Can Ruby Scale? Still Don’t Know.
Thursday morning, first day of RubyConf. Matz has finished his keynote address and a check of my watch tells me that I’ve got some time to kill before Gregg Pollack’s talk on “Scaling Rails” starts at 10:25, so I head up to my hotel room for a bit. Unfortunately, when I returned to the conference room around 10:20, I found that Gregg had already begun his presentation to a standing-room-only audience. I wasn’t surprised that the room had filled up. Gregg is known to be a great presenter, and the topic is one of interest to most Rubyists these days.
As much as I was looking forward to seeing his talk, I’m not a big fan of standing in one place for 30 or 45 minutes, even if I have a wall to lean against, so I headed next door to sit in on David Koontz’s talk on Monkeybars. No problem, I figured, because the Confreaks guys were there recording all of the talks, and the video of Gregg’s talk would be up on their web site at some point after the conference ended. As David Black had noted in a conversation the night before, the fact that you can just catch videos of any of the talks you might have missed has quelled his concerns about RubyConf evolving from a single-track conference to one with multiple tracks.
Fast-forward to this morning, and I’m reading Peter Cooper’s review of one of the latest RailsEnvy screencasts, entitled (wait for it) “Scaling Ruby”. It is a 40-minute long, highly polished version of the presentation that Gregg gave at RubyConf, and it sells for $9. And I think this is great. Gregg and Jason provide a ton of absolutely free material to the Ruby and Rails community, including their popular weekly RailsEnvy podcasts. I’m sure that a lot of work went into producing the video, as well as the PDF that comes with it, and it is probably a great value for anyone who’s interested in purchasing it.
The thing that I didn’t realize until I got to the review’s comments section, however, is that Gregg apparently chose not to have his RubyConf presentation recorded. I didn’t even realize that this was an option, probably because it’s an option that no other RubyConf presenter has ever exercised. Jeremy McAnally, organizer of this year’s Ruby Hoedown, also indicated that Gregg didn’t want his Hoedown talk recorded either. Bottom line: If you (like me) missed his talk at RubyConf this year, you’re not going to see it.
Gregg did chime in with his response to some of the negative comments on the review, and you can (and should) read those to hear his side of the story. His defense is that he put a lot of time into preparing for his presentation, and that he deserves to be compensated for that, and that if a free Confreaks recording of the same material were available that no one would buy the screencast. All of those things are probably true. (He does neglect to mention that the $250 conference registration fee is waived for presenters; perhaps he also chose to pay that fee in lieu of having his talk recorded.)
Let me be clear that while it is quite possibly a serious PR blunder on his part, Gregg didn’t break any “rules” and hasn’t done anything unethical per se. There’s also nothing on the RubyConf site, or in the conference materials, that guarantees video of each and every conference presentation will eventually be available on the Confreaks site. And before someone accuses me of being a free software zealot who believes that “information wants to be free”, let me reiterate that I’m not opposed to folks charging money for their work. Baby needs new shoes and all that. I would simply request that in the future RubyConf organizers consider requiring conference speakers to agree to have their talks recorded; or, barring that, being a little more up-front somehow communicating with conference attendees about which conference presentations are truly “can’t miss”.
I would simply request that in the future RubyConf organizers consider requiring conference speakers to agree to have their talks recorded; or, barring that, being a little more up-front with conference attendees about which conference presentations are truly “can’t miss”.
I blogged my own take on this, but I would say this is a really double-edged sword. The reason is, somebody could refuse to record their presentation just to promote their talk as a can’t-miss talk. It would be stupid, but stupid is different from impossible. I think signing an agreement to record video should be a pre-condition of submitting a proposal.
November 17th, 2008 at 2:09 pmHi Lyle –
I don’t think we’ve been non-up-front
It’s probably more that people aren’t aware of the process, which involves the speakers signing off on the release of their talk. We can’t really require that they do that; it’s their decision, and their signature on the form. I’m also not sure about publicizing who did and didn’t sign the forms. I’d want to follow the speakers’ leads on that.
I’ve got mixed feelings about recorded talks. I don’t think I’ve ever watched one; I’m personally very attached to the liveness of the event, and kind of envious of people who don’t mind watching videos. I should probably try it again and see whether my feelings have changed.
I probably did mention recording the talks as one factor in the multi-track format, but I don’t think it’s a very major one (at least for me). On this (slightly off-topic) topic, I’ve got some pre-conference comments on my blog.
November 17th, 2008 at 2:56 pmDavid, I didn’t mean to suggest that the conference organizers had hoodwinked the conference attendees! My sincere apologies for that poor choice of words on my part.
On watching recorded talks: I would have preferred to have seen Gregg’s talk, and indeed most of the RubyConf talks, live and in person. But that was not possible, and so I’m glad that I will soon have access to videos of the talks that I had to miss.
November 17th, 2008 at 3:02 pmAlright – actually came back and read the post since you asked me to.
. I was actually on the Confreaks team last year recording Rubyconf – and there were a few people that elected to _not_ have their talks recorded. They were just much lower profile so probably no one really cared. I do agree that better communication about which ones are going to be recorded would be best.
November 17th, 2008 at 4:14 pmI completely agree and posted as much on the RubyInside review linked above. I hope you don’t mind that I mentioned you Lyle
November 18th, 2008 at 12:28 amLyle, thanks for the kind words, and your perspective.
I’d be happy to throw you, or anyone who DID go to Rubyconf but didn’t get to see my talk a free copy of the Envycast. Just drop me an email. Gregg at RailsEnvy
After I’ve read everyone’s comments, I’m still not sure it was a horrible PR blunder. Since I was planning on using the same material in the Envycast, I was able to legitimize spending a lot more time to polishing the talk. Probably more time then the average presenter.
There are many people who are paid to work on their talks, so they can legitimize putting in extra time. You know, people who have full time gigs with lets say… FiveRuns, Engine Yard, Thoughtworks, or Sun Microsystems to name a few. I’m not so lucky.
As someone attending the conference would you rather have a kick ass talk which you wouldn’t be able to watch again later, or a mediocre talk that you could?
Some might say “If I can watch it later I can follow up on the topics”. This is precisely why I gave the URL to a PDF which gives you links to everything you’d want to follow up about.
If you ran a conference, would you care about one speaker opting not to have the conference video released? Personally, I’d be more concerned about the attendees having a good time. I’ve never heard of a conference outside of the Apple Developers Conference require they record your talk, but they also charge $499 to view one set of videos:
http://developer.apple.com/products/videos.html
Just my two bits.
November 18th, 2008 at 1:27 amI’d say it’s another Rails community episode of Neighbours. I mean, come on, Greg didn’t get paid for doing the talk (he may/may not have got a free ticket, but at $250 then it’s hardly a great bonus). Greg then spends a lot of time polishing and tweaking the material ready to release it. He then does so, and wait.. oh.. my.. word.. $9? Quick, somebody arrest the man. I’ll be buying it – same as i buy a lot of the peepcode episodes – at only $9 a pop they’re something useful to get new recruits to watch and tend to give far more info than a course which will typically cost you 10 times the amount. If he was charging 100 bucks a go, i’d understand the drama, but at $9 i hope it covers some of his costs.
November 18th, 2008 at 9:17 amChris, it’s not about the money (for me, anyways). I tried to make that clear in my post. James Britt suggested that for some people (and I think I’m one of those people), this move comes across as a kind of “bait and switch”—except that there was no baiting or switching on either Gregg’s part or the conference organizers’ part. There are no bad guys here. I just made an erroneous assumption about the availability of conference videos, and it frustrated me, and I wrote this post because it was clear that I wasn’t the only one who had made that assumption.
November 18th, 2008 at 9:53 amI also want to say I don’t have any bad feelings toward Gregg. There is no doubt he and Jason have given away tons of great information, and in fact I learned a lot from his Rails Caching tutorials on RailsEnvy.com and plan to use that knowledge in a (free) presentation at my local Ruby meetup.
My main issue is the lack of communication about this talk. That can be resolved in future RubyConfs to prevent this misunderstanding from happening again.
I also appreciate Gregg’s offer to give the EnvyCast to RailsConf attendees, though I feel a bit guilty about asking for it. I’m not sure if I will.
November 18th, 2008 at 11:38 amCan Ruby scale? Yes.
You owe me $9.
November 18th, 2008 at 3:33 pm