Dan Moore and Boulder Ruby | RubyEvents Guides

Guides

Highlights

Highlights

Choosing speaker wrangling

Helping new speakers get started

Booking two to three months ahead

Staying flexible with meetup formats

When a speaker cancels

Promoting the meetup

Knowing when to step away

Links

Dan Moore

Boulder Ruby

@mooreds.com

mooreds.com

CIAM Weekly

Hans: It’s great that you’re taking the time. You’re the first non-European I have the pleasure of talking to. Awesome that you shared the Guides on Hacker News. Huge thanks for that. That’s great. And also thanks for the input. Some great stuff in there. I think with the guides, it’s always nice to get actual conversations, right? Get the actual experiences, because your list, for example, is great, but I’m super interested in the experiences and where they’re coming from.

Dan: Yeah.

Hans: But we’re gonna get into that stuff. So yeah, once again, thanks so much for taking the time. We’re just gonna do it loosey-goosey, right? But let’s start with the easy part first, like, who are you and what’s your meetup?

Dan: So I have been a developer for a long time. I currently don’t do development. I’m more of a product person. But I was introduced to Ruby. I did a little bit of work in the mid-2010s, but in 2016, I co-founded a startup and we used Rails and a layer on top of Rails to build it out. And then I got introduced to Boulder Ruby Group. And after a couple years, that’s where I started volunteering. I’d say pre-COVID, maybe 30-ish people would attend. And then afterwards, definitely kind of decayed. We lasted through COVID, but I’d say probably 10-ish people a month now attend, maybe 15, or if we have a big name, maybe a little more. But yeah, so I just fell in love with the community. I like the language a lot. I’ve been a developer long enough that I care less about languages than I used to. But I still, I mean, for a web app, like, I’m like, why are you thinking about anything else other than Ruby? Certainly for the first couple of years of any company or organization. Unless there’s always a skill set issue, but like, that’s my default. So yeah.

Hans: Yeah. So what made you decide you wanted to contribute to the meetup? Or maybe we can—because you posted this thing like for meetup speakers and you said, I think, you’re the speaker wrangler, something along those lines, right? So maybe we can— so it’s Boulder Ruby, right? How do you organize? Like, are you a team? Yeah.

Dan: And just to be clear, I’m not on the organizing team anymore, but there were between three and four folks. And the main roles we saw were someone to deal with sponsors, which really is space and money, someone to deal with speakers, someone to kind of float in and out and be extra help, and then someone to help you set up. I would say those are kind of the main setup and breakdown. Make sure you leave the space in as good a condition as you found it.

Hans: Yeah, nice.

Dan: I don’t know if there’s any more for that group. I know some meetups do conferences or, you know, for a while pre-COVID we were doing hackfests, like where people come and work on stuff. But, you know, that’s a natural extension. But yeah, so a team and if you want to, I can definitely reach out. There’s two folks who are still kind of doing it after I left and maybe they’ve added somebody, I don’t know. But they’re like actively in it.

Hans: I think that’s fine. I’m already talking to people who are still in it. So we can talk about the guides. I think you read some of it. I just want to have a wide breadth of experience, because every meetup and every event, like a conference, is so different. And it’s a matter of personal taste, right? It’s your space. It’s your community if you’re organizing a meetup, in a way. And every city is different. The people in the city are different, right? So I want to give these checklists, these “hey, this is what you could do” ideas, some depth and a lot of context. So I’m looking for everything. I want to talk to people in Asia. I have no idea what conferences look like in Southeast Asia, right?

Dan: Sure.

Hans: And that’s completely fine. It’s also, I think, a valid experience. Like, you used to organize meetup, now you don’t anymore. So maybe we can dig into that a bit later.

Dan: Totally.

Hans: But let’s—so, and I’m not that structured yet. Let’s talk about what you did at the meetup specifically, because I think you have a lot of great tips for, like, as you described, the speaker wrangling. Maybe you can get into that, like, what was your job in the space of the meetup?

Dan: Sure, yeah, and I do want to kind of address your earlier question, which we kind of skipped over, is about why did I join. And I think that the answer was I got a lot of value and I liked the meetup, and they were just asking for volunteers. Those kind of organizations are always you know, skimping by on as few volunteers as they can. And so they said that. And the other reason, the...