. It's going to be at Shopify's headquarters.
Speaker 2:That's right at their office.
Speaker 1:What about next year? Do you have any ideas for when it's going to be? That's the big question. That's the big question.
Speaker 2:For the folks listening when do you think it's going to be? Should I say yeah, I want to hear what you think.
Speaker 1:So for the folks that are listening, because now it's being recorded, it's being recorded, so the folks that are listening whenever you get your swag bag, you get a raffle ticket at Railsworld and this year they had a space where you could it. Or do you want to say it?
Speaker 2:Yes, I want you to say it. I wrote down Berlin, berlin.
Speaker 1:I think so, because it's a very fashionable place. It has all the amenities, it has all the venues, everything. It's pretty close, it's central to Europe. Somehow you can get there from everywhere. I think Spain was a big. I wanted it to be Barcelona, but I think Madrid has a big. I wanted it to be Barcelona, but I think Madrid has a little bit more again the infrastructure that we need, but Spain is. I heard a lot of people that said oh my god, I want to do Spain because it's beautiful, it's Spain, right, the good food, the great weather and everything.
Speaker 1:So yeah, I said Berlin. What did you say?
Speaker 2:so okay, this is funny because I misunderstood. I thought I was saying where would you like it to be, and I said Jacksonville Florida. Because that's where I would like it to be.
Speaker 1:It's okay, you're not going to win. I'm not going to win. I'm not going to win.
Speaker 2:I'm 100% sure. But if I were to guess, I would have guessed South America, I would think Brazil.
Speaker 1:Well, we have Tropical on Rails, so you think that would be a that's kind of the Latin America I don't want to say official, but the Latin America Rails Conference and I think it's quite healthy to have it like that. Somehow I can't explain it right now, but I think it's healthy because Latin America is such a big place. They do their things a little bit different. I don't know. It feels a little bit like it's okay that they do it that way and the world just goes between Europe and the US.
Speaker 2:North America, north America, yeah, for sure, for sure, yeah exactly because we're in Canada.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, awesome.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we'll see. I like that idea. I would be excited about any of those places.
Speaker 1:Any of those places right, yeah, yeah, bata, paella, tinto de Verano, we're already going to talk about food.
Speaker 2:Yeah, see, see. But one thing that we can be sure I mean Amanda and the Rails Foundation this is so good, awesome, awesome, so good, awesome, awesome job. Such a good use of the space, yeah, yeah, yeah, space catering, everything.
Speaker 1:Whatever they pick, it's going to be good. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's awesome. It's really a spectacle. It's a festival. Yeah, it's not a conference, it's a freaking festival Two Rails and I think it's cool that they're launching, they're releasing the year during this or, like you know, the betas and everything, so it becomes kind of, you know, like apple does it, like, oh my god, this is the rails event right this is. This is where you want to be. If you're with rails, this is the the place.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I love how we celebrate it this uh, this is the first time my business partner who's on the design side right, you talk about the healthy tension, right? So he's. When, when we first started building products, he was the only designer, I was the only programmer. Right, he was the only designer, I was the only programmer. Right, he was the Jason Freed, I was the DHH and he's never been to a Rails conference at all. Yeah, and he's loving it. Awesome. He's like the. Even though he doesn't understand a lot of the tech that we're talking about, he's still just excited.
Speaker 1:All the energy you know, yeah, yeah, you feel it, you, you feel it, you feel it if you're here, awesome.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you, thanks for having me on the show.
Speaker 1:Thanks for being on the show, are you?
Speaker 2:kidding, we chicken winged it. And congratulations on your achievements, on your Buzzsprout achievements.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, yeah, I have them with me. Yes, the cool pins. Yes, we chicken winged it very well.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, very good. Awesome, thanks, I'm going to go get a pork knuckle. I'm going to go find one here.
Speaker 1:We can find some amazing food. Thank you, thank you everyone. Thank you Tom for being here, thanks Amanda and the team and the Rails Foundation for doing this.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 1:Have a good one, bye.
