DAVID HILL Happy Wednesday and welcome to the show. I'm your host, David Hill, and joining me today for a return visit, wonderful Ruby friend, Rachel Reitman. Welcome back to the show, Rachel. Hello. DAVID HILL So this was a bit of an impromptu conversation since the guest I had scheduled needed to reschedule for recording today. So what would you like to talk about today? RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN I want to talk about Ruby events. It's kind of the only thing going on in my life right now. Okay. Which, honestly, I'm kind of grateful for. After all of the talks this year, it's nice to have just one thing that I have to think about. DAVID HILL Every now and then, nice to kind of pare down, single focus every now and then. That'd be nice, yeah. RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN Yeah. There's some really cool stuff happening right now. So I think in the past, we've talked a little bit about some of our developer experience tooling, and a lot of that is changing right now. which is like really wild and kind of exciting. DAVID HILL How is it changing? RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN Well, so previously we had these like independent schemas and we also had like these validators and the validators acted like linters and they would look through all of the files and like try and find if there are any issues cross file. and if there are any issues like between different values so like checking things like is the start date before the end date is this unique is this id or is this title unique between like all of our different validations if we have like this slot on the schedule is there a talk to fill it a lot of cross file checks and stuff like that and marco has been working on yerba record which is exciting and cool. And it's kind of an active record interface for a lot of the linting rules and things that we've built in the past. So there's a lot that's kind of up in the air right now, which is kind of interesting because like, I've been thinking a lot about contributors and like how to support them. Because lately I feel like I've been getting a lot of, and it's not always necessarily AI assisted PRs. Sometimes it's just like, PRs from people who are newer. And I'm starting to think really hard about like how to build a harness, an environment that enables them to make successful contributions. DAVID HILL I feel like that's kind of the ongoing point of friction, I guess, for lack of a better way of describing it for open source is like, how do you make it as easy as possible for someone to come in and to be able to contribute and feel successful in that endeavor? Because if they don't, The odds are they're not going to come back. RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN Yeah, I think that's a really good way of thinking about it. I've been thinking about it a lot since Rails World, especially since Robbie's talk and Joelle's talk. Because Joelle's was all about harness engineering and narrowing the problem space. And then Robbie's was about building the workshop for people to work in. And so right now I'm trying to think, I have these people. they're going to make these contributions. DAVID HILL And the thing is, when we think about AI -assisted development, it's not just AI -assisted. RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN -assisted. It's also people who are newer, people who are junior, people who don't have context. How do you help people that lack context on your project to deliver contributions that are successful, that are mergeable, that are in the shape that you're hoping for when you open the issue? Yeah. DAVID HILL So you mentioned The thing that Marco was working on, Yerba record. What is that exactly? RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN So Yerba is a tool for working with YAML. And it's fantastic for YAML editing. And it delivers something really important to us, which is that it can tell us about the locations of things that need to change, which allows us to do really sophisticated error messages and report on exactly where the problems are. So like some of the things that we have definitely had in the past is like github actions annotations that show up in the pull request that says this key has an error in this location and this is how you need to like fill out the rule and then what yerba record is is it's the new evolution of that where it adds an active record style interface to abstract away some of the complications and like common code that we were seeing in these linter rules so for example uniqueness is now just a uniqueness check And it knows that it needs to check all of the video files. Interesting. RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN Yeah, it's really cool. It's a lot of change to adjust to at once. And I'm still thinking through how we help contributors with that and make sure that we're documenting all of the different options that are available with it. And right now it's only available inside Ruby Events. It hasn't been extracted to Yerba in general yet. And I'm not sure where that's going to land. DAVID HILL Okay. That was going to be the next question I had. I was like, is Yerba just internal to Ruby events or is it its own separate gem? RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN Yerba is its own gem. Okay. Yeah. And it does like YAML parsing and YAML editing in like a very fine detailed way. You can also search multiple YAML documents to find attributes and you can define the structure of them, like where you want your directive to be. You can lint YAML files and create rules for them. Okay. So that is extracted. Yerba record is something that is being explored in Ruby events right now. Gotcha. DAVID HILL So hopefully at some point that will be extracted out into its own separate gem too, so that other people can maybe take advantage of that as well. RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN Maybe, not sure. DAVID HILL Fingers crossed. RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN Maybe, not sure. I wonder how many people have the, have as many YAML files as we do in their project. DAVID HILL their project. Ruby events is probably a special case when it comes to YAML. RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN Yeah. But at the same time, DAVID HILL I don't know. As you're talking about it, that sounds like a premium use case for like, yeah, I'm sure somebody else out there would be like, we'd like to do some YAML validation. We've got enough YAML in here that it's a concern. It'd be great if there was a gem for that. RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN And there is a gem for that. The ActiveRecord interface, though, right now lives in Ruby events. Okay. And it's interesting. It's not fully active record. It's definitely following the same design patterns. Gotcha. Yeah. RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN But yeah, that's been kind of interesting. And so, yeah, I'm kind of like, I'm thinking through all of the things that might shift with this new paradigm and like how to enable and support contributions with it. RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN like how to RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN and support contributions with it. DAVID HILL That kind of leads into the next topic that you mentioned wanting to discuss. open source maintenance in the age of ai how is that going for ruby events and in general like what are you seeing in terms of prs and issues coming in well and that's the interesting part so first i'll start with saying like prior to this i think i very much felt like a junior maintainer where i was like oh i'm so excited i've got backup RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN and that's the interesting part so first i'll start with saying like prior to this i think i very much felt like a junior maintainer where i was like oh i'm so excited i've got backup if i have issues i can just turn to marco i can turn to audrey and i can turn to hans you know like i've got three other people here to back me up on this team and now i'm starting to feel the pressure a little bit more and so i'm kind of like oh these people want to reply for me these people are adding me do i have time to reply to this i opened this issue and this person has a pr on this issue and oh god how do i provide feedback on this and i'm starting to ask the questions of like are the problems in the code base are the problems like with the issues like and the tricky part is like some of them are really really good so we've been spending a lot of time working on like the ei experience for like the event data prs right the content prs where it's like adding event in data is now really easy RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN issues like and the tricky part is like some of them are really really good so we've been spending a lot of time working on like the ei experience for like the event data prs right the content prs where it's like adding event in data is now really easy And so it's like you can go in there and you can be kind of like, hey, event data, go look at this website and build me an event based on it. RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN Right. RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN Even that part, I like don't feel 100 % is like perfect yet, but it works. And like we've seen some like really great PRs from the organizers of events that are just like really detailed, really thought out and that are basically perfect. And some of that comes from like all of the validations that we've got. And those validations kind of stand in for testing, right? And so I'm starting to kind of like look at our code base and be like, oh, I don't know if we have enough tests. I don't know if we have enough abstractions. Like sometimes I'll see a PR and I'll be like, oh, there's a whole bunch of changes in here and a whole bunch of places. Is that... our fault because like we have it in too many places is there an easier way to fix this do i know off the top of my head what that is and so that's been really challenging and yeah so like trying to evaluate them and understand whether or not it's the right shape and the right solution to the problem is really RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN the right solution to the problem is really challenging i think yeah but it's also kind of cool because i feel like it's enabled people who previously felt like open source was too intimidating to get involved and so for me i'm starting to think about how the heck do i build a workshop so someone can spend their tokens on my project tokens are money if somebody wants to show up and spend their tokens on my project i want to enable them to do that in a way that is a good experience for both of us And that doesn't result in me feeling like stressed out and like I'm unable to meet my obligations. DAVID HILL Yeah. RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN My free time obligations that I have imposed upon myself and signed up for. DAVID HILL That you volunteered for. That I volunteered for. RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN I volunteered for. That I do not get paid for. That I like have put upon myself and that nobody asked me to do. And that I even have people that I could reach out to and be like. I have no idea how to handle this. I'm panicking a little bit. Do one of you want to take a look at this and decide how we're going to handle this situation? DAVID HILL Okay. Yeah. Yeah. That's a fun form of pressure that we sometimes put on ourselves. RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN Yeah. I think Jeremy Smith was talking about both Blue Ridge Ruby and his talk at Rails World. And he was like, yeah, I think that I. I'm trying to remember exactly how I phrased it, but it was something like, I think I really enjoy being stressed out and that's my form of fun. DAVID HILL Cause his talk at Rails World, like the amount of time he spent prepping that talk was absolutely insane. Doing Blue Ridge Ruby on top of that. I'm sure that was stressful. I'm happy to see that Blue Ridge is coming back next year, but Jeremy, said in a private conversation that he'll be in an advisory role for this time around. I think he's letting other people carry the work of running Blue Ridge next year. So hopefully he'll have an easier time this next time. RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN Yeah. Well, Blue Ridge Ruby 2027 is on our list of events that are happening next year. Yep. There's another event that I'm hoping shows up on the list. DAVID HILL Yeah, I kind of was afraid you were going to bring that up. RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN I have to. DAVID HILL You have to. No one made you do this. No one made me do this. It's an obligation you've placed upon yourself. RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN an obligation you've placed upon yourself. DAVID HILL Exactly. We're circling right back around to it. Yeah. So I've been talking and dreaming of running a Ruby conference for a while. And so I'm taking the first steps to try and make the Ruby magic conference is what I'm calling it happen here in Orlando, hopefully late summer next year. I'm currently messaging a bunch of different venues to try and see what it would cost, see what availability there is and settle on dates and all that jazz. Like that's literally where I'm at right now is trying to get things figured out because. I initially made the mistake of reaching out to like hotel and conference center places because it seemed like a natural thing to do for a first reach out. But all of them were operating under the assumption of like, oh, you're going to want a block of hotel rooms. And the meeting space is you fill the block of hotel rooms that will just give you the meeting space. And I was kind of like, oh, that's not. really what I want to do based on all of the conversations I've had with Jeremy and with Travis for Blast Off Rails, especially for a first year, wanting to not be on the hook financially for a huge block of hotel rooms that may or may not fill. Especially with the last week, with the way things have gone in the tech space over the last week, there's a part of me that kind of wonders if I'm a little... too late to the party for running a Ruby event. It's just like, does anyone even really care anymore about programming languages or things like that with everything that is happening with AI now? There are some concerns, like I don't want to be on the hook for a huge hotel room block if people aren't going to show up. And so ultimately I put up a website at rubymagic .dev to try and gauge. interest to see what people would even want to receive news about putting on a conference like that here in Orlando. So if you are listening and are at all interested in learning more, please visit the website, rubymagic .dev. You can sign up. And I haven't even sent any emails to the people who have signed up yet. I'm just kind of working on trying to get things settled. And this will be like the initial mailing list of hopefully, you know, I have a date and venue and this is what we're going to be doing type of email blast. So, yeah, hopefully I'll be adding that to Ruby events sometime soon -ish, whenever I manage to figure out dates and location. RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN First of all, I want to say Ruby Magic. Go sign up if you're interested in going to Orlando. I told my mom about it. She wants to bring my kids and, like, goes to the, like, Universal Studios or Disney World afterwards and make a whole thing of it, which is absolutely something people can do. And I know that... you are worried that programming languages aren't a thing in the world of AI. I am doing a lot of work with AI and frankly, particularly for cases where it's working in existing applications. And I think that we see this pan out in the most recent results. So the agent benchmarks that evil Martians have been putting out with the Rails Foundation. One of the things that they did is they had an AI build on its previous work and do like 10 small feature requests without knowing what the final thing was going to be. And they found that a lot of AIs struggled when they were successfully able to one -shot features. Particularly, I think some of the code bases that they're working with are very clean, well -maintained code bases. And as somebody who works with AI regularly on a big legacy code base at work, And on what I'm looking at as like a legacy code base with Ruby events, because Ruby events, it's the merger between Ruby video .dev and Ruby conferences. And we've had all of these different waves of improvements and changes to the way that we build things. DAVID HILL Right. RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN I'm seeing AI be transformative technology, but I'm not seeing it exist. in a world where it replaces programming languages, and I'm not seeing it exist in a world where no one looks at the code. I think someone needs to look at the code, someone needs to understand the context, someone needs to understand the historical decisions, or at least track them. Like somebody needs to build the RAG system that tracks the decisions that we've made in the past and why we built them. Somebody needs to go in and build a new linter rule that says every time you call like I'm trying to remember if it's YAML parse or psych parse. We now call Yerba parse. That's one of our linter rules. Like somebody needs to look at the code. Somebody needs to care and somebody needs to build tooling that helps guide the agents onto the right path. DAVID HILL of our linter DAVID HILL That makes sense to me. RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN And that happens in a language, preferably for token efficiency, if nothing else. If nothing else. DAVID HILL nothing else. RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN That's kind of what I'm spending my volunteer time at the moment doing is trying to figure out how I can put on a Ruby event here in Orlando. DAVID HILL spending my volunteer time at the moment doing is trying to figure out how I can put on a Ruby event here in Orlando. The idea I have in my head is to try and do a very similar to like Blue Ridge, do a single track two day event. Most of the time I'm imagining Tuesday, Wednesday as the two days, because then it gives you Thursday and Friday or longer if you care, but like doing Thursday and Friday at a park or whatever afterwards, which. That's what I'm going to be doing because. RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN That sounds like so much fun. Being able to hang out with all your Ruby friends and go visit the parks. You know, just bring your family and have a good wholesome time with like you and your friends and your community. Our first podcast together was one where you were talking to me and Andy Andrea about a magical moment that we had at RubyConf. DAVID HILL at RubyConf. That wasn't our first time, but continue. RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN Okay. Sorry. You're right. No, you're right. You're right. That was the second one. RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN This podcast together before this one was one about that magic of connecting and finding somebody else who has the experiences that you lack and coming up with ideas from it of cool things to build. Yeah. DAVID HILL finding somebody RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN All of those human elements, they're still here and they still exist. And the magic of conferences has always been sharing ideas, meeting other people and connecting with people from your community. The hallway track has always been an important part where we talk about the things that are worrying us and we talk about the problems that we have and how we're solving them. And we come up with new ideas and solutions. And I think that part has not changed. I think maybe some of the topics have. Like Robbie Russell talked about building the workshop. Kinsey Durham Grace talked about how your code base is what your agent is going to use in order to build what it builds. Like Joelle talked about harness engineering. I talked about how I was using generators to try and produce results for agents and humans. Those conversations are ones that probably wouldn't have come up five years ago. We still need to share that and talk about it. Right now, I'm trying to figure out how evals and hill climbing works. DAVID HILL now, RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN We still need to talk about that. And we need to talk about how to build it in Ruby because we're working in a Ruby app. All of that is still very real. DAVID HILL That's a good point. Admittedly, a lot of my kind of worries and hesitation probably stem from a bunch of external factors going on. Because I love the conference scene, I love having that community come together. I have grown to love the hallway track. My first several years going to Ruby conferences, I didn't do the hallway track at all. I was there for the technical content and that was pretty much it. It's one of those things where as I got more comfortable and... finally started to meet more people in the community. And I was like, oh, okay, now I have friends in the community I don't get to see very often. And these are opportunities to see them and catch up with them and see what they're working on and hopefully talk about interesting problems that they're running across and those types of conversations. So, but yeah, hopefully I'll have more to report soon -ish. I have no timeline at all yet, unfortunately, but yeah, I want to have a Ruby conference here in Orlando. So like, All my friends can come visit me here where it's warm. RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN Yeah. Well, I'm looking forward to seeing it on Ruby events. Like I said, we've put a lot of work into trying to make it a one -stop process to add your event. Right. DAVID HILL Right. Even using agentic tooling and everything. RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN Even using agentic tooling and everything. I actually have been working with that. So every single month I release a newsletter for Ruby events where it's like, here are all the events that are happening, here are the CFPs, here's all of the videos that we've updated and released. And like every single month I'm trying to make improvements to make it a little bit easier. But one of the big things that I do is I go through all of the events for the previous month and I make sure that they're updated now that they're over to capture like those last little talk changes, sponsors added, et cetera. This week I've been doing a little bit of that to try and get ahead before I make the newsletter next week. DAVID HILL How did I never know about the Ruby events newsletter? RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN It's only via RSS feed and I post about it most times on social media. Sometimes I can't come up with like a two sentence witty blurb to put on social media. And so those months I like overthink it and then I don't post anything at all. Okay. RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN I'm trying to reduce the number of times I don't make a two -sentence part. DAVID HILL trying to DAVID HILL Fair. One more thing I will need to pay more attention to. RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN Yeah. But I've been trying this new tool called Orca, and it's super cool. It's been really helpful for this because I can have like these parallel work trees and branches. And so I'll be like, I'll run my audit event data skill and it'll give me all of the discrepancies between like the website and our data. I can connect to it from my phone. So I slapped my phone above like the stove while I was cooking dinner last night. And I kind of like shouted at it and was like, no, no, use this person, not that one. Give me the link to the schedule and let me see myself. RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN Wow. Yeah, it's been really cool because I've been able to cut off like little tiny PRs while I'm working on like larger stories. I'm able to carve off and say like, oh, I need to do this really quick. I was working on a generator validator or a validator generator because like we were having people make a ton of validators. And I realized as I was going through the process, I was like, oh, we have like. this validator that's still in the rake task we need to move that we have like this problem and that problem and so I started carving off all these like little micro PRs instead of having them all accumulate into one and because it really quickly spun up work trees it was easier for me to do that interesting yeah it's been really cool to work with part of the reason I brought this up is because RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN it's been really cool to work with part of the reason I brought this up is because DAVID HILL of the reason RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN For the January newsletter, I want to capture all of the 2027 upcoming events and be like, here's everything we have scheduled for 2027. And just be like, I'm going to send it out to you. And then go back to the regular, here's last month and next month. DAVID HILL So for Orca, is this a gem or is this an external tool? Where can someone go to learn more about Orca? RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN I think it's like on Orca or something like that. It's kind of like Herder where it's like one of those tools that helps you to like plot out your work because it does the work tree management and stuff like that for me. It's got some orchestration tools in it, but I haven't played with those very much. And then it understands agents natively. So it'll go ahead and open either Claude or OpenCode or I guess Cursor if you use Cursor, like whatever it is that you're using. But it's also got like a file editor in it, which is amazing. And like you can highlight sections and leave like little notes on it, which has been really nice because at work it's getting me back in the code more often because I'm able to go through and be like, okay, what changes did it make? Let me review them. I'm still like very much in the code. So like today what I did is it gave me like a little hash structure and like I edited the hash structure to be like, no, this is the exact structure that I want. go apply it all the places that you need to and write the methods you need to give me this exact result wow but like because i could like leave notes on lines and stuff like that it's really easy to be like can you inline this here can you like fold this in there okay so it looks like the website is on orca .dev yes yeah okay that's definitely interesting i'll be looking at that DAVID HILL like fold this in there okay so it looks like the website is on orca .dev yes yeah okay that's definitely interesting i'll be looking at that RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN I talked to someone about it and they said it was like Claude desktop. I'm very nervous about anything that looks like a walled garden. DAVID HILL Granted, yeah. In this day and age, I would be too. Anything that looks like a walled garden is like, okay, all you're trying to do is do customer lock -in. And I'm a little over that at this point in my life. RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN Yep. And Orca is open source. DAVID HILL Nice. That's a nice feather in their cap for that then. Very, very interesting. RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN The January newsletter, I'm going to have to update all the events for it, but that one's going to have all of the events from 2027 in it. So we need to make sure we get review magic in before then. DAVID HILL I don't know that I can make any promises. I'm going to do what I can. And you will likely be the very first person who learns about it because I will probably be picking you and be like, hey, let's do a call so you can walk me through. adding it into the system, however it is that you've got the tooling set up to do that now. I've submitted some data events to Ruby events in the past, but I want to do it whatever the new fancy way is that you've got going at the time. I want to try the new fanciness. RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN Yeah, I think we've talked about this in the past, just you and me. And I keep saying there's a ton of engineering under the hood that goes into making it look really dumb and simple when you do the thing. DAVID HILL There always is. RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN I have been struggling so much with agent sessions. So there's these GitHub agent sessions. My whole goal the entire time I have been with Ruby Events is to be able to pull out my phone, see an update, and then just get that update into a PR state that I can merge. everything i've done with the generators extracting all the validate rake stuff all of that has been in service of this goal of laying on my couch with a bag of chips finding an event update getting that sucker in ruby events before marco does which is incredibly rare because he is very on top of everything that's happening in the ruby community occasionally i get a win and like i want that experience but my most recent challenge is that i cannot get the agent sessions to take screenshots or like upload the screenshots like at first it was telling me like oh i can't use playwright and i'm like you're a github agent session playwright should just be installed and then it went through a whole process where it was like i'm not authorized to attach screenshots and i'm like But you opened a GitHub PR, and they support attachments in the GitHub command line now. And so then I went through in my head this entire idea of, well, can I get a GitHub Actions workflow that takes the screenshots? Because I had this conversation. Dennis is a regular contributor over on Ruby Events, and he's been putting all of the old Amsterdam events in, which I love. It makes me very happy. But he mentioned that the existing, I think it's agent. browser that was doing this would like resize his screen in order to take the screenshots on his computer. And so he turned that off. RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN And so I was kind of sitting there like, oh, I need those screenshots so I can verify it. Because if I have the screenshots, I can verify it from my phone. Right. We're coming back to the phone thing. DAVID HILL To the phone, yeah. RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN If I don't have screenshots, I have to load it up on my computer, bring it down, seed the database, and then look at on localhost. And at that point, it's like, if I have my computer open, I might as well just run it myself. I might as well have been doing this manually, DAVID HILL And at that DAVID HILL might as well have been doing this manually, yeah. RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN So yeah, that's been my recent struggle. I would like it to be an agent session because I would like for other people to be like, hey, I just updated. rubymagic .dev bring in the schedule and I can just assign it to copilot and send it off and spend my tokens on it. But I think Orca might help me get there. Yeah, because now I can run Orca from my phone, but it's running on my computer. So this is a very long and complicated and way too technically detailed way of saying that building dev environments is still a major problem for agents. And that's why we keep running them on our computers. Of course. DAVID HILL Yeah. Man. Because nothing can be simple even when we have AI trying to make it sound like anyone could do this. RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN That's the thing. There's so much thought in engineering. I think Anthropic recently released how they do code reviews. And it's incredibly detailed. And they've talked about how much attention they put into being able to do a fast revert and rollback and the attention they put into it. And even then, Anthropic says, if it's a user -facing feature change, a human has to review it and a human is responsible for the results. And I'm like, even Anthropic has a human in the loop. DAVID HILL Okay. I have not been paying as much attention to Anthropic's news cycle as I maybe should have. RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN Well, and I think they also posted that there was like certain flows that required two humans. DAVID HILL Interesting. RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN Right? And I think it was only like documentation changes. That one annoyed me a little bit because in my mind, documentation is even more important in this world. DAVID HILL Since it effectively has to serve two different audiences now, it's got to service the real people. And it's also servicing AI agents who are probably consuming it multiple times a day. RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN I've said this before, but contributors and AI agents, they're both very, very smart, but they come in with zero context for your project. Right. And so giving them the tools that they need in order to build that context and understanding around the decisions you've made and why you've made them is vital. DAVID HILL Okay. Well, I've got a bunch of reading to do now about Orca to try to figure out how I can use this. amplify my bandwidth hopefully i kind of look at orca and i think it would have helped me be faster even if i weren't doing ai assisted development really yeah because it's got all of the information about like the pr checks right there visible from it and like i can open up a new work tree and carve off like a small pr and ship it without having to stop RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN kind of look at orca and i think it would have helped me be faster even if i weren't doing ai assisted development really yeah because it's got all of the information about like the pr checks right there visible from it and like i can open up a new work tree and carve off like a small pr and ship it without having to stop the main thing that I'm working on. And it's really easy for me to swap back and forth between tasks. And so if we start to think about it in terms of like, I am building things that would help humans. I am building things that build context. I'm building things that catch errors. I'm building simple things that are easy to understand and extend. All of that is vital. Yeah. And it helps agents too. I'll get off my soapbox. DAVID HILL That's okay. I don't mind it when you're on your soapbox. I usually learn something interesting when you're on your soapbox. RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN I've always been somebody that only learns things when I need to, when the project demands it, when the thing that I want to do requires me to know the thing. DAVID HILL when the thing RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN me to know the thing. And so I've been trying to place harder and harder challenges in front of myself to the point where I need that. And I feel like at this point, I'm starting to get to the point where I'm like, oh, I know things that other people don't know. I'm really glad that it's working out and that I do feel like I know things now. DAVID HILL That's generally a better feeling than the opposite. Yeah. RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN I think maybe it's why I've been willing to experiment with AI a lot. And I think that's why I'm less worried about it is because I've been spending a lot of time solo trying to get it to do what I want it to do. And I've seen all of the mistakes and all of the errors and I've been trying to fix them and get them to behave. And it's been like months of work, months of nights and weekends and lunches. DAVID HILL of nights DAVID HILL The willingness to do that, and not just the willingness to do that, but like your willingness to kind of do that in public since you do your coding while doing live streaming on Twitch on Sundays. I think that goes a long way, not just to you learning, but also you've got people coming to you asking how to do things because you've demonstrated not just that you can learn things, but that you're comfortable. Sometimes admitting in public, yeah, I don't know how to do that right now. Let's go figure it out. It's less that you are like, oh, she always knows and more she's willing to figure it out if she doesn't. And I think that's kind of an interesting place to be that is just born out of the things that you're willing to do in public. RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN Yeah. Jeremy Smith brought this up. So we were supposed to do like little Blue Ridge Ruby. demo videos. And I was like, oh, this will be fun. I'll hop on. It'll be a fun little 10 minutes of like chatting or whatever. And he hits me with, you do a lot of things that are very intimidating. Like you do open source and you do live streaming. DAVID HILL I was like, oh, RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN oh, we're searching my soul today in the 10 minute Bloomer Truby promo video. Okay. DAVID HILL Wow. Yeah. RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN Yeah. I have anxiety. Every time I do something that scares me, it expands my comfort zone a little more and the world becomes a little less scary. DAVID HILL That's a thing that I think from the outside looking in, it's really hard to recognize sometimes because I would never have assumed that you have anxiety. I would have assumed that, oh, she's just comfortable doing this stuff. Yeah, sometimes you're doing that stuff because... your desire to want the outcome on the other side of that is stronger than the anxiety, or you just decided it's time to beat the anxiety into submission. RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN Yeah. My friend and I were talking about this literally today at lunch and she was like, well, how do you do it? And I was like, I don't know. I think I just do it anyway. And she was like, so you like do it while crying. And I was like, yeah, I do it while crying. DAVID HILL Makes sense. Yeah. See that. RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN You're like, actually, yeah, that tracks. I'm thinking about it from my perspective of just like when I've tried to muscle through things like, DAVID HILL about it from my perspective of just like when I've tried to muscle through things like, yeah, sometimes I'm doing something new and scary and I do not like it and I'm grumbling about it the whole time. And then I get to the other side of it. I'm like, OK, maybe that wasn't as bad as I made it out to be. But still. RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN still. OK, I needed to hear that today because I'm feeling that right now where it's like. Change is happening. It's not as bad as I think it's going to be. It's going to be better on the other side. I just have to adjust. DAVID HILL Our brains are so good at imagining threats and danger and discomfort when we're outside of that comfort zone. And so sometimes we just need to remind them, actually, it's okay to be a little uncomfortable sometimes. RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN Yeah, it's okay to be uncomfortable. Well, and if you think about it, our brains in particular, the practice of software engineering is one that mandates pattern matching and loose pattern matching as well. DAVID HILL Lots of it. Lots of it. RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN Lots of it. Change is incredibly dangerous in our profession because change means things might break. That's how bugs get introduced is when we change things. If we just left the system alone and we never changed it, it would be perfect. DAVID HILL I'm not sure I agree with that statement. RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN But like change, I think, especially for software engineers, it can be scary. It can be intimidating. And we just got to do it while crying. DAVID HILL Right. DAVID HILL Oh, what a note to end on. Do it while trying. RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN Ruby magic. Do it while crying. RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN And do it with some help. When you want to add it to Ruby events, I'm here. DAVID HILL you want to add RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN When you want to figure out who else is going, there is an entire newsletter of people. You've got your newsletter of people who want to find out about rubymagic .dev and want to attend a conference in Orlando and take their family and it'll be fun on the other side. DAVID HILL It really would be fun on the other side. I just have to hope and pray that I find a venue that'll work. I can afford that will give me the room and the dates that I need to put on a fun event. RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN Yeah. Fingers crossed. I believe in you. DAVID HILL believe in RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN I don't have to do it. DAVID HILL And that's fair. There was a long time where I sat on this idea. I was just kind of like, that'd be cool to do someday. And finally decided, you know what, if I'm going to do this, I should actually start working on it. So hopefully something will come about from it. Hopefully. Well, thank you for joining me today, Rachel and talking about what's going on in the Ruby world for you. RACHEL WRIGHT MUNN Thanks for having me, David.