Aaron Francis

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Transcript

Aaron

00:00:01 – 00:00:12

I thought, I can make myself shorter if I just spread my legs out. You know, geometry, I could get shorter. And so I ended up oh, yeah. Pretty pretty aggressive splits.

Andrew

00:00:22 – 00:00:24

Hey, Aaron. How's it going? Good.

Aaron

00:00:24 – 00:00:25

Good to be back.

Andrew

00:00:26 – 00:00:31

It has definitely been a while. We both had busy summers, didn't we?

Aaron

00:00:31 – 00:00:43

Yeah. I think busy summers, lots of conferences, couple episodes we recorded, one that we will release, and one that was just frankly, it just wasn't good enough, and so we canned it, but we're back.

Andrew

00:00:44 – 00:00:57

We are back, baby. So let's hear about it. I think the conference stuff is probably worth debriefing on. So you made it all the way to Europe, and you gave a talk at Fullstack EU. Why don't you tell us about that?

Aaron

00:00:57 – 00:01:19

Yeah. I went to Antwerp, Belgium, which I discovered is very, very far away from Dallas, Texas, but it was great. Yeah. I went at the beginning of October to Antwerp for Fullstack EU and gave a talk on microservices in your monolith. So I it was basically another talk on that open source library that I wrote called Sidecar.

Aaron

00:01:20 – 00:01:37

It was awesome. It was a really short trip because Jennifer, my wife, stayed home with the kids, and so I couldn't gallivant across Europe by myself while she's at home. So it was a quick turnaround, but super fun. Really glad I did it. Met a lot of great people.

Aaron

00:01:37 – 00:02:02

Kinda thought it was gonna be more Laravel people just because the organizers are big in the Laravel community. It was really cool because it was not a very Laravel conference. It was basically across the whole board. There were even dot net people there, which I am told exist, but I don't bump into them much in my day to day life, so it's fun to meet them and hang out with them and yeah. It was a blast.

Aaron

00:02:02 – 00:02:04

I'm super glad I did it.

Andrew

00:02:04 – 00:02:18

So that is sort of interesting because we're framework friends. We're kind of bridging the gap between 2 ecosystems when we talk about stuff. And so you've got full stack EU. You get there. There's not a lot of Laravel folks or as many as you were maybe expecting.

Andrew

00:02:18 – 00:02:30

So it's a lot of different ecosystems that are represented. What was the intersection? What is there that is being presented that kinda crosses the chasm between all those different developer ecosystems?

Aaron

00:02:30 – 00:02:47

Yeah. It was interesting. It was literally a full stack conference, and it made no warranties about which stack it was. It was just full stack. And so there were people talking on what's coming in future CSS spec releases, that kind of stuff.

Aaron

00:02:47 – 00:03:19

There were people talking about distributed tracing across distributed systems, and that was the dotnetwoman, and it was super interesting and just not a world that I have really had to do much of with the distributed computing is not something I've ever done. There were some people talking about, like, event sourcing. Yeah. All kinds of different stuff. And it was interesting because I was one of the few people that live coded, and so a lot of the other stuff was maybe at a little bit higher theoretical level.

Aaron

00:03:20 – 00:03:52

And so it didn't really matter that, for example, the distributed tracing was a dot net person because the stuff that she was talking about was generally applicable to basically any stack. I think that's kinda how it was structured, and even I tried to make sure that mine wasn't Laravel specific. I did say this library that I wrote is Laravel, but what I'm most interested in showing you is this pattern and this concept and less trying to sell you on my open source library.

Andrew

00:03:52 – 00:04:36

That's really interesting to me because I feel like so many of the conferences are ecosystem specific, and there's some benefit in that. Right? Like the camaraderie of connecting with the people that are all working on rails or the people that are working in Laravel or with Laravel covering the features that are specific to each platform and each stack. But there's so much of what we're doing that's common across all of them that I feel like there is also a real value in almost by having something like full stack EU where people can go and cover the stuff that's general, that would be the perfect conference for people talking about things like Tailwind CSS or even MySQL and Postgres. Right?

Andrew

00:04:36 – 00:05:16

These things that are common components that we're using across ecosystems. And if we have those venues for talking about those things and producing content that's specific to the stuff that's common, it allows our framework specific conferences to be a better version of themselves as well. It's interesting because even though yours was Sidecar, right, which is a very Laravel specific thing, but like you're saying it's the concept, so that's good. You can also cover stuff that's general, but then when you go to Laracon it's so much easier to just lean into stuff that's Laravel specific because the common components are being covered elsewhere.

Aaron

00:05:17 – 00:05:34

Yeah, totally. Another topic that was covered was some advanced Git operations, and that's a great example of it really doesn't matter if you're Laravel, rails, or dot net. You're probably using Git, and you don't know how to use it. And this woman's talk was awesome. I learned so much about Git.

Aaron

00:05:34 – 00:06:10

And so, yeah, it was really fun. This is the first in person one I've been to since the before times, and it was awesome to be back in person. And I met for the first time a lot of my Twitter friends in person, and it's just so much better. Virtual conferences serve a purpose, and they were really, really helpful, I think, during COVID. But being in person, it's just so much fun being able to walk around the city after the talks are over and go get some pizza and hang out and, like, actually get to know these people.

Aaron

00:06:10 – 00:06:13

Just really unbeatable. Yeah.

Andrew

00:06:13 – 00:07:01

I think it's definitely that one two punch of both Twitter, which is this incredible place where you can just connect with your tribe, find your tribe, connect with them, find the people who are interested in the things that you're saying, find the people that you're interested in the things that they're saying, and they can be anywhere in the world. That's the best part. So that's an incredible benefit, but then also having these intermittent times where you get to see people in real life, the fidelity of those interactions and the fidelity of those relationships just goes to a whole other level. So there is something really special about the combination of those two things being able to find your tribe and then making opportunities to meet with them in real life and have those relationships evolve even more. So how many people are at the conference?

Aaron

00:07:01 – 00:07:06

I think 200, 250, something like that.

Andrew

00:07:06 – 00:07:09

Yeah. So not huge. That's like the that's a really nice size. Right?

Aaron

00:07:09 – 00:07:25

Yeah. It was single track, which I always prefer. So everyone is having the same experience the whole time, which is just a preference thing. Single track, 1 big ballroom, and then a little foyer where we hung out in between talks. And, yeah, it was great.

Aaron

00:07:25 – 00:07:46

I feel like you got to meet a lot of the people because it was set up that way. And I was one of maybe one of the only Americans there. Most of the rest of the crew was all from Europe. So that was fun. And a lot of people came together as teams, which is good because they all know each other.

Aaron

00:07:46 – 00:08:07

I feel like it's a little bit bad when a bunch of distinct teams show up because they kinda congregate together. And so I felt like it was a little bit hard to break into some of the conversations because there were several groups of teams there, and they were all just talking with themselves. So kind of an interesting trade off of sending a whole company's team to a conference versus going solo.

Andrew

00:08:08 – 00:09:11

Yeah. I feel like for me personally, now that I have my own groups of people, like, basically every conference that I go to on a regular basis, I have a group of people that I'm already connected with, and it is definitely the natural thing to just fall into what's comfortable. But I do think as communities, it's critically important that those of us who already have a place here put in the effort to try and bring people in if they're showing up. There's so many people that come to a conference and it's their 1st conference or it's their 1st conference on this platform or in this ecosystem, and it isn't really hard to identify people who don't have a click that they're already part of. And so I think it falls to those of us who are already established with a group to try to make opportunities to bring people into that group so that they can find their place.

Andrew

00:09:11 – 00:10:13

I mean, if you want your community to grow, that's kind of a critical way of doing it. They showed up, somebody came, I don't know how widespread that approach is to conferences, but I think it's worth talking about and worth focusing on for sure. So, like, one practical example of that is when you see groups of people going out to dinner or when at RailsConf and RubyConf when I was doing like a movie night and we're gonna rent a limo and we're all gonna go out together. It is important to me that you're leaving room for newcomers and so when I did the limo thing, I actually specifically only invited 10 people for a 20 person limo and then said to everybody, hey, recruit somebody who's here for the first time or doesn't have an in group or whatever and invite them and we'll show them a heck of a time we'll have a really great time together but that doesn't necessarily happen naturally You have to be deliberate about that. So last thing on Fullstack EU, is your talk online yet?

Aaron

00:10:13 – 00:10:17

Not yet. It will be at some point, but not yet.

Andrew

00:10:17 – 00:10:20

What was the camera setup like? I'm super interested.

Aaron

00:10:20 – 00:10:30

I think they just had one. No. That's not true. I think they had 2. I think they had one right down the middle and one off to the side, but I'm not entirely sure.

Aaron

00:10:31 – 00:10:37

But it went great. I did my live coded and took a risk, and it paid off. So I'm excited to see the playback of it.

Andrew

00:10:37 – 00:10:44

Hey, wait. Let's talk about this podium. I said it was the last thing, but it's not the last thing. You you mentioned about the live coding, and all I can remember is this photo

Aaron

00:10:44 – 00:10:45

of the future

Andrew

00:10:46 – 00:10:49

going, like, full splits. It was like gymnastics up there. What happened?

Aaron

00:10:49 – 00:11:01

Yeah. It's kinda funny. It made for good content. So what happened was the podium was a little bit short. I'm 61, so I'm not tremendous, but I'm kinda tall.

Aaron

00:11:01 – 00:11:32

And the podium was a little bit short, but the podium was also super angled. The back is up and the front is down so that you can rest a laptop on it, and it kinda rests there. So what happens is the keyboard is angled down super far, and so it would be as if I was standing straight up typing at my waist level, and my wrists would be super bent. So that's really, really hard to do in a live coding situation. 1, you're already nervous.

Aaron

00:11:32 – 00:11:57

You're already typoing a bunch of stuff. And then to put your wrists in this horrible angle, I just didn't think it was gonna work. And so instead of hunching over, like, Quasimodo, I thought, I can make myself shorter if I just spread my legs out, you know, geometry. I can get shorter. And so I ended up, oh, yeah, pretty pretty aggressive splits to make myself shorter, and it totally worked.

Aaron

00:11:57 – 00:12:11

And then I saw the pictures afterwards, and I was like, this looks absurd and yeah, year. I was like, yeah, it doesn't matter. It was funny.

Andrew

00:12:12 – 00:12:22

Link in the show notes. Yeah. That was awesome. It felt like a fun thing for sure. If I had been there, I would have gotten under that podium on my knees, bumped it up for you.

Aaron

00:12:22 – 00:12:27

I did on your back. Yeah. It was funny. I it's all good fun. I I enjoyed it.

Aaron

00:12:27 – 00:12:31

The live coding went well, and everybody got a chuckle out of it, so it worked.

Andrew

00:12:31 – 00:12:33

So what's next for you on the conference front?

Aaron

00:12:33 – 00:12:49

Yeah. It's been a busy conference season, busier than I think I I bargained for. So I had Laracon online in September, Fullstack EU beginning of October. I have Longhorn PHP, which is in Austin. I have that.

Aaron

00:12:49 – 00:12:53

I think beginning of November, maybe. It's a

Andrew

00:12:53 – 00:12:54

little closer to home?

Aaron

00:12:54 – 00:13:09

A little closer to home. And then the week after after Longhorn, I'm speaking at GitHub Universe in San Francisco. So I'm going live in person to speak at GitHub Universe, which I'm super excited about. So I have

Andrew

00:13:09 – 00:13:11

Did it talk to you?

Aaron

00:13:11 – 00:13:20

Yeah. I'm speaking on that article that I wrote for them on publishing your work. So it's gonna be kind of a live and fleshed out version of that article.

Andrew

00:13:20 – 00:13:38

What's the gist of that article? Because we were just talking about this before you were telling me about something where you reached out to somebody Mhmm. About something, and I feel like that's an Aaron superpower. Well, talk a little bit about what the article was and what the theme of that was.

Aaron

00:13:38 – 00:14:12

Yeah. It's funny you say that's an Aaron superpower because I feel like it has been cultivated in the past few years. I don't know that it's always been there, but the basic premise of this article that I wrote for GitHub a couple months ago is you can increase your odds of getting lucky if you just publish your work, and that can take on many different forms. That can be tweeting about what you're working on, writing blog posts, making videos, doing podcasts. Basically, the more stuff you put out there, the more chances there are that good things are gonna come your way.

Aaron

00:14:12 – 00:14:37

And so if you start talking about databases a bunch on Twitter, people are gonna think of you as the database person. And when they have database questions, they're gonna come to you. When they need database consulting, they're gonna come to you. And so that's kind of the premise is, like, it's scary to put yourself out there. Even for me, it's still really scary, but you don't know what the upside is, and the upside is functionally unbounded.

Aaron

00:14:38 – 00:14:48

And so the more that you publish the things that you're working on, the luckier you can get. That's the premise of the article, and that's the general outline of what I'll be talking about in person.

Andrew

00:14:49 – 00:14:55

It definitely is a skill that you've cultivated over the years. If you look over my shoulder, do you see what's there hanging on the wall?

Aaron

00:14:55 – 00:15:00

I do. I see a beautiful print that I programmatically generated for you.

Andrew

00:15:01 – 00:15:15

Yes. Absolutely. We have it on the wall. It was a project that you did 10 years ago that is still, I think, to this day really cool, but you never really promoted it. Only, I think, probably got utilization within a small circle of friends.

Andrew

00:15:15 – 00:15:59

And while the artwork that you generated for us is meaningful enough that it's still hanging on the wall behind me, it is kind of a testament to how much more timid you were in the past about sharing your work, putting things before people. And I feel like this GitHub article is on two levels both the topic of covering this evolution that you've had where you're putting more work out in public finding your tribe as a result of it right people that connect with that work or benefit from it or are interested in it that's fantastic But the untold story that's like the meta story of that article is how did you end up writing that article for the Readme project?

Aaron

00:15:59 – 00:16:09

So the whole thing is this interesting chain of events. I had my first talk at Laracon online in February. It went really well. Somebody messaged me and was like, hey. That went really well.

Aaron

00:16:09 – 00:16:21

Good job. That person had been featured on the GitHub Read Me project before, and so I asked him. I was like, hey. Could you put me in touch with the Read Me people? I'd love to pitch them my story.

Aaron

00:16:21 – 00:16:34

And he was like, sure. That sounds great. So he put me in touch with the read me people, and they did a profile on me. So the first thing they did was a profile, and that was because I had reached out and pitched them and said, hey. Here's my story.

Aaron

00:16:34 – 00:16:44

I think it's compelling. I'd love to be a part of the project. And they're like, sure. Sounds great. So they did the profile, And then after the profile, they reached out and said, hey.

Aaron

00:16:44 – 00:17:04

Would you wanna write an article? And I was like, yeah. Sure. And so I wrote this article on publishing your work, and that was actually what got published first on the Read Me project, was this article that I wrote, and it just went crazy. Like, it spent the whole day at the top of Hacker News and drove them a ton of traffic, so they were thrilled.

Aaron

00:17:05 – 00:17:16

It's funny because the article is basically about itself. It is a self referential endless loop of publishing your work increases your luck, and this article is evidence of that.

Andrew

00:17:16 – 00:17:26

Yeah. It is. Absolutely. And I think it's evidence of the fact that you have, over the years, become more proactive about seeking out those opportunities where you know that you have something

Aaron

00:17:27 – 00:17:27

of Mhmm.

Andrew

00:17:27 – 00:17:59

Value or possibly have something of value, and that's hard. I think that's hard for people to get into the mindset of, like, I have something to offer. It doesn't have to be a yes every time and it's not a failure if somebody says no. But if you don't put yourself out there, you'll never know and you're probably leaving so many opportunities, so many good things on the table by not pursuing those opportunities when you think there may be something there. So I think your approach to that is really good as well.

Andrew

00:17:59 – 00:18:17

You're not entitled or anything like that. It's just reaching out and saying, hey, I would be interested in this or let me know if you're interested and then seeing if there's a match there But in this case there was and the result was fantastic. I mean that article went big. Right? Like you got retweeted by Microsoft.

Andrew

00:18:18 – 00:18:20

Yeah. That was a big couple

Aaron

00:18:20 – 00:18:36

of days for me. It was really, really exciting because it was really hard to write that article. Like, it took me a long time, and I probably rewrote it 2 or 3 times. And then to see the reception was like, man, this is really exciting. So, yeah, it was fun.

Aaron

00:18:36 – 00:18:39

Being retweeted by Microsoft was kind of wild.

Andrew

00:18:40 – 00:18:47

Congratulations. Yeah. Thanks. Really, really, really exciting to see that kinda play out the way that it did. That was awesome.

Aaron

00:18:47 – 00:19:15

Alright. Enough about my conference season. I think you you didn't speak at a conference recently. You hosted an entire conference recently, so I wanna hear about RailsaaS. I've heard actually from several friends and a couple of other podcasts, but I wanna hear from the man himself what you set out to do, and do you think you accomplished it, and was it everything you hoped it would be?

Andrew

00:19:16 – 00:20:22

This was all consuming. This, I think, was a big part of, and I think you would agree, probably the biggest part of us not getting around to podcasting over the past few months because I don't think I could have anticipated, in addition to what all my mainline work is that I do, which I'm also very busy with, adding basically a whole other job to that to try to put together a conference and all the things that are involved, the logistics, the organization, trying to find people to help, people cost money, and so making decisions about who do you bring on to help and where do you have to just lean in on a first time conference and do it yourself, It absolutely was sort of all consuming for whatever portion of time I had left. Yeah. So I think that's the conflict between the two reactions to that question is evidently, I got a bunch of feedback from people saying, this was great, can't wait to come again, you did it, telling me personally that I had executed on my vision. And then it's interesting because I have the inside scoop and I'm like, oh, man.

Andrew

00:20:22 – 00:21:04

There were a bunch of things where I could have done that better. I could have done that better. But the reality was it was what I could do. But, yeah, I sort of have this inside vision of specific things that I wanted to be a certain way and we didn't quite get there. But ultimately the conclusion that I came to when it all sort of resolved was the vision was so grand, and I had thought about this for so many years in one form or another, that the vision was so grand that even though certain aspects of it didn't live up to my own expectations, nobody else really knew what those expectations were.

Andrew

00:21:04 – 00:21:27

And so even falling short of them was clearly still, like, a really great result and something unique and something new and something different. That part actually came through and there were no disasters that actually saw production and that part was very satisfying, and there could have been some. Like, there were some things.

Aaron

00:21:27 – 00:21:33

Of course. Okay. So let's dig into that a little bit. 1, tell me just real quick how many people were there?

Andrew

00:21:33 – 00:21:36

It was officially 90.

Aaron

00:21:36 – 00:21:42

Okay. 90 single track. Maybe I'm making an assumption here, so I'll ask you outright. Are you gonna do it again?

Andrew

00:21:43 – 00:21:44

Yes. A 100%.

Aaron

00:21:44 – 00:22:01

Okay. Good. So given that, what are some of the things that you are really, really pleased that you did that you're definitely gonna do next year? Like, what were some of the most fun or the things that went the best or the things that made people really excited to be there?

Andrew

00:22:02 – 00:22:43

Yeah. So if you want an attendees sort of summary of the conference I think a really good overview of the conference was done by Britney and Gemma on the Ruby on Rails podcast. Britney wasn't just an attendee I had reached out to her and asked for help interviewing attendees and speakers and sponsors at the conference which she completely leaned into and just absolutely crushed it. So that was for the 4th camera. So we had 3 cameras in the room, and then we had a 4th camera for this additional, sort of, track of content that we wanted to include and produce in our attempt to basically create marketing material for rails.

Andrew

00:22:44 – 00:23:27

But I think as a result of her proximity to the organizing of the event, she really identifies what was different and special about what I was trying to do with the conference, and so for anybody that wants to do a real deep dive on it that's an awesome episode that she did about that. So for me personally I think there were 2 major goals to the conference right? 1 was to bring a bunch of people together around the idea of the inter section of business and rails. How rails can help you start a business, people who are already successful in business, connecting with people who aspire to run a business. That was one piece.

Andrew

00:23:27 – 00:24:30

And then the other piece was I had this idea that we could create a venue where we were overpowered relative to what's normal with production staff, equipment, cameras, audio, all that lighting venue, where we could raise the bar there so that is up to the level of our best conference talks. And the reason why this was worth pursuing I think as an experiment is because on the community side I know that you can't run I mean first of all you run a first time conference you're not gonna get 5,000 people and you don't want 5,000 people. On the community side of things we actually really substantially benefited from the fact that there were about a 100 people there. Everybody was about a 100 people that were there and that's a great size for networking, for building new relationships. I don't know that the conference will ever be that size again.

Andrew

00:24:30 – 00:24:40

You think of all the effort that people are putting into these talks that they're producing and, like, a 100 people, that's not there's an imbalance there. It's just not worth it.

Aaron

00:24:40 – 00:25:04

Listen, as somebody who has now given a few talks, it's just not worth it because it takes I saw someone say it takes, like, an hour of prep for every minute of final talk, and I didn't realize that until I started doing it, and it's too much effort. So to give a talk to a 100 people and to spend an entire week on it is not worth it. I agree. So I I like that aspect.

Andrew

00:25:05 – 00:25:15

Yeah. And so my idea there is basically we're going to record this content and try to make this content look great for, let's say, 10,000 people.

Aaron

00:25:15 – 00:25:16

Mhmm.

Andrew

00:25:16 – 00:25:48

Could be a 100,000 people that can see this online. And some of these stories, some of these narratives that were being shared whether it was technical or sort of in the weeds of the story of a business being built, this can benefit people everywhere. These stories are not unique to Hollywood, California or the place where we can bring people together. These are stories that can help anybody, anywhere in the world, and we have the benefit of free transmission. We can get this stuff to people everywhere.

Andrew

00:25:49 – 00:26:26

So let's make that the focus. Yes, a 100 people will have a great experience, but we can help 10,000 people online with the content that we produce. And it's interesting because we've run the conference now, we did the production, we had the 3 cameras, we had Mike and his team, the director of photography, and all of that happened and that was an experience. Now we're in post production, so we've got an editor that's working with the content and putting it together, so it's in post production and it remains to be seen what the final result of that is. I think that part went well.

Andrew

00:26:26 – 00:26:55

So yeah at its core those two things that I set out to do those happened. The in person experience was fantastic and I got a bunch of really great feedback and people have sort of recounted that online. And then the video production side, we stuck the landing on that as well at the conference. And there's a whole bunch of other pieces of it, other little things that we were trying to do, but everything else was extra credit after those two things.

Aaron

00:26:55 – 00:26:58

When are the videos gonna be released, and are they gonna be free for everyone?

Andrew

00:26:59 – 00:27:07

Absolutely. They'll be free for everyone. I can't say when they will be released. I did the conference for the first time. I'm also doing the video production stuff for the first time.

Andrew

00:27:07 – 00:27:26

Yeah. So there's a learning curve on the post production part as well. And so the experiment is still in session in a way. And so I'm not in a particular rush to get the videos done. I'm more concerned about putting in place the system where we're getting the result that we want at the end.

Andrew

00:27:26 – 00:27:41

So it may be a bit but most of the talks are good for a much longer arc. There's not very much in there that is specifically time sensitive, and so I think I'm gonna take the opportunity to learn what I can about post production and getting the content right.

Aaron

00:27:42 – 00:27:50

And do you think this is gonna be a yearly thing? You said you wanna do it again. So you think you'll do it every year, every other year? How do you feel?

Andrew

00:27:50 – 00:28:09

Yes. I think we do this every year. I think we do it in the same place. So one of the things I wanna do differently than the way some conferences are done. Some of the conferences and I totally get it, I get the benefit, but I also see the disadvantage is going to a different city every year.

Andrew

00:28:09 – 00:28:27

Every year is in a different city. The benefit of that is it's new and exciting. You get to experience a new city. Typically, you might know some people that are from there, so they get to show their area, whatever. One of the disadvantages of having a conference that moves is you never really, as an attendee, develop roots in the neighborhood.

Andrew

00:28:28 – 00:29:14

You're kind of off balance every time because you don't know what's what unless it's a lottery year, you won the lottery and you happen to know the place where the conference is being attended. And I think that actually minimizes your ability to have a top tier experience in some ways because you're just figuring it out and by the time you kinda figure it out it's time to go home. So organizationally one thing I know from running smaller events in the past is it is just so much logistically easier if you do an event in the same place as you did it last time because you've got so many problems solved. You can really build a system that then kind of executes on repeat year after year. And I experienced this with MicroConf year after year in Las Vegas.

Andrew

00:29:15 – 00:29:28

Even though Las Vegas is not my favorite place, at least I could get into a groove where when I got there, you meet up with friends, you meet new people, You can show people around because you're like, ah, yeah, I know this neighborhood that we're in, whatever.

Aaron

00:29:28 – 00:29:33

I know this horrible part of the strip that has this one good restaurant. Yeah. I remember that.

Andrew

00:29:34 – 00:29:51

Exactly. And so I think that is something that for me, just from a an efficiency perspective, I think that's gotta be the way that it is. And that means that we can use the same vendors, we can use the same production crew, we can have the same makeup artist, all of this stuff. Right?

Aaron

00:29:51 – 00:30:13

Yeah. For you as the organizer, doing it in a new city every year is like starting from scratch every year. I don't understand why you would put yourself through that. If you could basically run it back and make the tweaks that you wanna make, well, then you're improving every year versus starting over from whole cloth, which sounds really, really hard.

Andrew

00:30:13 – 00:30:41

Yeah. And I think from the attendees' perspective, it was a great neighborhood. There were so many restaurants within walking distance. Like, it's an extremely sort of walkable neighborhood in that way. And so I think the attendees as well for those that enjoy that neighborhood they'll start to have a sense of ownership of yeah that's that place that we go and there's this restaurant and if we want jiaolongbao we go to that place and if we want sandwiches or if we want hamburgers or wings we go to that place.

Andrew

00:30:42 – 00:30:49

I think that is a valuable reason to do it in the same neighborhood every year. So, yeah, absolutely. Let's do it again next year.

Aaron

00:30:49 – 00:31:00

Okay. So I'm gonna spring this on you. You haven't been prepped for this question. Are we gonna start Framework Friends LLC and run a Laravel sister conference? Are we gonna run Laravel SaaS together?

Andrew

00:31:01 – 00:31:28

I would be totally down for a framework friends conference because so much of what I do is very rails specific. I do bullet train. It really only benefits people that are Ruby on Rails programmers. I'm now doing a conference called rails sass which is very Rails specific. In fact, in a way trying to give another shot in the arm to the Rails renaissance.

Andrew

00:31:28 – 00:31:50

Mhmm. Right? But it's all rails rails rails This is actually not what I would recommend to an entrepreneur that was looking to start a software business. I have the benefit of 5 years of hindsight now working on bullet train. People used to ask me like, oh, do you think I should do a starter kit for this or a starter kit for that in different ecosystems?

Andrew

00:31:50 – 00:32:03

And I think honestly, I would encourage them to build developer tools that are less rails SaaS and more framework friends.

Aaron

00:32:03 – 00:32:04

Right? Interesting.

Andrew

00:32:04 – 00:32:17

So more pan framework, pan ecosystem. So your total addressable market is huge. Right? Develop tooling that can be utilized by all developers everywhere.

Aaron

00:32:18 – 00:32:55

I like the idea of the niche in this particular area of a Business of Laravel conference. I think a Business of Laravel conference would be pretty fun because you do have of course, the addressable market is capped, but it's capped at a much higher level than matters for me at this point. So, like, if we were to do a business of Laravel conference and cap it at a 100 people, we're still well under the 5,000,000 Laravel developers or whatever it is. But we could do business of Laravel 1 year, and then at some point do a framework friends conference as well. But I think it would be fun.

Aaron

00:32:55 – 00:33:32

I think something like railsas in the Laravel ecosystem would be fun. I would probably try to do it broader. So speaking of capping it, I would probably do it a little bit broader and do business of Laravel, which would include consultants, freelance, SaaS, developer tooling, all of that just like outside of SaaS, but still making money with Laravel. But I think it's an interesting pattern to do a technical conference kind of, but focused on business as well. And it's not just like MicroConf, which leans technical, but it was explicitly not technical at all.

Aaron

00:33:32 – 00:33:39

So I don't know. I think it's an interesting idea. I don't know if I'll actually do it. But if I do, you'll be my business partner on it.

Andrew

00:33:41 – 00:34:18

So that's an interesting thing. Is it the business of x or is it x SaaS? And I think one of the reasons why SaaS is particularly interesting and we saw this at the conference. SaaS is one of the highest leverage modes of operation, the recurring revenue, your compounding gains over time. It's a very specific experience because you have the long slow SaaS ramp of death when you're waiting for that revenue to accumulate but then once you've got it you're set.

Andrew

00:34:18 – 00:34:46

That experience is one thing. It's such a specific experience and its rewards are so great. There are a lot of people that are aspirationally, they know that they want that other gear in business which isn't consulting. It's not trading your time for money. And so I almost feel like trying to cover business generally dilutes the potency of that message.

Andrew

00:34:46 – 00:35:20

Another potential issue there that you run into is consulting businesses specifically are always looking for intake. It's like a revolving door of clients. And so I think the vibe when you are a consulting business showing up at a conference, it's a very different mode than SaaS businesses talking not even about selling their SaaS to each other but just talking about the operation of SaaS businesses and the development of SaaS businesses. I think those two things I would be careful expanding the scope because

Aaron

00:35:21 – 00:35:21

That's interesting.

Andrew

00:35:22 – 00:35:53

SaaS itself is so special and fundamentally the thing that will change somebody's life. And as a mission or as a purpose, you really can help people find another gear by steering them towards SaaS and coaching them on SaaS. And if you're doing a single track conference, you definitely can do 8 talks or 10 talks or 12 talks on SaaS and still only be scratching the surface. So, yeah, I would be careful about diluting that too much.

Aaron

00:35:53 – 00:36:10

That's interesting. I didn't think about that. Alright. So kinda joking about the Laravel SaaS conference, but for real, on the RailSaaS, how much of it were you able to, I guess, delegate or hire for, and how much of it did you have to manage every last detail yourself?

Andrew

00:36:11 – 00:37:23

This iteration of RAIL SaaS was highly micromanaged, almost to a fault, and yet in my experience that I actually had running the conference kinda realized that was the right way to do it and potentially would have been a disaster if I had tried to do it another way, if I had tried to over delegate on the first iteration of it. So coming back to the delta between like my vision versus what actually executed at runtime, part of that was a byproduct of doing too much myself. But part of the reason why I did so much myself was there were so many potential points of failure. Everything from like ear projectors to the audio video stuff in the room to chair rentals to all of this stuff where if any one of those pieces had not worked out it would potentially compromise the entire thing and nothing like that happened but only because I super micromanaged everything. The net result of that was and I'm not proud of this.

Andrew

00:37:23 – 00:37:28

This is nuts. I got 45 minutes of sleep the night before the conference.

Aaron

00:37:28 – 00:37:44

I saw this picture on Twitter of it looks like a bunch of chairs shoved in a closet, and you said something. I don't remember exactly, but you said something like, I it's one of my proudest moments that these chairs never saw the light of day or something. So what was that all about?

Andrew

00:37:44 – 00:38:14

The chair rental was an absolute disaster, which was something that I tried to delegate to the hotel. I allowed them to do the chair rental to fill in the extra chairs that we needed. I showed up and my heart just sank because the chairs that they rented, they were outdoor wedding chairs beat to heck. They were ugly as sin. And if you've seen the photos of the room the normal furniture in there is actually really nice, like it's a nice spot.

Andrew

00:38:14 – 00:38:35

And they had filled it in the back of the room with these like totally crappy chairs that they had rented. And honestly when I saw it I was like, crap what are we gonna do about that? I have no idea how to fix that problem. We need this many chairs. While I was working on other stuff that I was getting set up the night before the conference I found the broken chairs that they had to replace.

Andrew

00:38:36 – 00:39:11

I found them in a closet and all of their backs would like slant backwards when you sat on them. And so the solution that I ended up coming up with was wait a minute I can put those against the back of the room against the wall. So I ended up redeeming like 20 chairs that looked cool but were broken, and was able to fill in all the chairs we needed. That could have been a disaster, and it could have been a vibe killer for sure. But in the end nobody saw that because at 2:30 in the morning I fixed the issue, stuffed all the ugly chairs in a closet, and got the good chairs.

Andrew

00:39:11 – 00:39:51

That's just one example because of budget constraints, first time conference, limited number of sponsors, limited budget We didn't even have the space rented the day before somebody else had it rented so we did all of our load in at 8:30 at night and that's why it ended up pushing things so late for me but I just told everybody else go to bed there's nothing you can do to help this I'll sort it out I'll figure out the HDMI issues and in the end it wasn't perfect but it was good enough and if I had delegated that I think it would have been an absolute train wreck. Now that I've been through it, I think it's much easier to delegate that stuff going forward.

Aaron

00:39:52 – 00:40:17

I guess it paid off in the end because there were no showstoppers. And I don't know Yeah. If there's a way around that the 1st year because you have to make sure that your vision is executed. And to delegate that out the 1st year is probably really, really hard because you don't know what you don't know. So now you're able to delegate that out next year because you know what the pitfalls are, I suppose.

Andrew

00:40:18 – 00:40:53

Yeah. I think one of the jobs that I have in this current phase while it's still fresh in my mind is to write that all down and we already found somebody to help us run the show so to speak next year. We have a bullet train customer and an attendee at the conference who approached me they came to the thing after the conference where we were hosting bullet train customers and he just said look we run events as a business. We run our whole business on a bullet train app that I built but we are an events business and they live in Los Angeles. They're in the Los Angeles area.

Andrew

00:40:54 – 00:41:04

And so he reached out and said October is our off season. Do you want us to help you run the show next year? Let me know what we can do to help. And I was like, absolutely. That would be amazing.

Andrew

00:41:04 – 00:41:18

So maybe there were multiple correct ways to do that. The reality was I reached out to somebody I really respected who could have been an event organizer so to speak who has done that historically and has a really good track record. People like that are just really expensive.

Aaron

00:41:18 – 00:41:19

Mhmm.

Andrew

00:41:19 – 00:41:55

And so it would have been like I wanna say a quarter of the whole conference budget would have been hiring that person and the reality was the real experiment was production. And so really all the extra money that we had ended up being invested in more and more production. Cameras, audio, stuff like that. And that was the right choice both financially and I think like you were saying just making sure that the vision is the most complete version of itself. So hopefully never again Next year it should run a lot smoother and with a lot less Andrew.

Andrew

00:41:56 – 00:42:07

Not just that like I don't want to emcee it, I don't want to have to do the day of stuff. There are other people that can help there. I'm looking forward to next year attending my own conference.

Aaron

00:42:08 – 00:42:24

Well, I think that's a good place to leave it. I think you are owed some congratulations for pulling off a conference. I don't imagine that's very easy to do, and it sounds like it came off without a hitch. So congrats on doing that, and we look forward to many, many more.

Andrew

00:42:24 – 00:42:30

Thanks, man. Looking forward to it as well. Framework Friends is edited by Paul Barr at Peachtree Sound.

Aaron

00:42:31 – 00:42:33

Our intro music was created by Corey Griffin.

Andrew

00:42:34 – 00:42:41

You can find us at frameworkfriends.com. Andrew's on Twitter at Andrew Culver. And Aaron is on Twitter at aarondfrancis.

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