DAVID HILL Happy Wednesday and welcome to the show. I'm your host, David Hill. We're in the final weeks leading up to RubyConf 2026, and I want to highlight some of the great speakers and community members that will be participating in the conference this year. Joining me today is Mike Dalton. Welcome to the podcast, Mike. Thanks, David. So let's kind of start with your introduction to Ruby and how you kind of found your way into the community. When did you first kind of start with Ruby? MIKE DALTON Yeah, it was. I can remember very distinctly because it was right after my freshman year of college. I had taken a couple of programming courses in high school, Java, you know, Visual Basic, and then did my freshman year at Drexel and in 2007 and did a bunch of languages there. But I was. I guess, very enthusiastic about learning more about programming the summer after my freshman year. So I came home from college and talked to my dad. My dad was a computer programmer. And I asked him like, oh, I don't know what what language should I. pick up next? What should I do next? And he, he mentioned Ruby. I don't think he had done anything with Ruby himself, but I guess he had just heard about it at the office and heard about people talking about it. And so I went and bought a book, the Ruby programming language book. I think it's a O 'Reilly book by Matt's that talking about the Ruby programming language. And I read through that and was, yeah, kind of hooked ever since. DAVID HILL That's interesting. I'm always a little jealous of people who started programming in high school because I didn't even get remotely interested in programming until college. MIKE DALTON Yeah. DAVID HILL And my dad was also a computer programmer. Oh, wow. He didn't really do anything to kind of motivate me to try programming. And admittedly, that might be partially because I was such a theater kid in high school. That's what I envisioned my life. becoming is like, yeah, that's, I took a different direction eventually, but I'm always a little jealous when people started programming in high school. I feel like you guys got to start so much earlier than I did. MIKE DALTON Yeah. Yeah. MIKE DALTON Yeah. It's funny. I was, I was a theater kid as well in high school. That's great. DAVID HILL Theater kids unite and start working on computers instead. Yeah. Well, It does pay better. I mean, that was one of the big concerns my parents had when they were like trying to eventually steer me away from it. It's just like, you know, you want to get married, you want to have kids and have a family. Being an actor, like you can hit it big, but even when you do, like it's not really a great environment, for lack of a better word, of like, you know, how are you going to meet someone? How are you going to like... developed a relationship in a healthy way. Okay. Yeah. You're probably right. MIKE DALTON Yep. Yep. Exactly. Yeah. I think my dad, I think my, my dad didn't really. He didn't really actively encourage you. He more just kind of showed things off as a kid. And I, but I do remember him taking like one of my homework assignments and it was something to do with prime numbers. And he wrote like just this quick little Java program that just like generated all the prime numbers and thinking back on it, it's like, okay, yeah, that's kind of easy to do to just continually generate prime numbers in a loop. But at the time it was like. whoa, that's, that's pretty cool that you could do that. DAVID HILL Right. MIKE DALTON That's like the earliest, yeah, like thing I remember him doing. And there was a he had all those like, teach yourself Java and 21 days books. And I remembered I got like a little bit into one of the books. And I remember being very confused why why I was opening Notepad. to write code that did not seem like the right i was very confused by that and then i remember the very first program it had me write was not a hello world i didn't even know about hello world at the time it was a what's the frequency kenneth so it had you just to system .out .println what's the frequency kenneth which is an rem song I don't know why. So that was probably my first program was a Java program that output what's the frequency, Kenneth, when you run it. DAVID HILL you run it. Oh, man. Yeah. The story about how he, that you're just telling about what the thing that your father did reminded me of a time when I think I was a junior in college. there's like the required math class that i had to take and i just remember there's this one problem that was like i understood how to do it but like the steps involved of going through and executing the math was tedious and i hated it and i just didn't want to do this assignment and so what i ended up doing was instead i just like wrote a little program that would solve that problem yeah you know i gave it the inputs of the specific numbers as like and it you know ran through it it's like okay here's the answer it's like great there's like i didn't even feel bad about it this is like you know i had to understand this well enough to write a program that did it correctly even though i didn't my i didn't you know do the math myself i was like i had to understand this to make it work i'm okay with it but so we got rubyconf coming up DAVID HILL so we got rubyconf coming up And you're going to be giving a talk at RubyConf. Tell us about your talk. MIKE DALTON Yeah. So my talk is called Authentication Hell. And it's kind of a, yeah, the talk kind of scratches an itch I've had for a couple of years. I've had this idea. I don't know about you if at work you have a lot of different kinds of authentication you have to use. So during my job, like we use Okta. When I wake up every morning, pretty much the first thing I do besides having coffee is answer a million push notifications to my phone. We have like the laptop is behind authentication and there's a VPN. And once you get on and you have to get on the VPN first. And sometimes you're asked for like email authentication. DAVID HILL And sometimes MIKE DALTON you're asked for like email authentication. Some days it's GitHub. Some days it's ClickUp. MIKE DALTON All of those get routed through our AWS instance, and I've got to authenticate with AWS. And so before I can really start my day, I've got to do all this authentication. And so I kind of just thought, what would it look like to parody this experience by creating a video game that... where the mechanics of the video game are built around authentication. So for example, if you get hit by an enemy in the game, you have to re -authenticate. So that's kind of where this idea started. And I was like, okay, I submitted the talk. I had no idea if it would get accepted. They were looking, but one thing that gave me hope was they had a track. called weird ruby yep they were looking for you know weird weird talks and i was like if there's any chance of this getting accepted somewhere it's for this track at ruby conf this year and so i went with it and yeah it got accepted and and then i had to build the game oh no so sad for you yes no no yeah that that's this has actually been the yeah DAVID HILL no so sad for you yes no no yeah that that's MIKE DALTON this has actually been the yeah You know what? It took me actually a little bit to get started. I think I kind of had whatever writer's block, but for programmers, I guess. Because there were so many directions I could take this game in. It took me a while to kind of figure out exactly what I wanted to do and just dive in and do it. DAVID HILL Right. I mean, and I'm on the program committee for RubyConf. Like, I remember going through and seeing this one. I was like, yeah, this... would fit right in with the weird Ruby track. This is exactly kind of what we're looking for here. And so I'm looking forward to seeing the talk. MIKE DALTON Yeah, I'm looking forward to giving it and seeing people play the game. Yeah, the game is up live right now, so people can play it before the conference or they can come to the conference, watch it demoed, play it after the conference or during the conference talk. There's even a special achievement in the game for playing the talk. during the conference uh so there's achievements in the game even yes there are achievements i wanted the game to i don't know if you i don't know if i know you're a big board gamer i don't know if you're a big video gamer as well but i'm a huge gamer and i'm a huge sucker for games that have like weird achievements like weird steam achievements and trying to DAVID HILL there's achievements in the game even yes there are achievements i wanted the game to i don't know if you MIKE DALTON wanted the game to i don't know if you i don't know if i know you're a big board gamer i don't know if you're a big video gamer as well but i'm a huge gamer and i'm a huge sucker for games that have like weird achievements like weird steam achievements and trying to accomplish those so yeah the game it's it's an interesting game it's it's a platformer basically um like kind of like like a mario type game right yeah there are achievements in the game for doing various things and it's still very much in i would say early development it's not like uh the game is not going to take you a very long time to play right now um but yeah so what did what did you build this game in i so One of the, I guess, obvious constraints I had for building the game was it had to be in Ruby. It wouldn't make too much sense to have a RubyConf talk about a game written in something else. And actually, I'm glad that was the case because I've been attending RubyConf for a long time and I've seen... a lot of talks about dragon ruby like one of the creators of dragon ruby has spoken at a lot of different conferences and so i've been wanting a reason to like kind of dive in but i've always been a bit like intimidated because i've always been a web developer i don't even really know much about the paradigms of game development um and this was like the perfect sort of excuse to jump in to that and so yeah it's written in dragon ruby dragon ruby is a um is a game engine a 2d cross -platform game engine And it allows you to write video games in Ruby. And it's pretty basic Ruby. It's using a variant of MRuby. DAVID HILL Yeah, I've tinkered with DragonRuby a bit here and there. Just enough to have really realized how much I don't know about trying to build a game, even in a language that I'm familiar with. But yeah, it's one of those things I keep... telling myself I want to go back to and try and play with more. So maybe this will kind of serve as a bit of inspiration for me to just be like, oh, yeah, there's some things I want to go try out and build in Dragon Ruby. MIKE DALTON Yeah. And I think like one of the the other like big helps for me is like I've gotten I'm using Claude. I use a lot of like agentic programming and it's it's I'm surprised how well it understands Dragon Ruby. and is able to write DragonRuby help. Like, yeah, I can give it kind of like high level instructions. Like I want you to allow the player to jump, for example. And DragonRuby is not a very, like there's not really a physics engine built into the engine itself. So it kind of relies on you. setting up sprites and defining where you want at a given period of time where you want that sprite to appear based on a bunch of different inputs and so but yeah it was able to it's able to do uh what it's able to do a lot of like the um mechanics of the game and i'm able to review and since i understand ruby i'm able to go back and i look at the code i'm like oh yeah okay i see why I see how I understand how jump works now. Like, I don't know if I would have figured that out on my own or would have like, I would have had to refer to something to figure out how to implement this. DAVID HILL Right. MIKE DALTON One thing it's not good at is making the game fun. Whenever I've asked it to like build, I've asked it to just build a level around this and it creates very predictable, symmetric. things in the game that are just aren't fun at all so like that is it's almost like i feel like that is is been my like goal role on this game is like okay i need to actually figure out how to make this enjoyable and and you know yeah it almost sounds like you're saying that the ai is not particularly creative yeah yes yeah i DAVID HILL almost sounds like you're saying that the ai is not particularly creative yeah DAVID HILL i more and more as it because i feel like the ai stuff isn't really going anywhere at this point like this technology has entrenched itself in enough things that we're unlikely to see it go away but i think the better we can do it kind of recognizing what it's good at and what it's not good at and is only going to serve us well in terms of is like hopefully using it for things that it is well suited for and putting human ingenuity and creativity to use in the things that it is not well -suited for. MIKE DALTON Yeah. And actually, one of the interesting things related to this is... I am not much of a designer myself at all. I've always struggled with that aspect. I've always just used like, you know, Bootstrap, Daisy UI, just something like out of the box that has a design. And I experimented with using Claude Design for this. And it came up with what I thought was like a pretty unique like user interface. DAVID HILL And I experimented MIKE DALTON user interface. But I've since talked to a couple people and they're like, yeah, I think Claude Design often generates this as a potential design. because they've said that they've seen my design on other websites and, and I've also, and I've also seen it myself as well. Like I've seen it on other like apps that are kind of like vibe coded. DAVID HILL coded. MIKE DALTON It's like, okay, I guess maybe, yeah, I thought I had, I thought I'd, you know, prompted this AI to build a pretty unique design for the game, but maybe it's not as, as unique as I thought. And we're, we're just going to enter this era where all of the, you know, we had the era where every site looked like. Twitter bootstrap. And now we've had the era where every site looks like ShadCN. And now we're going to start seeing the same Claude just kind of regurgitating the same designs. DAVID HILL Yeah, because that's essentially what it's built to do, right? It kind of takes the aggregate of all this stuff and kind of shoots out whatever it thinks the median or the average of. It's calculations gives it. And so, yeah, it kind of, I guess, settled on this is the design that everyone wants. And that's what it gives to everybody. MIKE DALTON of takes MIKE DALTON Yes. It had a very fancy, it called it here. It presented me with the, the Neo brutalist design. I don't actually know. DAVID HILL had a DAVID HILL I don't MIKE DALTON So that is the, the term for the design. It had came up kind of helped me come up with, which was Neo brutalist. Neo brutalist. DAVID HILL brutalist. That's an interesting name. MIKE DALTON interesting name. DAVID HILL Okay. Fun. Well, I'm really looking forward to seeing this talk because I, yeah, for my job, I would kind of live through a special variation of authentication hell as well with Okta and single sign -on and who knows what else is super fun to have to re -authenticate all these times on my personal laptop from my home office. Like, who else do you think is going to be trying to authenticate here? DAVID HILL But yeah, that's going to be fun to see. But then you're also giving a talk, kind of moving away from RubyConf a little bit. It says you're giving a talk in RubyConf Africa. Let's talk about that a little bit. That's quite the track. MIKE DALTON Yeah, it is going to. I think I didn't really look at where the conference was. Well, I knew it was in Africa, obviously. But Africa is a big continent. So I kind of just applied, you know, submitted a CFP for it without really thinking about much about like how I would get there. And yeah, well, actually, it's not going to be too bad. It turns out there is a direct flight from JFK to Nairobi. Nairobi, Kenya is where RubyConf Africa is this year. And so, yeah, it's at the end of August. And yeah, so I'll be flying direct. on a 14 or 15 -hour flight. That will be, I think, DAVID HILL will be, MIKE DALTON think, the longest flight I've taken of my life by far. And yeah, I guess I'm just going to suck it up and go to the conference and maybe spend another week in Africa as well to do a little vacation while I'm there. And yeah, I'm looking forward to it. It should be a fun time. DAVID HILL Wow. I mean, if you're going to go to Africa for a conference, yeah, you might as well. spend a little more time there. And I don't know, that's, that's an area of the world that I think is fascinating. It would be really fun to see, but wow. Yeah, that's, and yeah, 14 hour flight. I think that's a little bit, that's a little bit longer. I think than my longest flight, I think I've done 12 hour flights. Okay. That's, that's the longest I think I've done. MIKE DALTON Okay. DAVID HILL Wow. So that, that'll be really cool. I'm, I'm looking forward to hopefully hearing you. share your experiences from RubyConf Africa at some point. Cause that, I think that'd be really cool to kind of get an insight into what the community is like out there. MIKE DALTON Yeah, definitely. Yeah. I mean, I think they, they've had the conference for a while, I believe. I think I've just had it. I think I've seen it before multiple years. DAVID HILL just had it. I think I've seen it before multiple years. So I, I'm not surprised that it exists. It's more just kind of like, I don't know that I've interacted with many people from that area of the world. Yeah. I'd really be curious to see what the Ruby community is like there. MIKE DALTON Yeah. MIKE DALTON Yeah, yeah, I am too. I'm looking forward, yeah, to meeting people. I mean, that's probably one of my favorite. I mean, there's obviously a lot of amazing talks at conferences, but probably one of my favorite aspects is meeting people who, you know, you wouldn't. I work remotely from Philadelphia. I don't really encounter a lot of. Ruby developers in my day -to -day life. I mostly meet them at conferences. DAVID HILL Yep. And that was one of the things I really enjoyed about Blue Ridge, which we both attended earlier this year, was getting to sit down and kind of have meals with you and Afat and getting to meet other Rubyists because, like you, I work remote. It's rare that I have opportunities to talk with other Ruby developers. outside of the conference environment. It's just like, it's been really fun to have those experiences again. MIKE DALTON Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. DAVID HILL Awesome. So is there anything else you'd like to talk about, Mike, before we wrap this up? Um, I don't know. MIKE DALTON know. You know, one thing I'm curious every time, I feel like most of the time we've hung out in the past, it's been about. We've played board games. So I'm curious, what are your current... I can see some... We're on the Zoom call. I can see some board games in the background. Like, what are you playing right now? What are you... This is a Pandora's box of a question because there is no depth to my board game problem. DAVID HILL is a Pandora's box of a question because there is no depth to my board game problem. MIKE DALTON So the ones you see behind me... So I've got... DAVID HILL I've got... Have you ever played a game called Clank? No. Okay. It's a deck builder that there's also a board game. You're essentially trying to rob a dragon. Okay. That's what it boils down to is you're a group of thieves who are trying to steal these valuable artifacts from a dragon. And you move around the board and purchase things and fight monsters based on the cards available in your deck. MIKE DALTON That's what it boils down DAVID HILL And so you're constantly adding cards to your deck to improve it, make it stronger, yada, yada, yada. There's a legacy style of the game. Are you familiar with legacy games? MIKE DALTON with legacy games? Yes, yes. DAVID HILL So the idea being that you make permanent changes to the game as you progress. You put stickers on the board. You put new text on cards. MIKE DALTON progress. DAVID HILL new text on cards. Sometimes you tear up cards so that they're no longer available in the game. So that game on top there is a legacy version of Clank. Okay. It evolves over time. The one on the bottom there is called Thunder Road. Okay. It's like, imagine like the car chase scene in every Mad Max movie. That's what, that's what the game is. It's just that scene where it's just like, you've got three vehicles and you just, you race till the end and Surprise, there is no end to the race until one person is completely eliminated. MIKE DALTON what, MIKE DALTON you race MIKE DALTON Okay, yeah, which is kind of how it works in Mad Max. Right. DAVID HILL Right. And then, what else do I have over here? The one right next to Thunder Road is called The Queen's Dilemma. A couple of years ago, there was, I think it may be closer to five years ago at this point, there was a game called King's Dilemma. And it's... It's not a social deduction game, but it's this very social game where the king has delegated the management of the country to his council, and you are a member of the council. And so there's this deck of cards that are the problems. It's like you draw the top deck off the card, and it tells you the problem. And then you have two options for how the council chooses to deal with this problem, option A and option B. And it doesn't completely tell you what the results of either of those will be. So like you don't know what good or what bad will come from it. But like you've got your own individual goals of things that you want to do. And there's rules around what happens to the country and certain scenarios. But it's like it's this very weird social game that I've played it. It's kind of a legacy style game where like there's a board and you put stickers on it and things kind of progress through a story. MIKE DALTON board and you put stickers on it and things kind of progress DAVID HILL I've played this game. i think four separate times which basically means that i or a friend have purchased this game four separate times because it's not a game you can just reset and start over yeah um so yeah i've played that one four different times so like i got the sequel which just came out earlier this year i think i kick -started it so yeah queen's dilemma i'm hoping to play that one in the near future MIKE DALTON four separate times DAVID HILL so yeah i've played that one four different times so like i got the sequel which just came out earlier this year i think i kick -started it so yeah queen's dilemma i'm hoping to play that one in the near future But yeah, I actually have a board game night tonight with some people I go to church with where we're going to be playing a 4X game called Last Light. MIKE DALTON dilemma i'm hoping to DAVID HILL Okay. Most 4X games that I've played, like Eclipse and Twilight Imperium and a bunch of other ones like that are just like huge time sinks of a game. Most 4X games take six to eight hours at least to play once. Last Light is a little bit unique in that it... takes an hour to hour and a half to take to play even with new people um so yeah that's nice we played eclipse last month and so now i'm like okay i want you guys to play a shorter version of this where we can maybe also play something else but yes that's that's the really quick introduction to the things that i'm currently playing awesome awesome MIKE DALTON yeah that's nice we DAVID HILL yes that's that's the really quick introduction to the things that i'm currently playing awesome MIKE DALTON awesome Yeah, I just had a board game night with some friends and we played a couple games, but the one that really stuck out to me was we played Bomb Busters. I don't know if you've ever played that. I've heard of that one. It kind of reminded me of, it's a cooperative game. It kind of reminded me of Hanabi. Have you ever played Hanabi? It's like a card game where, you know, each player has like... They're both pretty similar. Each player has a set of cards or tokens that are hidden to them with a series of numbers on them. DAVID HILL them. MIKE DALTON In Bomb Busters, you have to guess what numbers your teammates have without seeing them based on various hints. You have so many guesses before you lose. And you have to, meanwhile, you also have to avoid, you know, I think the theme of the game is when you get a match, you like snip a wire to defuse the bomb. It kind of has like a bit of a legacy aspect where there's like 60 something scenarios in the game and you start out on like scenario one, which is the easiest. And as you kind of progress. You know, you open a different scenario pack. And I will say we got up to scenario like six, I think, and it was not easy. MIKE DALTON So we did get it, but it wasn't easy. So we didn't want to look at what scenario 60 was, but we could only imagine. And apparently there are board game pieces to it that only appear in scenario 60. DAVID HILL did get it, MIKE DALTON game pieces to it that only appear in scenario 60. Right. Yes. DAVID HILL Of course. I think a lot of legacy games do that, whereas it's kind of like they will introduce new pieces that you only have access to once you've gotten to a certain point in the story or the campaign, which is always super fun when it's like, MIKE DALTON point in DAVID HILL is always super fun when it's like, I already had a million pieces I was keeping track of, and now you're giving me a new one? What are you doing? MIKE DALTON are you doing? DAVID HILL But yeah, it's been super fun. But yeah, I believe I haven't... Yeah, I'm on the program committee. I should know this, but I've been so scattered trying to deal with work and other things I haven't kept track of. I think there's supposed to be a board game night at RubyConf. MIKE DALTON Yeah, I think I heard that, yeah. DAVID HILL I'm trying to pull up the schedule now just so I can verify. DAVID HILL So here's Tuesday. DAVID HILL And there's a happy hour on Tuesday at the end of the day. And then, yep, Wednesday, there's a game night. So, yeah, I will definitely be attending the game night. DAVID HILL be attending the game night. It feels like the last couple of times Ruby Central has had a conference, the game night was like there was something else also going on that night. And so it was kind of competing for attention. And it looks like this time it's just game night on Wednesday night. So hopefully we'll have a good turnout. But yeah, I will definitely be bringing a handful of games to play this time around again. MIKE DALTON Awesome. Yeah. I don't know if I'll bring any, but I will be there to play. Maybe I'll have my laptop there with me to show off authentication. How about the game night? DAVID HILL Get people playing your game at game night. Yeah. MIKE DALTON people playing your game at game night. Yeah. Well, my talk will be on Thursday. So I think I was also planning on hanging out a bit at the hack day and just unofficially showing off my game. DAVID HILL was also planning MIKE DALTON just unofficially showing off my game. And yeah, just giving people a heads up before the talk. Nice. I get some behind the scenes info about that. DAVID HILL Awesome. Well, I'm really looking forward to it and looking forward to seeing you again at RubyConf. MIKE DALTON Yeah, definitely, David. DAVID HILL Well, thanks for coming on the show. This has been the Ruby on Rails podcast. It was a pleasure talking with Mike Dalton. You'll be able to catch his talk from RubyConf when the videos are released. We'd love to hear from you. If you have comments about this episode, send an email to comments at therubyonrailspodcast .com. You can include a text comment or attach a file from a voice memo or Google recorder, and we'll respond to some of them in a future show. Thanks to Mike, our wonderful editor over at Redrum Creative, for making us sound like professionals. And a special thank you to JudoScale for sponsoring this episode. Thank you for listening.