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**Jim Remsik:** Yeah, certainly. Steven Bristol, if you were tied to him, he and I were good friends. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Jim Remsik:** And he was local to Jacksonville. He was on the other side of the city, probably 45 minutes away, but... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** And a Rubyist. Everything was built on Ruby. |
**Jim Remsik:** Famous in his own right, a Rubyist... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yes. |
**Jim Remsik:** And he and Alan were just delightful people. I still go down every time I'm in Florida, I try and get over to Panama city and visit Alan, who is now a mayor of Panama City Beach. |
**Jerod Santo:** I heard that. |
**Jim Remsik:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So cool. So cool. |
**Jim Remsik:** Yeah. So the way that I got to Hashrocket was I worked at the state of Wisconsin department of financial institutions, I was in the .NET stack, and I saw this video about building a blog in 15 minutes... And then me and my coworker started diving head deep into Rails on the side. He was a little bit mor... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That thing rings a bell. Was that like Obie's right-hand person, and like just in every detail of Hashrocket? |
**Jim Remsik:** Yup. Yup. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, okay. |
**Jim Remsik:** Absolutely. And so he came down there, they were pairing all the time, and they had four people, and then one of them wound up stepping away, and so they needed a fourth. And John was like "I know a guy." And so I went down and interviewed... I spent a week in Florida interviewing... Again, made some mi... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow. |
**Jerod Santo:** How long were you there? Or are you still there? |
**Jim Remsik:** I'm not still there. We lived there for four years or so, and then the call of coming back home was a little bit too loud. So now we're back in Wisconsin. When I came back, I took what I had learned down there and I took part ownership of a consultancy in Madison, and have been basically -- I worked wit... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[11:48\] Ruby's been through some really interesting eras, I think. You know this, Jerod. You're a Rubyist at your core. I mean, I'm not speaking to the choir. I mean, I am speaking to the choir here, but... I feel like there was this -- the video you alluded to was DHH explaining how you could bui... |
**Jerod Santo:** For sure. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** These things all came out of how to actually deploy and run an application in production. And it got easier over time with Heroku, and things like that, and Engine Yard... But this was such an interesting era for, I think, software. It's either interesting because it's interesting, or it's interesti... |
What does that bring up to you, Jim, when you think about these olden days? Would you call them the good, old days? Is that how you'd frame them? The good, old days? |
**Jim Remsik:** I feel like when you say "the good, old days", that suggests that these days are not good. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. |
**Jim Remsik:** Or like it elevates those old days. And not to say that those weren't good days. These are good days, too. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** For sure. |
**Jim Remsik:** Technology-wise. We've got our challenges in front of us, but whatever. I think -- yeah, that period of time was a lot of fun... But I think we also kind of put on those rose-colored glasses a little bit. There were things like Merb, and there was a whole "We're going to fork the codebase, and people ar... |
**Jerod Santo:** And you've never left. You're still doing Ruby, still running Ruby-related meetups and events... Has it been consistent for you? Like, from 2010 to 2025? |
**Jim Remsik:** Yes, it has. I think the thing that changed was events; the pandemic got rid of events, for a period of time there. And so we did Madison Plus Ruby from 2011 to 2018. We actually stopped just before the pandemic. But we had done a Madison Plus Ruby event in Chicago, we had done a Madison Plus Ruby event... |
We moved -- I think like a number of people, we moved out of a city center, and we're sort of out in the middle of nowhere right now... And I don't have a local community, so I've had to sort of seek it out. And that's a little bit the genesis of the events that we're looking forward to over the next two months, which ... |
The feedback that I constantly get from meetup organizers is that it's hard to get people to show up every month. And so if they get a good speaker, or if there's some coincidence with something that's happening in town, they'll get spikes... But then attendance is up and down. It's easier in a place like New York or C... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[16:08\] Right. |
**Jim Remsik:** And I think the big thing - and Adam, you alluded to this earlier - for me is that in-person connecting with people. It is the ability to sit down... One of my favorite stories from a conference was talking to an attendee from Madison Ruby, and they were so excited to sit down with Tenderlove... And the... |
So I think there's so many surprises that happen when you talk to people face to face. Or I really want to talk to Adam, but he's talking to somebody else over there, so I'll talk to Jerod in the meantime. It turns out Jerod and I have things in common that we didn't know. And so there's this serendipity that's possibl... |
**Jerod Santo:** You can't replicate it, and you also can't guarantee it either. And so there's a risk involved, and like you said, it's so easy just to keep your shoes off... I think that it's hard for folks to see that value when it's variable, and when there's so many barriers to getting there, to sticking your neck... |
What does a small group look like, and what does a big group look like? What's the difference? We're talking like 10 to 50 people, or like 2 to 20? What numbers are you guys talking about? |
**Jim Remsik:** For meetups today, you mean? |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, you were talking about people struggling maybe with Madison, or... |
**Jim Remsik:** Yeah, I think on the smaller end you're talking 5 to 10 people. On the larger end... You know, San Francisco's an outlier in a lot of ways, but I think they regularly get a hundred people or so. I could be wrong about that number. Chicago's routinely 40 to 60 people, depending on the speaker... And as I... |
**Jerod Santo:** Are speakers always involved? It seems like you could do meetups just for meetups' sake, like "Let's just hang." And that might be less -- maybe it's more intimidating, maybe it's less intimidating... But does that work or no? |
**Jim Remsik:** I'm a consultant, and so the answer that I give most often is "It depends." |
**Jerod Santo:** Okay. |
**Jim Remsik:** But you're right, it does sound easier. The real answer is "What do you do instead?" There are lots of groups that just do social nights, and that's less intimidating. Not everybody's -- especially men of a certain age, whatever, might not want to go out drinking... So you can do social nights, you're g... |
And in general, it seems like, while speakers can sometimes be hard to find, there is usually somebody that wants to promote something that they're doing... And so lots of meetups will engage remote speakers at times, because that way they don't have to pay somebody to travel if they're from out of the area. But the go... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[20:12\] And so now you're deciding to do this regional - is it conferences? They're actually conferences? Or these are meetups? What are these things that you're going to do this fall? |
**Jim Remsik:** They're single day, single track conferences. We're aiming for about 60 people. And that's the sort of -- that's the size where you can actually meet everybody in the room. And we're also able to -- we're not going to be in beige boxes, we're not going to be in hotel ballrooms... We're going to be in Ch... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** What's the what's the venue for Austin? That's your last leg, is Austin. That's my stomping grounds, you know that, right? I'm in Austin now. |
**Jim Remsik:** I do know that. And my theater -- somebody came in and sniped my venue out from underneath me. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You're homeless...? |
**Jim Remsik:** I mean, I am -- |
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