RoR - Episode 539 - Travis Docktor
[00:00:00] Open: You're listening to the Ruby on Rails podcast 
[00:00:08] David Hill: Welcome to the podcast, Travis Doctor. You are planning a conference this summer, and a little bit of a perspective that I'm trying to take with this, that the previous host of the podcast really emphasized or was trying to emphasize a lot on startups and small companies using Ruby on Rails, and I still want to do that as much as possible.
But one of the things that's fascinated me more, especially recently, is, like, the community of people that have grown up around Ruby and ab- around Rails, and the efforts that are made to create and foster that sense of community. One of the big things that does that are the conferences. And so I kinda wanted to highlight as much as I can conferences that are coming up.
And Travis, you're planning a conference, so why don't you start us off by telling us about this conference that you're putting together? 
[00:00:58] Travis Docktor: Yeah. So it's [00:01:00] called Blast Off Rails, and it's happening June 11th and 12th. And this is actually the first time that it will happen. This is a new conference that I am just putting on for the first time and learning a lot.
And yeah, I hope to see a lot of people there. 
[00:01:21] David Hill: Did you say where it's happening at? 
[00:01:23] Travis Docktor: Oh, I didn't. It's in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which is where I live, which is a cool place that I think everyone should visit 
[00:01:31] David Hill: And that they have a reason to because of the conference. Exactly. As someone who's kind of perpetually in the zone of thinking it would be cool to put on a conference and hoping to do it one day, and I know also that you interviewed a bunch of other conference and meetup organizers to help kind of build up to your own project here, what lessons did you learn from talking to them?
What lessons would you pass on to someone else looking at doing this crazy, crazy [00:02:00] thing? 
[00:02:00] Travis Docktor: I think the best advice they gave was the advice that I didn't follow, and also the lesson that I had to learn on my own, I guess, which was just to keep things simple. So a lot of people gave the advice of, "This is your first time.
You're going to run up against a lot of friction just in different ways, and the less you do, the better you can put on the conference." It's not like a commentary on my ability, but rather any time you do something for the first time, you're going to be going through a process of learning, and you're not gonna do it as well as you could do it the second time.
And I had a lot of people tell me, [00:03:00] like, "Look, if you don't have sponsors, don't promise a bunch of stuff like swag and T-shirts, and video and all of this stuff. You don't have to promise that until you get the money from ticket sales or from sponsors." And I went and talked to a lot of conference organizers, and they said that, but then they also would tell me, like, how much money they spent on their venue and how much money they made from tickets and sponsors and stuff, and how many attendees they had.
And I ignored the keep it simple advice, and instead I looked at, "Oh," like, "they got this many sponsors and this many attendees. I could probably do that, which means I can probably do the swag and the T-shirts and the video and all that." And I just [00:04:00] kinda took the wrong piece from all of those. I won't say it's wrong because it's all working out, but I would re-emphasize the lesson of, like, keep it simple.
The only thing that you really need at the end of the day for a conference is speakers and a place for them to speak Which doubles as a place for people to gather. And that's really what people go to conferences for, hear some speakers and to meet people and talk to other attendees. That's why I go.
I'm pretty sure that's why most people go. Those are the most interesting parts. You hear a lot of people say, "Oh, I'm really, like, into the talks. I plan out all the talks I'm gonna go to." Or they say, "Oh, I'm really into the hallway track. I really just spend as much time as I can just talking to other [00:05:00] attendees."
Those are the two important pieces, and if you can give people a place to do those things, you have a conference. You literally don't need anything else. You could do it without name badges. Just make people introduce themselves. It's possible to just do that, and that's a lot of, like, meetups, for example.
Conferences are just kind of like bigger, more produced meetups. The conference hasn't happened yet, so a lot of, like, my lessons haven't solidified, and I can't really call them lessons yet. 
[00:05:39] David Hill: I don't think that's true. I... You've done a whole lot already for planning and preparing for this conference that's coming up.
I think it's perfectly fair to say that you've learned things along the way already. 
[00:05:50] Travis Docktor: Yeah, true. There's some stuff that I can pick out that I'm already kind of thinking about, like, "Okay, yeah, next year [00:06:00] I would do this differently That's the biggest one probably is I wish I would've built more incrementally instead of putting together the ideal in the beginning and then having to scramble to kind of build backwards from there- Right
instead of building incrementally forwards. 
[00:06:19] David Hill: This may be a horrible analogy, but it almost sounds like what you're describing is people should approach it almost like it's a Kickstarter with stretch goals of like once you get a certain amount of funding, it's like, okay, that unlocks our ability to do this other extra thing that we couldn't really guarantee before.
[00:06:38] Travis Docktor: Yeah, no, that's a great analogy, I think. And I also think that this is probably personal differences as well, because maybe some people might not stretch far enough, and they could actually do more, but, like, maybe they don't have the confidence the first time around. So like this might [00:07:00] be unique to people like me, where you have to kind of like pull yourself back a little bit, whereas maybe other people have to extend themselves a little bit to what could be possible that they can do, and I have to bring myself back to what's possible for me to do.
So you might have to find that out for yourself. Yeah. And maybe you already know that about yourself. 
[00:07:23] David Hill: That's gonna be a different line for everybody anyways. 
[00:07:26] Travis Docktor: 100%, yeah. 
[00:07:28] David Hill: So with putting together your own conference for the first time, has there been any particular part of the process so far that you really enjoyed or that has really kind of stood out in your mind for any reason?
[00:07:42] Travis Docktor: I don't know if this is contradictory, but marketing has been one of my least favorite things to do ever. I just don't like selling myself or anything that I make. It's just really difficult. [00:08:00] I don't love it. And so marketing this conference has been really difficult. But one thing that I did kind of as a marketing piece was making a game that's kind of based or themed around the conference, and that was a lot of fun.
So I made a game based on, in my opinion, the best video games ever made, which were the Pokemon RPGs of the 1990s, and I kind of put a web developer Rails Ruby developer spin on those games, and I also placed it in the setting of the conference. So you're in Albuquerque, you're collecting boarding passes for the rocket ship that's gonna take you to this conference.
So it's kind of based around the conference, and I love those video games, and it was a lot of fun to [00:09:00] make and play this. And I also put all real people from the community. Like there's no NPCs necessarily in the game. Every person in the game is a real person in real life in the Ruby or Rails community One just recently that I was super happy with that just kind of like sealed the game for me and kind of made it what I wanted it to be was Matts.
I had reached out to Matts weeks ago, maybe months ago, when I was making this game because I wanted him to be the one... So in the Pokemon games, if you're familiar, in the very beginning of the game, you receive your first Pokemon from Professor Oak, and I wanted in this game for you to receive your first Ruby gem from Professor Matts.
[00:09:54] David Hill: Oh, wow. 
[00:09:55] Travis Docktor: So I like built out this like dialogue and character and everything, and [00:10:00] I asked everybody that was in this game for permission to put them in this game. So everybody that's in there, I talked to beforehand. Just I felt like that was better, and I reached out to him and didn't get a response for a while, and then just this last week he responded like, "Ah, so sorry I didn't get this sooner, but yes, put me in the game."
And I was like, "Yes." And finally I got to like turn that on, and now you receive your first gem from Professor Matts. 
[00:10:28] David Hill: Well, now I've gotta go back and start over again. 
[00:10:30] Travis Docktor: Yeah. It really makes it so much better because I had like a Professor Pine, which was just a play on Professor Oak. I didn't have a real person.
That was the only character in the game that was not a real person, and now I can say that- And 
[00:10:45] David Hill: now it's who it was always meant to be. 
[00:10:47] Travis Docktor: Exactly. Exactly. So yeah, very happy about that, and that was so much fun. Making it was fun because I love those video games, and then also putting real people and like reaching out to all these people [00:11:00] who some of them are like friends and who I talk to all the time, and then some of them are people in the community that maybe I've interacted with once or maybe not at all, and just getting them into the game and then watching them like play the game and find themselves and like, you know, you do battles in the game which are in this game are code reviews.
And it was just a really fun process all the way through from building it to watching people play it. It was the most fun I had organizing this conference by far. Nice. 
[00:11:35] David Hill: So there was one kind of wrinkle with the game that we kind of chatted about at Blue Ridge that I wanted to hit on. You know what I'm talking about.
I know exactly what you're talking about. 
[00:11:46] Travis Docktor: The wrinkle was that the game was a little bit too hard. I think that when I was building it and playing through Yeah, I [00:12:00] kinda knew exactly where to go and, like, where to grind a little bit and which battles to do first and all of that, and I was not thinking enough about maybe the first-time player who had no idea what was going on, maybe hadn't even played the Pokemon games before.
And yes, a lot of people started the game and then immediately stopped because it was really difficult to even win your first battle or your first code review at first. So that was unfortunate. And I have tweaked it, so now it's a little bit easier, and I also added a peaceful mode. So if you just wanna walk around and talk to people and, like, find the real people or find yourself if you're in the game, you can go to the menu and turn on peaceful mode and, and then no one will battle you.
No one will ask you for a code review. 
[00:12:53] Open: Oh. 
[00:12:53] Travis Docktor: So I tweaked it a little bit. It might've been too late, I think. Maybe some people already kinda moved on, but [00:13:00] that option is there now. So if you found it a little too hard the first time, go back and give it a- another shot. 
[00:13:07] David Hill: The part of that that I remember from Blue Ridge was when you announced on the socials that you had gotten that feedback, and so you'd gone back and tweaked it.
Granted, this is not, like, a commercial game or anything that you're, like, selling to people, but just, I just thought that was such a cool little piece of the community, that people had tried it and told you instead of just bouncing, that they had actually provided feedback about it, and that you then went in and you made some adjustments.
And I was one of the people that kind of bounced initially 'cause I-- there wasn't a single fight that I could find that I could win And it was like, "Oh, he tweaked it. Let's go try it again." That was definitely 
[00:13:46] Travis Docktor: one of the cool parts. Yeah, I don't think I've ever built anything outside of my job that regular people just went and used or tried and then gave me feedback.
So that was really cool [00:14:00] too, to like have something that actually kind of, uh, engaged the community a little bit. Even the people that said it was hard still gave positive feedback of like, "Oh, but it's a really cool idea." So yeah, it was really cool. It was a really fun thing to do. I wish I had thought about it.
I had the idea, I wanna say, in the beginning of April, or yeah, it must have been very beginning of April, and I wish I had had that idea two months before so that I could have polished it and maybe tweaked the difficulty- 
[00:14:40] David Hill: Right ... 
[00:14:40] Travis Docktor: a little bit before before releasing it. Maybe got some early feedback. But I had wanted a digital experience to go along with the conference, and I wish I could have, I don't know what [00:15:00] the word is, but intermingled or meshed the digital game more with the physical conference.
So like maybe if you beat the game, you got like half off your ticket or something like that, or having some more references to the game in the physical conference, that kind of thing. I didn't have time to fully flesh all those ideas out. But yeah, it still came out really cool, and I still had a lot of fun doing it.
Nice. 
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[00:16:07] David Hill: The idea that I'm playing with for an event that I hope to put together someday, I keep thinking of trying to do some kind of digital game experience, like during the actual conference of like having a game app that there are hidden QR codes around the conference or something like that, that- 
[00:16:27] Travis Docktor: Yeah, I love that
[00:16:28] David Hill: but like some kind of like scavenger hunt like that, but I still haven't like figured out enough of like what the actual goal is or what the prize for finishing it would be that would make any kind of sense. 
[00:16:40] Travis Docktor: Yeah. If you just kinda like let it simmer in the back of your mind, I'm sure you'll come to it.
Once you get different pieces, you're gonna like figure out what the event is, and then that idea will come back to you of the scavenger hunt or whatever it is, [00:17:00] and it'll come. That sounds really cool. I like that. I wish I could kind of bring that game experience all the way into the conference and have like real code reviews like you have in the game at the conference.
That would be fun. 
[00:17:17] David Hill: That would be pretty entertaining. So granted, the conference hasn't happened yet, but like it's close enough. How is it going in terms of like ticket sales, you know, expected attendees? I'll say that it's 
[00:17:32] Travis Docktor: not going the way I saw it going back when I had my ideal vision a year ago. But it's going pretty well.
I think that a piece of advice that I might give from my experience thus far is that you can't put on anybody else's conference. Your conference is unique to [00:18:00] you and the moment in which you put it on. Even if you took all the speakers and the schedule and maybe, like, the volunteers and everything and from a different conference, and you tried to put on the exact same conference, you wouldn't be able to do it just because there's so many different factors of, like, the geography, like the city it's in, the geopolitics and gas prices, the cost of travel, the people that know you and how they find out about your conference.
And there's so many different factors that go into it I made the mistake probably early on of talking to all these other organizers and then assuming I was gonna be able to put on their conferences. That's just not the case. But I think that I'm still happy with how it's turning out [00:19:00] for my first year, and I'm 95% sure that I'm gonna do it again next year just because I feel like you can't draw conclusions from just doing something once.
And if my ticket sales aren't as good this year as I wanted them to be, the theory is, is because it's my first year, and I'm not a well-known person in the community, so this was like a big risk for people to buy a ticket to this conference by somebody they don't know in some place they've never been.
So maybe if I put it on again next year, maybe ticket sales will be better, and I won't know that until I do it again and kind of prove out like, okay, is this something that the community wants more of? Do they want more conferences in the [00:20:00] Southwest? We'll see. So I'm still very happy with how it's turning out this year, even if ticket sales weren't what I was shooting for.
But all the experience that I've gained thus far has definitely been worth it. Just all the people that I've met and the relationships I made and even the making the game and the website, like it was just a lot of fun and very much worth it in every respect. So I recommend. It is a lot of work, but I do think that it's worth it for anybody to kinda try to take on something like this if they want to.
[00:20:43] David Hill: Nice. Makes me very happy that sounds like you're planning on doing a year two, just because with the timing of things in real life this year for me, I'm not gonna be able to make it to Blast Off this year, but it's definitely a conference that I would like to attend. So if there's gonna be a year two, that makes it a whole lot-- [00:21:00] The FOMO is less because I'll be able to try again next year.
[00:21:04] Travis Docktor: Yep, definitely. 
[00:21:06] David Hill: So was there anything in the planning and preparation for the conference that you were surprised by that you weren't really expecting to have to deal with? 
[00:21:14] Travis Docktor: I don't have like a negative answer to this. Like there was nothing that was like Oh, I didn't think I was gonna have to deal with that, and I had to deal with it.
There was a positive surprise, though, that very early on, I was reaching out to a lot of conference organizers and asking them for advice or any, like, conference template or game plan that they had. 
[00:21:44] David Hill: Tips and tricks? 
[00:21:45] Travis Docktor: Any tips and tricks, yeah. So I was doing that very early on, and also reaching out to sponsors to see if I could get any money to try to put this thing on.
And in both cases, I was surprised [00:22:00] by the generosity of the community. You hear a lot about that, so maybe I shouldn't have been surprised. But when you experience it- 
[00:22:12] David Hill: It's different when it's a thing you're doing that you're asking for help with. 
[00:22:15] Travis Docktor: Yeah. It's not a thing that people say, like it's a real thing.
Really busy, important people responded to my cold email and jumped on a call with me to talk for sometimes half an hour, sometimes an hour, about conference organizing and event planning, and that was really nice. That was a very pleasant surprise. I mean, I was reaching out to these people, so I was hoping for that obviously.
But it was just a very pleasant surprise that these people [00:23:00] responded to a complete stranger. They don't know if I'm serious or not or if I'm going to waste their time or anything. And yeah, they all were very generous with their time and their knowledge. And on the sponsor side, it wasn't just time.
These people actually put money behind this, behind somebody that I don't have any sort of, like- famous blog or nobody knows who I am. I'm just a Rails developer who decided to put on a conference, and I had to ask people for money to help me do that, and they put up the money. That's very humbling, I guess, how I would describe it because you're kind of at the-- [00:24:00] I don't know if you're at the mercy of the universe when you decide to do this thing, especially with no experience or network to back it up, and I was just welcomed with open arms pretty much everywhere that I went, to be honest.
I think I talked to perhaps, like, 10, 15 people. I think only one person I didn't get a response from, and it's just like they're busy people. I'm not gonna fault them for that. It's like a 93% response rate is just pretty crazy. 
[00:24:48] David Hill: Uh, yeah. That's amazing. Yeah. Switching gears a little bit. I've had the opportunity to be on the program committee for two Ruby [00:25:00] Central-hosted conferences so far.
I've had pretty good visibility into, like, the CFP process for those conferences. Not every conference is gonna run their CFPs exactly the same, so I wanted to kinda ask what your experience was running your CFP for your conference for the first time. How did that go? 
[00:25:19] Travis Docktor: CFP was hard for me because you wanna see all the talks.
Luckily, I got more submissions, more good submissions than I could accept. And a lot of people have, like, a committee that's going through all the CFPs and, like, voting, and I thought about doing that, but I ended up deciding that having multiple people would make it more complex, and I [00:26:00] wanted it to be as simple as possible.
Sometimes I followed the simplicity advice, sometimes I didn't. But I decided that if it was just me, I could make quicker decisions, and the timing was-- I felt a little, not rushed, but I was waiting for the kind of the spring conferences to announce their speakers so that before I made my decisions, so that I wasn't kind of taking a bunch of their speakers and making them do talks again.
Or just you want more different people. You don't wanna see the same talks at every conference. So I was kind of waiting for the spring conferences to announce, and after they announced, then I felt like I could make my decisions. But I also wanted to have a [00:27:00] certain amount of time to ma-make my decisions and to give these speakers a certain amount of time before the conference to prepare their talks and stuff.
So I felt like if it was just me, I could knock it out in a weekend or two weekends of just going through all these CFPs, which was the case, and I think it turned out really well. I'm super happy with our lineup and super excited to see all their talks. But yeah, I guess overall, the CFP experience for me was as good as it could have been.
I have never, and I think this is a little bit of a detriment, I have never been a speaker at a conference, and I've never been on a selection board or committee or whatever you would call that. So I was doing [00:28:00] this without a lot of experience, so I just kinda went through and I had a spreadsheet and I actually I have to say, I probably would not have been able to put on this conference had the AI era not started at the time that it did because a lot of little things like the website and the game, I wouldn't have had time to do those things outside of my, like, normal job and life that had I not been augmented by AI.
You know what I mean? So the CFP was interesting because PaperCall, which is the platform that everyone suggested that I use, kind of went AWOL during the spring, and, 
[00:28:56] David Hill: uh- Is that the same one that Blue Ridge was using? 
[00:28:58] Travis Docktor: Yeah. It's like they- [00:29:00] Several conferences had some major problems with bugs in the system, and the developers were just not there.
And so you couldn't-- I forget some of the things, but it was like core functionality. It was like I couldn't move people through the process in the way that I wanted. So I ended up exporting all of the submissions as an Excel or CSV and then had Claude build a review application basically where I could look at their submission, kind of like rank it and move people through a couple levels of review to kind of narrow it down So that was nice, but then, like, yeah, later I have people emailing me, like, I had to manually send out these acceptance or rejection emails because that wasn't working in [00:30:00] PaperCall, and people that submitted multiple talks, they would like go into PaperCall, and it would show just as if I had not reviewed them.
And they're like, "Are you rejecting all of my talks or just this one?" Or... That was a whole thing, but maybe next year I'll-- I wanna say I'll, like, build my own simple CFP software. But that's also something, like, you don't wanna mess that up on accident. You don't want the difficulty to be too high when you release it.
[00:30:34] David Hill: Yeah. 
[00:30:35] Travis Docktor: It's a very developer thing to think. I'm, "I'll just build my own, darn it." I just build my own. It's, I'll just make it the way I want it. Yeah. So we'll see how that goes next time. I'm gonna talk to other organizers again and see what they're gonna do next year 'cause it was a problem, and I know that Jeremy with Blue Ridge and I think RBQ, the [00:31:00] Austin conference, I think he literally had a Google Form for his CFP, which that works.
It worked. So yeah, we'll see. Just another aspect, and that's, uh, yeah, I'd completely forgotten about that until you asked, actually. You go through these phases of, like, "Okay, now I'm in the CFP phase," and you do that, and then after that, you're like, "Okay, now I'm in the, like, marketing phase," and I just 
[00:31:28] David Hill: forgot what happened 
[00:31:30] Travis Docktor: in the phase before.
[00:31:31] David Hill: Yeah. That's completed work at this point. 
[00:31:34] Travis Docktor: Right. Yeah. 
[00:31:34] David Hill: Current work I need to worry about now. 
[00:31:36] Travis Docktor: Yeah. Deallocate any space in my brain for CFP stuff 'cause I'm focused just on other things now. 
[00:31:44] David Hill: Right. Well, thank you so much for joining me today, Travis. Was really excited to get to chat with you about Blastoff Rails.
I'm planning on reaching out after the conference just to see how it went, and maybe we can do a, kind of a retrospective episode afterwards, but [00:32:00] I'm hoping it goes really, really well. 
[00:32:02] Travis Docktor: Yeah. Thank you. Thanks for having me on to talk about it. It was good to look back on what's happened thus far and kind of put me in the final stage.
We just have a couple weeks, so thanks for having me on. Yeah. It's been great talking to you. Talk to you later. 
[00:32:21] David Hill: This has been the Ruby on Rails Podcast. Special thanks to Mike, our wonderful editor at Redrum Creative, for making us sound like professionals. Thanks for listening.