Ben Scofield

In case you didn’t notice, the CFP for RailsConf 2010 in Baltimore went out yesterday – and along with it, the news that I’m co-chairing the conference with Chad Fowler. I’m very excited to be a part of the team this year, and I’m really looking forward to helping shape the conference.

If you’ve got ideas for how RailsConf could be the very best it can be, I’m all ears! Feel free to leave a comment here, or email me.

We’re rapidly approaching November, which means that another NaNoWriMo is almost upon us. NaNo’s provided that last little push for tens of thousands of novelists over the past ten years. Given its success, I’m very excited to see that some people are experimenting with the format, and are trying to bring some of that inspiration to other disciplines.

The most recent issue of the Pragmatic Programmers‘ magazine contains one of those experiments: PragProWriMo. Instead of 200k words of a novel, participants in PragProWriMo are asked to commit to writing 80 pages of a technical book. The scope’s a little smaller than NaNo, but it’s still a significant challenge for people willing to undertake it – and it could possibly result in some exciting new technical books down the road.

There’s also been a bit of chatter on Twitter about something like a NaOSSWriMo – starting and releasing a substantial open source project in November. I’m really excited that people might undertake this challenge, as we’ve seen what talented individuals can do in two days before… what more could someone accomplish with thirty days of intense effort on a single project?

So, if you’ve got the time in November, why don’t you rise to the challenge of one of these projects? Or, if you’ve got something else in mind, start posting about it now, since you never know who else might get excited by it and join you for the month.

I’ve seen one particular complaint about Ruby conferences fairly often over the past couple of years – people question why the same speakers tend to show up at every event, often with the same (or only gently modified versions of the same) talk. Having organized an event specifically intended to combat that trend, I’ve got some thoughts on the subject.

Firstly, few people (relative to the size of the community as a whole) submit proposals. When the available speaker pool is small, you’re bound to get a number of repeats over a conference season.

Secondly, many speakers just aren’t very good, which turns selecting talks into something of a crap shoot – some speakers are known to provide good, high-quality talks consistently, but most others are a gamble, with poor content or presentation skills. As a result, the known-good speakers are invited to and accepted for more and more events (which, as a side-effect, allows them to hone their skills and get even better), while the less-known speakers are left to lightning talks and other, more local venues (like user groups).

So, how do we fix this? Here are two suggestions:

Submit! If you’re nervous about speaking at a conference, start small – with a presentation to your co-workers or a local user group. There’s a nice path from local, focused events up to national and international conferences if you just look for it. The more people who submit, the more variety organizers have to choose from.

Get better! This is a natural consequence of the former, but it’s certainly possible to improve as a speaker without having regular opportunities to present. There are a number of resources (books, blogs, etc.) that can help with all aspects of the presentation process. Heck, you could also just ask speakers you respect for their advice – most will be more than happy to provide feedback.

I recently read Paul Graham’s Hackers and Painters (a collection of essays from his site, conveniently gathered into a single hardbound “book.” Genius!), and several of the pieces resonated with me. Granted, there were also some pieces that I found completely wrong-headed, but oftentimes worthwhile books have those bits as well as the good ones….

One of the essays I found most interesting was “What You Can’t Say,” the main point of which is that we should challenge conventional wisdom, to state unpopular truths. The bulk of the essay is dedicated to determining exactly what those conventional wisdom and unpopular truths are – taboos, things you get in trouble for stating, heresies, etc.

PG’s examples are almost entirely social in nature – pornography filters, hate speech, etc. There’s a clear parallel in the development world, and there are great examples of people who’ve done just that and had great success. We’re seeing people question tradition and make dramatic progress daily now, with things like alternative databases (why should we store every domain relationally?), Seaside (why must web applications be stateless?), and more. Ironically, one of the earliest arguments for Rails was that it valued convention over configuration – and that itself was a questioning of conventional wisdom.

I think that PG is correct in saying that these practices (stating unpopular opinions, etc.) have value. What’s essential, however, is that the people who are questioning conventional wisdom actually do the work to show where their alternatives are better. It’s one thing to point out that relational databases suck for certain domains; it’s another thing entirely to create a database engine that meets the need.

So: go ahead and support the fringe, rail against the mainstream, do something taboo – but do the work, too.

I was listening to a program on NPR recently, and I heard the interviewee say something interesting about discovering the guitar. Paraphrased, it was:

If you were to draw a thick black line through my life, one side would be “before-guitar,” and the other would be “after-guitar.”

It’s interesting to reflect on the thick black line test. I honestly don’t know if there’s a single moment in my own life when everything changed, but I’ve clearly got a few dark gray lines at various points. What about you?