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**Mikeal Rogers:** So why don't we start off by just telling me a little bit about how you got into open source and how you got into Ruby? |
**Ryan Bigg:** Sure. I was interested in Ruby on Rails from about 2007 when a friend of mine showed me the 15-minute blog by DHH, where he used Whoops a lot, and he's like "Look at all the things I'm not doing", and from that point on I was really interested in building a forum system in Rail. I started building that, ... |
Then a few years later GitHub came along and I moved the project over to GitHub and people were contributing through that. So that's really where I got my start, with my own little forum project. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** You have a background as a developer, but then you made a lot of contributions to Rails through documentation, right? |
**Ryan Bigg:** Yeah, that's right. In 2011 I ran this little Pledgy campaign; I raised $2,500 to document Rails. I think it was around that time that Rails 3 was coming out, and the router had been rewritten by Sam Stephenson, but while the code had been rewritten, the documentation hadn't. So I went through all the co... |
I've also rewritten the Getting Started guide, which is probably the one that people know the most about. My first contribution though was the Active Record Query Guide, which was previously called the Active Record Finders Guide; because it does more than finders, we renamed it to querying. The Configuring Rails Appli... |
\[03:59\] This was about after my 400th commit to Rails... So I replied to him and I said "Here's the list. Here's why I am on the contributors' list." I think he was busy that day, because he didn't end up replying back. |
Anyway, after baiting him on Twitter, I ended up writing the beginning of the Asset Pipeline Guide. That's how that came about. Then the last guide that I wrote that I can remember is the engines guide, which was actually a chapter of Rails 3 in Action and I extracted the content from that and built that into the offic... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** What was it like being a documentation contributor on Rails? Was it something that was really encouraged, was there a lot of infrastructure to support for it, or was it something that you really had to drive yourself? |
**Ryan Bigg:** There was a lot of infrastructure support for it. Xavier Noria ([fxn](https://github.com/fxn) on GitHub) started that project, I think with Pratik Naik ([lifo](https://github.com/lifo) on GitHub). They started the doc Rails project, so looking for contributors, and they were really encouraging people fro... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** So you mentioned - you kind of glossed over this, but you mentioned the first documentation project you did you crowdfunded? |
**Ryan Bigg:** Yeah, that's right. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I was curious, why did you decide to crow fund that? |
**Ryan Bigg:** I was in between freelancing jobs at the time, and I was like "Rails needs documentation and I need money, so let's combine the two and we'll start this crowdfunding project, and hopefully I'll raise enough money to survive a month", and I did. It was really nice to be able to spend an entire month worki... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** You mentioned that there was some support inside of the Rails project for people doing documentation, but you eventually kind of transitioned into more of a community manager role for an open source project with Spree, so what was that transition like and what are your thoughts on how to do community... |
**Ryan Bigg:** That transition was completely by accident. I was working for a company - you probably haven't heard of it, because it's an Australian-based company... It's called the ABC, and it's the Australian equivalent of the BBC. Everyone's heard of the BBC, no one's heard of the ABC. They are a big government-fun... |
The company I was working for at the time, ReInteractive was hired as the consultant on that project. That project persisted for eight or nine months or so, and I got involved in the Spree forums (the Google groups, I should say) and a friend of mine, Phil Arndt (who does the Refinery CMS), pointed out this post in the... |
I was like, "I get to work on open source, and I get paid not a pittance, so I can actually do things." And the other offer on the table was that I get to go around the world, speaking at conferences, and I was like "Yes, yes, yes. Absolutely. I will do this, because this is an amazing offer." So I said goodbye to my c... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** \[08:14\] It's like a totally different function from documentation as well, right? |
**Ryan Bigg:** Yeah, totally. I'm always interested in helping out communities and building communities and helping people understand code. Documentation is one of the ways that I do that, and the community manager role was definitely another way I could do that... Because I got really involved with the spree project a... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Did you bring any kind of particular focus on non-code contributions, since that's kind of the world that you came from when you started community management? |
**Ryan Bigg:** I welcomed all kinds of contributions; we did eventually have Spree guides, so we did end up doing that, but a lot of the contributions I would say on Spree were code contributions, people improving the framework and that sort of thing. Documentation wasn't kind of our focus on that project. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Maybe this is a dumb question, but because Spree is a user-facing application, which is kind of different from the types of open source project we've had on here before, was Spree being open source - did that change how you thought about the community manager role? Was it like being a community manage... |
**Ryan Bigg:** I've never been a community manager at any other company so far; Spree is my only experience with that. What we were doing at Spree was mainly answering emails, maintaining the GitHub issues, doing new releases and that sort of thing. I don't know if it's any different to any other community manager role... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** You mentioned that you were traveling a lot and going to conferences and stuff like that - what was your schedule like? How much were you actually traveling? |
**Ryan Bigg:** Well, I think it was 2013 that I traveled six and a half times around the world, the equivalent of... So about 180,000 kilometers. That was a lot of flying. My longest flight was 42 hours I think it was, from point to point. It was crazy. |
There was this time where I was consulting in the U.K., then I flew back to Melbourne and then had to fly back to New York for a conference the week after, so I spent three or four days of that week in airports. That's the less glamorous side of going around the world and traveling and speaking at conferences. |
The glamorous side is that you get to meet all these people and they're like "Oh my god, it's Ryan Bigg! He wrote the book and he maintains Spree! He's actually real, he exists! He's been really helpful, and I love him!" That kind of fanboyism is hilarious. My wife got approached at a conference that we both attended; ... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Do you think some of that contributed to the feeling of burnout in that type of a role? |
**Ryan Bigg:** Yes, absolutely. It's this -- what's the word I'm looking for? Not Messiah complex... Fanboyism, hero worship probably is the better term for it. People think you're the most amazing thing and you do all this amazing work, and therefore my feelings for that were "People think I'm amazing, so I have to co... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** \[12:26\] Do you feel the same way about documentation as well? That sort of hero worship? |
**Ryan Bigg:** Yeah, in a different kind of way. With documentation typically the projects are a much slower burn, if that makes sense; the open source projects are -- you know, if an issue or a pull request sits there for a couple of weeks, people are like "Why is it taking so long? He doesn't love me anymore." But if... |
With the Rails guides there was never any pressure to get them done. With the books I've written, there was pressure from the publisher, but as Douglas Adams says, "I love the sound that deadlines make when the whoosh past." |
**Nadia Eghbal:** One of the reasons I was interested in having you on this show was because you've contributed in a variety of different ways to projects, which I don't know that a lot of people can say they've written code and done documentation and done community management, so you've seen sort of like the whole vie... |
**Ryan Bigg:** I don't see any point in writing code if you can't explain what it does in the form of documentation. If you're developing an open source project and you want people to use it, yes they can look at the code, but having documentation where it's like "Step one, step two, step three, step four, and now you'... |
It's a very strange dichotomy and I'm trying to crack it, but I can't convince people to write documentation. They think they suck at writing documentation, but typically they don't, they're okay. Documentation is sometimes sparse, and that's why they think that documentation sucks, because the documentation they write... |
My job then, if I'm working with somebody like that, is to encourage the documentation to be written, however they wanna write it, and then I work with them in reviewing the documentation, like "Hey, by the way, did you think about adding this in? We could explain the wording here. How about having an image describing ... |
Like Spree's payment gateway - you've got to authorize the capture, the refund, all of that; you can explain it with words, but you can also explain it with a pretty picture, which helps people understand the flow much better. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** It's almost just like having those methods I guess out there... It helps people help themselves, right? |
**Ryan Bigg:** Yeah, that's right. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Just thinking about it, I feel like there's almost -- the explanation that developers don't do that kind of stuff is almost just trying to pass the buck to some mythical person who's gonna come in and write all this stuff, but there's value in just having people learning how to do at least a little bi... |
**Ryan Bigg:** \[16:02\] Yeah, try it. I mean, I didn't just instantly become good at writing documentation; I don't even think that I am good at writing documentation still. It's a practice, it's an art, it's a craft; any skill that you learn - you get good at if from practice. You learn the piano by playing the piano... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** It's better than zero documentation. |
**Ryan Bigg:** Exactly. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Do you think that that changes for a big project versus smaller projects? I know you've maintained smaller projects on your own and then you've contributed to bigger ones like Rails - do you think that responsibility changes when it's a small project versus a big one? |
**Ryan Bigg:** Yeah, on a small project you probably -- if it's a really small team, it's up to the developers of that project to do that documentation, whereas on Rails it's not necessarily up to the Rails core team to do that documentation, although I wish it were, because then they would have had routing documentati... |
On the larger projects you've got people who add new features, and you probably have people who want to write the documentation, and getting them to work together is the key there. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Also, the smaller projects probably don't have anything as complicated as the asset pipeline to document, right? |
**Ryan Bigg:** No, absolutely not. I still don't understand the asset pipeline. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Coming up, Nadia and Mikeal talk with Ryan about his departure from open source. In November 2015 he wrote a post announcing his departure, so we asked why he wrote it, what were the events leading up to it and what was the response from the community. We also talk about how he stepped down and hand... |
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