Chad Fowler’s talk at Ruby Nation titled The Passionate Programmer has got me thinking. After writing a review over at SpeakerRate, I decided that it would be better to share my thoughts here.
I have mixed feelings about Chad’s presentation. On one hand, discussions along the lines of career development and life decisions are needed in the programming community. On the other, the subject areas of “life balance” and “passion” are very tricky to present. They are inherently subjective and philosophical.
Some of the content of Chad’s talk reminded me of the philosophies of Tim Ferriss which I find half-useful and half-not. I welcome discussion and even polarizing figures. But over time, I would prefer that Ruby conferences draw from a wider base of philosophical inspiration than just one popular and self-admitted master of self-promotion.
I find it telling that in the Ruby community, we’ve seen several successful Rubyists talk about life balance issues: DHH (RailsConf, a few years back), Chris Wanstrath (at RailsConf this year), and now Chad. These have been talks based in personal experience, and I have enjoyed them.
The issues of developing careers and finding meaning are well-worn topics. Just look at the shelves at any bookstore. Great thinkers and everyday people have struggled with these issues for thousands of years.
I hope we beware the echo-chamber effect — where Rubyists form little enclaves and isolate ourselves. We should seek out many voices: not just the ones of us “at the top” and not just programmers. If we Rubyists are truly interested in these subject areas, we should seek out a broad variety of thinkers and invite them to our conferences. I think we’d be better for it.
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The issue, if there is an issue, lies with the conference organizers for choosing to have token presentations on philosophical content. I tend to find these presentations very hit-and-miss, appreciating some (particularly Damien Katz’s at RubyFringe) and not others (DHH at RailsConf 2008).
Tangential to your post, instead of polarizing philosophical talks, I’d far prefer to see polarizing technical talks. However, the lack of those may itself be due to navel-gazing in our community. Where are the talks on people pushing the boundaries on Ruby and Rails? Luc’s talk at RubyNation (I missed it but we discussed it before hand) sounded like it may have been befitting of that. However, the lack of conferences where most of the talks are leading/bleeding-edge content is almost certainly due to the (over) abundance of Ruby conferences.
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