Episode 538: A New Host Has Appeared!

RoR - Episode 538 - David Hill [00:00:00] Open: You're listening to the Ruby on Rails podcast [00:00:08] Rachael Wright-Munn: Happy Wednesday, and welcome to the show. I'm your interim host, Rachel Wright-Munn, and I use she/her pronouns. You may remember me from episode 515 about live streaming or episode 530, where I hosted the AMA for Elise, which is why I'm here today. Today, we're gonna do something a little different. I'm hosting another AMA for the new host of the Ruby on Rails podcast, David Hill. Yay. David Hill was on episodes 421 and 518. He has a lot of experience hosting podcasts, RubyGems, the Ode to RailsConf podcast, and the Remote Ruby podcast. Welcome to your show, and thanks for inviting me today. [00:00:45] David Hill: Thank you for being here to help introduce myself to the [00:00:51] Rachael Wright-Munn: podcast. Yeah. I think it makes it a lot easier when you have someone else to talk to. [00:00:54] David Hill: Yes. Thank you. [00:00:57] Rachael Wright-Munn: First, I kinda wanted to ask you about some of your prior [00:01:00] podcasts. Like, what was the idea and what was the vision behind them? Starting with Ode to RailsConf, the first one. [00:01:06] David Hill: Right. So I guess that was two or three years ago now when, at RailsConf, they announced that the next RailsConf was gonna be the last one. Over the course of, like, the next 24 hours, that was a lot of what people were talking about. There was a conversation I overheard where somebody kinda wishing that somebody would make some kind of a documentary about the history of RailsConf and that type of thing. That little conversation snippet kinda stuck with me for a few hours. I didn't have any kind of experience that would help me f- something like that, something that ambitious of making a real documentary, but I'd kind of wanted to do a podcast for a long time, and I had this kind of mental block in my head. I wanted a podcast that I created to be something that had a unique spin or direction to it instead of it just being, "Oh, [00:02:00] it's another guy talking about Ruby." So that was kind of the initial idea was just kind of like, "Oh, well, this way I can do a podcast about RailsConf, talk to people about their experiences at RailsConf. I can pull from a wide experience set of, like, people who've been for multiple years versus people who were coming for their first time." So I really liked that idea, and the fact that the last RailsConf was a year away also gave me a really tight, confined timeline that this was not a forever project. This was a project that I could do for a year, and even if I hated it, I could probably muscle through and do it for a year. And if I didn't hate it, which I didn't, surprise, it's still a confined project that I could mark as done, and then I could hopefully transition into something else. [00:02:52] Rachael Wright-Munn: Yeah, and you did, the RubyGems podcast. [00:02:55] David Hill: The RubyGems podcast. That one was unfortunately relatively short-lived. From what [00:03:00] I remember, that one was pretty much an idea that came from Marty Haught at RubyGems. They wanted to kinda have a Ruby Central specific podcast, and so that was kinda an idea where he approached me about it and asked if I'd be interested in co-hosting it with him, which at the time that sounded like a great idea, and I was excited to help try and be a part of that. But then the whole debacle that happened with Ruby Central and the taking control of the GitHub repositories and everything, the way it happened and the way it was communicated, it's one of those things where, like, I felt like- Ah, goodness. How to express what I felt at that moment is really just difficult and complicated. I asked at one point if it's something that we should talk about on the podcast because I felt like that's probably one of the things that should be talked about. I understand at the same time why Marty said no, because it's an ongoing issue, and there's things that [00:04:00] for legal reasons probably can't or shouldn't be discussed on a public forum like that. But because it was something that was so visible and impactful to the community that I couldn't talk about, and it was connected to this organization that technically owned that podcast, it's like, okay, I think I need to step away from this podcast because I'm not saying Ruby Central was right. I'm not saying they were wrong. I'm saying I didn't feel comfortable in the situation that I was in, and so I felt like I had to step away from it. [00:04:34] Rachael Wright-Munn: That makes sense. That makes a lot of sense. Prior to that going down, how did you go about selecting guests and thinking about who you wanted to bring on and the stories you wanted to tell for that [00:04:47] David Hill: podcast? Wow. I don't remember a whole lot of what we did for that one. Because it was Marty's initial idea, he was leading a lot of that. We brainstormed just ideas for guests, and because [00:05:00] we called it the Ruby Gems podcast, I think the perception around it was that we were talking about actual ruby gems, but that wasn't really the intent behind the name. It was more just kind of like talking to people in the community who are doing interesting things and So yeah, it was never, from what I recall at least, I could be wrong, it was never intended to be, "Let's talk about a different Ruby gem every episode." It was just supposed to be talking with people in the community doing interesting things. And so sometimes you can just throw a stone and you're gonna hit somebody doing something interesting in Ruby because, like, people are doing some wild things. [00:05:41] Rachael Wright-Munn: And then your most recent podcast that you're hosting is Remote Ruby, and you're hosting that alongside Chris and Andrew. [00:05:49] David Hill: Right. So we kind of have to back up a little bit to Ode to RailsConf. When I came up with the idea late [00:06:00] in the evening of the first night of RailsConf, because I'm me and have certain confidence problems sometime, I wanted to run this idea by a couple of people and see if anyone even thought this was a good idea that anyone would listen to. One of the first people I approached was Chris Oliver, and he was very enthusiastic and supportive of the idea. He connected me with Paul, our editor. He connected me with Tom Rossi from Buzzsprout. That's where I ultimately ended up hosting the podcast out of. He not only connected me to Paul, our editor, he also volunteered to, to sponsor the podcast and pay for me to have the podcast edited. So yeah, I started h- having a, a really positive, friendly relationship with Chris really early on. And then once Ode to RailsConf came to a close and Ruby Gems, I stepped away from it. Remote Ruby used to have three hosts. It was Chris, [00:07:00] Andrew, and Jason Charms, and Jason Charms stepped away to spend more time with his family, and work was getting more pressing on him. And so, like, they wanted to have three hosts again so that if one of them is out, there's still two people to have a conversation with. And so I'd already had a good relationship with Chris and had a year and change of podcast experience, and so they asked me to join them on Remote Ruby. [00:07:23] Rachael Wright-Munn: Ah, that's so awesome, and that's one of the podcasts that's on my regular rotation also. [00:07:28] David Hill: It's been on mine too for a long time. So now I listen to it less now because I actually am in the conversation live, if that's... [00:07:36] Rachael Wright-Munn: No, that makes sense. You've already heard it. [00:07:39] David Hill: Yeah. [00:07:40] Rachael Wright-Munn: But my question is kind of, like, what is the idea and the vision behind that podcast? What is it supposed to be? What are the stories that you're looking to tell? [00:07:48] David Hill: For Remote Ruby? [00:07:50] Rachael Wright-Munn: Yep. [00:07:51] David Hill: The way those episodes play out is usually the three of us talking about what we're working on or interesting problems that we're facing [00:08:00] at the moment. Sometimes we kind of try to take a look at things that are recently released in the Ruby ecosystem. Most of the time it's just three people taking a break from work to talk about work. [00:08:16] Rachael Wright-Munn: I think that's a great summary of the podcast. Which leads me into my next question, which is what is the vision and idea that you have for the future of the Ruby on Rails Podcast? You've got a lot of different experiences. You've told a lot of different stories over these three podcasts, and they've got very different formats. So what are you envisioning for the Ruby on Rails Podcast? [00:08:36] David Hill: So one of the things that Elise was doing that I really liked was she was trying to really focus on startups and small companies that are building with Rails. And as much as is possible, I wanna keep doing that. But the more I've thought about this question, the more I've felt like the thing that really speaks to me [00:09:00] is a lot more in the community of Ruby on Rails and less in the company corporate side of it. One of the things that I want to spend some time in the podcast talking about are people doing interesting things in the community, whether that's in the code space or organizing community events. I've recorded two episodes already that are gonna be released after this one. Those guests were Travis Doctor and Jeremy Smith, who are organizing a couple of conferences that happened this year, Blue Ridge Ruby and Blastoff Rails. People creating these spaces and these community events for Ruby developers to kinda come and get to know each other and see what other people are doing. I really like those experiences, and I wanna try and highlight those more. That's one of the things that I think might be a bit of a departure that I want to use the podcast to focus a little bit more on. [00:09:54] Rachael Wright-Munn: It's so fascinating, the entire topic of, like, organizing events. You and I are on [00:10:00] the program committee for RubyConf this year. Right. It is so much harder than I thought it was going to be. This is my first time on a program committee. This is your second time. [00:10:09] David Hill: Right. [00:10:10] Rachael Wright-Munn: Even just that aspect is so much harder and more complicated than anything you can think of. So the people who are doing that community organizing are just... They're incredible people, and they're doing so much for the community. [00:10:24] David Hill: Right. Like, for Jeremy, Jeremy's got, I think, two or three other core people that help him put on Blue Ridge Ruby. Travis is just doing a whole conference by himself. Then us on the program committee is like, there's not a whole lot that we need to do on the program committee. Like, we did the CFP process a while back. You've got a very specific thing that you're doing with the Hackspace and the Community Day, and Michelle Yuen is the speaker liaison, just kinda managing all the communication with the speakers. But the rest of us on the program committee don't really have a whole lot of what we're doing. And so, [00:11:00] like I was the speaker liaison for RailsConf last year, and so, like, I don't feel too terribly bad, but at the same time, I was kinda like, "Maybe I could be doing something more than nothing that I'm doing right now." [00:11:15] Rachael Wright-Munn: Yeah. There's a range of workloads there, and it really is what you make of it. [00:11:21] David Hill: Yeah. But it's a lot of work, and there's this huge range of people doing it by themselves to small teams to, like, having this huge nonprofit that is doing a lot of the work, and we're just kind of there to help and do what we can along the way. But again, that's part of what's fascinating about this ecosystem is, like, there is no really one right way to do it. [00:11:46] Rachael Wright-Munn: Mm-hmm. [00:11:46] David Hill: If you wanted to do something to put something out into the community, you can probably make it happen. It's just, it might take a little bit more work than you'd like, or you've gotta find some other people to help you get there Hey, this is [00:12:00] Adam from Judo Scale. You're probably sick of hearing about us, and I get it. Over the past decade, Judo Scale has become the default auto-scaling solution in the Ruby community, and that's great, but there's still lots of teams overpaying for their hosting and getting tripped up by traffic spikes. If you're on one of those teams, you need a better auto-scaler, and that's Judo Scale. We use better metrics, give you more control, and react faster than any other auto-scaler. We're a small team of Ruby developers like you, and we're ready to help. Learn more at judoscale.com/ruby. [00:12:35] Rachael Wright-Munn: In this case, you're inheriting this podcast that has this very long legacy, and this is a question that I asked Elise in her AMA, which is like, what is it like to inherit a big legacy project like the Ruby on Rails Podcast? You're stepping in and picking up that mantle. [00:12:52] David Hill: Yeah. This has been an interesting process getting to this point. Elise actually approached me at [00:13:00] RailsConf last year and asked if I'd be interested in co-hosting the podcast with her. Her workload and personal life had gotten to the point that it had already been a little while, a couple of months I think at that point, since the latest episode had been released, and the idea was that it wasn't that we would co-host it together, it was that she would do one and I would do one, so it basically cuts her recording time load in half 'cause I would be doing every other episode. And I was admittedly really excited about this idea. "Fantastic, I would love to do that." But then things happened in real life where I need to kinda clarify here that I don't have any specific details about what was going on in Elise's life. I tried to get in touch with her for a while and- [00:13:48] Rachael Wright-Munn: And if you did, you wouldn't share them. [00:13:50] David Hill: Right. In the conversation where she handed the podcast off to me, she doesn't want to invite inquiry into what was going on in her life because she's a pretty private person. [00:14:00] But just life just kinda had got in the way for a while, and then earlier this year, I think it was two or three months ago now maybe, it had been, I guess, eight months, I think, since the last time I tried to contact her. I just kinda had this thought of I'm gonna reach out to her again, wish her well, hope she's doing better than what was going on before, whatever it was, and ask if she has any inclination towards getting the podcast restarted, and that was the point where she basically said that she's doing better, but also not in a position to really keep it going again. And so she kinda handed it off to me. So yeah, I'm still just kind of not really knowing how to feel about having this huge legacy project to pick up and run with because it's still just kinda just starting. This will be the first episode released with me at the head of it, and so I'm just kinda, I don't know, we'll see how this [00:15:00] goes. [00:15:00] Rachael Wright-Munn: Yeah. Well, and it's interesting having a first episode be episode 538. [00:15:06] David Hill: Right. Yeah. There's a huge backlog of episodes that I have got no connection to really other than the title of the podcast. [00:15:13] Rachael Wright-Munn: Yeah, and listening to them and, like, carrying forward, like, uh, what is it? Today we're using a template that was actually written by Brittany, handed down to Elise, and is now being handed down over here to you. [00:15:26] David Hill: Yep [00:15:27] Rachael Wright-Munn: I wanted to ask specifically for this podcast, you kinda touched on this already that you're looking for startups and small businesses and community organizers, but, like, how do you go about finding podcast guests? [00:15:40] David Hill: A lot of times admittedly it's people I know or people that I'm aware of in the Ruby community that I want to have an excuse to talk to. Before I even started oh/derails Conf, I met Drew Bragg at the conference, and at the time he was, I think it was [00:16:00] fairly new into the podcasting space with Code and the Coding Coders Who Code It, which is just such a ridiculous and fun name for a podcast. He literally said that he started the podcast specifically to give himself a viable, reasonable excuse to go talk to somebody. And then five minutes later, I watched him do that and walk up to Aaron Patterson and ask Aaron Patterson to be on his podcast sometime. I was like, "How freaking cool is that?" As an introvert, as someone who has a certain amount of social anxiety and like, "Oh, I wanna go talk to that person, but my mind is now completely blank because I'm seeing this person I want to go talk to, I'm just gonna fan goober on them, and that's not what I want to have happen." And now I have this thing that is like, "Oh, I have this podcast that I can use as like, 'Would you come on the podcast sometime so we can talk about whatever it is you're working on?'" And by then, like, my brain's operating again enough that I can, like, contain the [00:17:00] squeals of glee that I'm talking to- ... this person. [00:17:04] Rachael Wright-Munn: No, that makes a lot of sense. And, like, I've actually heard a couple of different podcast hosts say that, is that it gives them an opportunity to have these conversations with people. [00:17:14] David Hill: Um- Right. A lot of it's people I know, people that I'm aware of that I wanna talk to, trying to just kinda keep an eye on what's going on in the community. Marco Roth, for example. He's made the rounds to a lot of different podcasts talking about Herb and Reaction View. But as far as I can see, it doesn't look like he's been on this podcast. And so I was like, he's like one of those obvious people that I'm like, "Of course I wanna have Marco Roth on here sometime," because he did this amazing stuff that- I don't know. It feels like a, a significant oversight that we haven't talked about that on this podcast. And so- [00:17:51] Rachael Wright-Munn: Hmm. Well, and Erb has come in fast, and it's come in strong as well. [00:17:55] David Hill: Right. [00:17:56] Rachael Wright-Munn: I think as soon as he got the parser working and then, like, some of the [00:18:00] Reaction View stuff started coming out, where it's like now you have the debugger, we're starting to see, like, the benefits of having something that can parse your HTML and ERB templates. [00:18:12] David Hill: Right. That's a big thing. [00:18:14] Rachael Wright-Munn: Yeah. Has definitely felt revolutionary. How do you, once you've selected your guests, how do you develop questions for them? [00:18:24] David Hill: I wish I had an actual system that I could respond with. What I did before for, like, Ode to RailsConf was I had a smattering of questions that was, like, trying to kind of touch every base I could think of in terms of a person's potential involvement with the conference. How many times they've gone? Are they just an attendee? Were they ever a speaker? Were they ever a volunteer? Just kind of going through every possible way I could think of of how you could have interacted with the conference and what your experiences were there. The idea [00:19:00] basically being to hopefully ask the questions that'll get them talking and get them telling stories 'cause for Ode to RailsConf specifically, that was the goals. I wanted people to share their stories of attending and experiencing RailsConf. For the Ruby on Rails podcast, which is a little bit of a different kind of focus, I still think a lot of that holds true. The goal is to try and get them to talk about what they're doing, what they're working on so that they're sharing things that they've learned and the problems that they've run into. I feel like the more I've talked to people about those types of things, the more I have found that- Programming can be a very solitary experience sometimes, especially with so many of us getting to work remote these days. Sometimes you don't get a lot of the socialization that you get from, you know, working in an office. [00:20:00] Um, at least that's been my experience. I've been working remote for more than a decade now. I don't really go into the office, and sometimes I get trapped in my own head of, like, "Oh, this must be so easy for everybody else, and I'm just a dummy that I can't figure out this particular problem." And then I actually get out and talk to people, and it's like, oh, no, other people, they're struggling, too. Maybe I'm not as dumb as I thought I was. [00:20:24] Rachael Wright-Munn: Yeah. I think that's one of my favorite parts about the live stream, is I get to show people that I'm dumb and that I make silly mistakes and that I run into them. And sometimes I fight with Docker for, like, 10 hours. [00:20:36] David Hill: I'm like- Ugh, Docker's the worst. I'm fighting with Docker right now. [00:20:40] Rachael Wright-Munn: It is the difference between the potential and the reality. [00:20:45] David Hill: Right. [00:20:45] Rachael Wright-Munn: Right? 'Cause you sit there and you're like, "This has the potential to make my life so easy and so nice and so pleasant," and the reality is that it's not there yet. And I know it's possible. [00:21:00] It's just frustrating and painful, and there are so many little edge cases. Yeah. [00:21:07] David Hill: Yeah. That's about the size of it. Unfortunately, I don't have anything that I would call a system for how I develop questions. It's all about trying to find questions to ask that specific person about the things that they're working on that'll get them talking so that... I want them to spend most of the time on the episode talking, and I'm just there to kind of prompt and ask a next question or a follow-up question to keep them talking. 'Cause, like, they're the guest on the show. I want the focus to be on them. [00:21:37] Rachael Wright-Munn: That makes sense. That sounds about right. I'm wondering if you could develop some common questions based on, like, where they're coming from. Like, you said you wanted to focus on, like, small businesses and startups. There are some questions that I bet are common between those. And then for organizers, I bet there's a bunch of common questions that they all have to deal with as well. [00:21:57] David Hill: There probably is, and I need to [00:22:00] spend some time fleshing out this episode template document that we're working with to kind of have that kind of in place so that there's like, "Here's what we're looking at. We're gonna look at this block of questions." But we'll see how it goes. I need to put a little bit more work into that, I think. [00:22:17] Rachael Wright-Munn: Well, I have another question for you that I also asked Elise in the AMA, which is, what is an interesting or funny moment you had when meeting a listener? [00:22:27] David Hill: The only times that it's happened to me so far that were really memorable were at that final RailsConf. Every now and then I'd say something, and someone would just kind of like their head would pop up. You can see them get that look on their face like they're trying to figure out why that voice sounded familiar, and by that voice, I mean my voice. It was always funny to me because for podcasts, it is apparently notoriously difficult to get any kind of [00:23:00] sense of how many people are listening to your podcast. [00:23:03] Rachael Wright-Munn: Yeah. [00:23:04] David Hill: The numbers that I was able to get through Buzzsprout, they were not super huge. The O'Reilly RailsConf podcast wasn't any kind of a blockbuster. It didn't bring in thousands upon thousands of views or listens or anything. It was a pretty small niche podcast So every single time someone, like, popped up, it was like, "Oh, I know why they did that," because they probably listened to an episode of the podcast, and they've heard my voice talking about things for a while, and all of a sudden they just heard that voice from real life. Every single one of them was just kind of funny that way, but also startling to me because my audience numbers were fairly low. I thought, "I don't know that I'm ever going to actually run into anyone who's listened to this who didn't already know me." But it happened more than once, and so I was like, "Okay, this is kind of cool. There's actually people out there listening to this." [00:23:57] Rachael Wright-Munn: I have two thoughts on this. One, [00:24:00] Joel Quenneville has described this exact experience to me, and I have also done this to Elise at San Diego RubyCon where, like, I was listening and I was like, "Oh my gosh, I know this voice. I know her. I know her." And then she starts talking. She talks a little bit about, like, recording software and stuff like that. And then I was like, "Wait a second. I know who you are." I said it out loud. I fan-gushed. You were like, "No, I don't wanna fan-gush." I fan-gushed. I will unabashedly fan-gush and tell someone how cool I think they [00:24:37] David Hill: are. Nice. [00:24:39] Rachael Wright-Munn: My second thought was Ode to RailsConf was a niche podcast, but I bet every single person who listened to Ode to RailsConf was at the last RailsConf. [00:24:52] David Hill: That's entirely possible. According to the audience numbers that I have access to, I don't know that that's a [00:25:00] true statement, but, you know, maybe. [00:25:03] Rachael Wright-Munn: I use AntennaPod, so I don't think you would've gotten my downloads. [00:25:06] David Hill: Yeah, that's part of the thing is the way podcasts work is so weird and fragmented and cached in so many other places that getting a accurate read on who has downloaded and listened to a podcast is apparently next to impossible. [00:25:23] Rachael Wright-Munn: I kind of like that. I like that it's distributed. That's a nice part about it. [00:25:28] David Hill: Yeah. It just makes it difficult when you're like, "I don't know if anyone cares that I'm talking into this microphone right now." But the Ode to RailsConf podcast itself was something that I was doing for me mostly of, like we talked about earlier, having the excuse to go and talk to people that I wanted to talk to and ask them about RailsConf and their experiences at it, which RailsConf was... I think this is true. RailsConf was, I think, my first ever big tech conference that [00:26:00] I attended, as the one that I attended most frequently from any other conference. And so it was just like, "I'm going to miss this conference going away." It's like I wanted to hear their stories of their stories of experiencing RailsConf and attending it and things like that. And there are so many fun stories that I got to hear from versions of the conference that happened before I was in the community or before I was able to attend conferences. And so just, like, hearing about some of those experiences was just so fun. And so it was like, if no one else is listening to this, that's fine because this was for me. [00:26:33] Rachael Wright-Munn: Yeah. That makes sense. A side note, it's almost impossible to get download numbers. But I'm betting that those are numbers that sponsors find very important. And we mentioned earlier that Ode to RailsConf was sponsored by Chris Oliver. So how do you go about getting sponsors for a new podcast? For an old [00:26:58] David Hill: podcast. Thankfully, [00:27:00] again, partially thanks to Chris Oliver, I've got some help on that front. He has connected me with the people in charge of a particular company that I haven't had the conversation with yet, so I'm not gonna name-drop who it is yet. But I'm gonna have a conversation with them next week. And on top of that, because I had talked with Adam McCray from Judo Scale previously, 'cause like I've had him on Ode to RailsConf. I think we had him on RubyGems even. And then I chatted with him at the last RailsConf for a little bit, and we kinda chatted about the Ruby on Rails podcast at the time, and he had expressed that he had tried reaching out to Elise to talk about sponsoring the podcast with her too. That was around the same timeframe when I was like, I knew I was going to be co-hosting it soon or thought I was going to be co-hosting it. I just kind of filed that away in the back of my mind. And so when Elise passed the podcast over to me, the [00:28:00] timeline of when this happened, I was in the hotel. I had just checked into the hotel in Asheville, North Carolina, the day before the first day of Blue Ridge Ruby. I'm in the hotel on a Zoom call with Elise as she's, like, working on transferring the domains to me. Like, that's when this happened. That evening when we had, like, the first kinda big social gathering, the pre-conference meetup, where I got to meet you in person for the very first time- [00:28:26] Open: Yeah ... [00:28:28] David Hill: Adam McCray was also there. And so I was just like, "Oh, look, there's Adam," and I remembered that he wanted to sponsor the podcast. I'm going to go ask him if he would still be interested and willing to do that. And so getting that first sponsor was really easy because I already knew who to talk to, and he had already expressed an interest, and he was still interested. So he's all set to sponsor the podcast. He's sponsoring two episodes a month for the first three months So I'm hoping to get this other sponsor on board [00:29:00] to sponsor two more episodes a month for the next three months, so that'll fund the podcast for at least three months of doing an episode a week. That's the pace that I would like to get to, especially in the lead-up to some conferences later this year. Kind of going back to some of your previous questions about how do I find guests, one of the things I want to do in terms of focusing on some of these community events is maybe look at the speaker lineup, I guess, the speaker lineup for some of these upcoming conferences and trying to pick out some of those individuals to come on the podcast and talk about what they're going to be talking about at a particular conference. And so, like, I've got huge lists of people that way that I can try to pull from. I'm gonna need to release on a weekly cadence instead of twice monthly to make that make any kind of sense. [00:29:51] Rachael Wright-Munn: Yeah. No, that's fantastic, and that is a great way to find people to talk to. [00:29:55] David Hill: Yep. [00:29:56] Rachael Wright-Munn: Some background questions about you. How long [00:30:00] have you been doing Ruby? [00:30:01] David Hill: I first got into Ruby, I think it was 2008, so it's been a hot minute. It was completely on accident. I got hired at a marketing advertising company in Kansas City to do Java, and then I walked in for the first day, and someone in HR or whatever is basically like, "We don't have anything for you to actually work on in Java. We're still gonna hire you. We're just gonna put you on a different team. Go learn this thing called Ruby on Rails." Okay. So yeah, I went to Barnes & Noble after work, and I found the first Ruby on Rails book I could find that I've never seen anywhere else since then, and took it home, started working through it, and it's just like, "Wow, Ruby is so much nicer than Java, so much nicer, so [00:31:00] much nicer than PHP. I think I like this better." [00:31:04] Rachael Wright-Munn: Yeah, no, definitely. And it sounds like that's probably why you stuck with it. [00:31:10] David Hill: Yeah. I decided pretty quickly that I wanted to stick with Ruby. I liked Ruby, I liked Rails, I liked how it just felt like I could just read the code and intuit what it was supposed to be doing. The whole kinda idea that Ruby was designed from the beginning to focus on developer happiness and developer productivity. It was kinda like, "Oh, yeah, let's make it easy for the developer to write code to do a thing." That's a novel idea. I like that. [00:31:40] Rachael Wright-Munn: Right? As a developer, I very much like that. That makes me very happy. [00:31:45] David Hill: Right? Why do I have to fight the language to do a thing that needs to be done? [00:31:50] Rachael Wright-Munn: Oof, yes. All right, I have one last question for you, which is, do you have anything that you wanna tell the existing listeners of the Ruby on Rails [00:32:00] podcast, a message that you wanna send out to them? [00:32:02] David Hill: Um, you know, it's been a little over a year since the last episode, so I hope that they're willing to give a new host a try. I'm excited to be here and to get the podcast going again, and I hope they listen and they enjoy the podcast still. [00:32:19] Rachael Wright-Munn: Well, since I did the intro as an interim host, shall I pass it off to you and you can do the outro? [00:32:26] David Hill: Sure. It was great talking with Rachel Reitman today. We'd love to hear from you. If you have any comments about this episode, send an email to comments@therubyonrailspodcast.com. You can include a text comment or attach a file from voice memos or Google Recorder, and we'll respond to some of them on a future show. Thank you for listening. 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.