Comments on: Can Ruby Scale? Still Don’t Know.

By: Daniel Berger

Daniel Berger — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 20:33:57 +0000

Can Ruby scale? Yes.

You owe me $9.

By: Ryan Leavengood

Ryan Leavengood — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 16:38:46 +0000

I 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.

By: Lyle

Lyle — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 14:53:25 +0000

Chris, 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.

By: Chris

Chris — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 14:17:38 +0000

I’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.

By: Gregg Pollack

Gregg Pollack — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 06:27:44 +0000

Lyle, 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.

By: Ryan Leavengood

Ryan Leavengood — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 05:28:20 +0000

I completely agree and posted as much on the RubyInside review linked above. I hope you don’t mind that I mentioned you Lyle

By: Jeremy Nicoll

Jeremy Nicoll — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 21:14:26 +0000

Alright – 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.

By: Lyle

Lyle — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 20:02:29 +0000

David, 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.

By: David Black

David Black — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 19:56:03 +0000

Hi 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.

By: Giles Bowkett

Giles Bowkett — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 19:09:28 +0000

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.