Friendly is taking a break

Tl;DR;

We're taking a break with Friendly.rb. We had three beautiful editions, incredible fun, and learned so much in the process. This happening changed us, the hosts in ways we could not imagine. We're taking a break because things have happened in our lives that require our focus.

A thought sprouted

Let me paint you a picture.

It's late 2022. I went to Wroclove.rb, and was mesmerized by the community and the event. I learned about RubyConferences.org and was checking it out to see which was the next event I could go to. Sadly, there were almost none in Europe. Rails World wasn't a thing. Euruko and Brighton just came back after a break. Immediately my mind started working. "What if I put on an event like that?" "Would I be able to do it?"

A conference was born

I started contacting conference organizers. Andy was the one of the first. I can't tell how much that call changed the course of Friendly. Andy taught me about the diversity problem in events.

He taught me that being the biggest event by number of attendees may not be the most important metric of a successful event. But most importantly, he opened my eyes that I could make any kind of event. I could make the event that I wanted to attend. That made it so much more appealing to me than anything else 🙌

Assembling the team

By then I had a group of friends with who I had weekly calls with for about a year now. People nowadays call it a mastermind group, but we were not masterminding anything, relly 😅 It was a support and accountability group with a big focus on the Ruby community.

I had Avo and Lucian was just starting Short Ruby Newsletter. We've had conversations before about putting on an event in Romania, but had no real catalyst to get started

I pitched the idea and everyone was pretty much on board with it from the get go. So we started brainstorming.

The first thing we needed is a name. "What should we call it?" "Bucharest.rb? Romania.rb?" We probably had weird proposals like Carpathians.rb and others. We did check Balkan.rb but that was taken 🫣 Balkan.rb was on a sabatical at the moment too.

So I proposed the idea "How about we call it Friendly.rb? It would just set the tone of the whole thing 🙌 We call it Friendly, we will be friendly, and hopefully friendly people will come.", I said not knowing exactly how important that would become. That day we were set on the name. We got in touch with a designer and went with our Romanian folkloric motifs and quickly spinned up a website and released ticket sales.

Speakers

Remember the diversity talk I had with Andy? I took a big mental note of that. We wanted to have a very balanced mix of speakers form all facts of life, all genders, some well-knownk and some just starting out.

I was always afraid that we wouldn’t be able to have a great line-up every year. But I think we managed to do that.

We were very lucky to have had so many fine folks speak at Friendly. Thank you Xavier, Elena, Jeremy, Jason, Naijeria, Nick, Rosa, Tom, Greg, Irina, André and the rest of the speakers for coming all this way to speak. I know for a fact that many people came to see you, not us.

Why we're taking a break

Many are asking "Why?". The reason is pretty simple: Life changed for us.

Jakob moved to Germany. During the time I know him he moved to different cities three times. He just loves trying out new things.

Stefan moved up the career ladder and is increasingly more busy and has less time to focus on Friendly stuff.

Lucian is busy as well with Short Ruby. His work requires more of his time and the slice of free time he has is split between family and other things (Friendly is in the "other things" slice).

I now have two wonderful kids. One of which is a boy toddler who doesn't care about anything and anyone in this world. His latest passion is to be naked all day and pee in the grass "like a dog". I have the business I want to further focus on and doing Friendly takes away much of that focus.

So our priorities changed.

It takes a lot of focus

During these past three years I stopped speaking about how much time Friendly takes from us to happen and started talking about focus, because focus is much more precious than time.

Speaking about time, I estimate that in the first year it took at least one and a half months of my productive, work-related time to make Friendly happen. You read that right. One and a half months. Maybe more, I don't count my hours.

The second year a little bit less, and probably the last year, less.

In '25 I left my kids and wife at my in-laws (where we spend some part of the summer) for about three weeks before Friendly to come to Bucharest to finish up Friendly. That proved out to be more difficult, emotionally, than I anticipated.

But anyway... Focus is the thing that I lost. Because I wanted to make a more-than-nice conference and wanted to offer our guests an very welcoming experience I knew that I wanted things in a certain way.

I wanted the swanky venue. There was no way I would compromise in a boring hotel lobby or corporate building.
I wanted a great video crew. I wanted to capture the talks that were happening on stage but also the vibe off-stage too, and I wasn't going to leave something that important to chance or to an un-experienced crew.
I wanted our guests to experience much of that Bucharest has to offer. We started organizing guided walking tours after the next day.
I wanted a great after-party. I wanted everyone to eat and drink.
I wanted the off-conference time to be spent nicely in the city so we prepared a list of attractions, food, drinks, and coffee places for folks to go to, meet and hang out.
I wanted to have quirky talks so we had talks about where the Roma people came from, Mental health, and plenty of SaaS.
I wanted to have special activities like Jakob's game show (all props go to Jakob for that), Lucian's Coffee demo, and Julian's Music and game building with Ruby talks.
I wanted to show folks our mountains, so every year, on day three we got on a train in the morning, went to the mountains, visited a castle, had some local food, and got back in the evening.
I wanted everyone to leave with a smile, (at least) a new friend, and them believing they've been seen, heard, and appreciated.

All of that takes time and focus. Someone has to make sure every second that those things will happen. Every event organizer know most of the time you have multiple touch points with every vendor. You need to check up on them. You need to ask for details. You have to ensure things are happening in a certain way.

We don't have managers at Friendly. No hierarchy. If you have an idea and want to have something happen, you go out and do it. You might have a review (in the form of me and my opinion 😅), but if you have an idea, you have to implement it yourself.

To cut it short... it takes a lot of time and focus to ensure things go properly and people feel welcomed.

What about passing the baton?

We thought about "giving" it to someone else, but that's not the profile of the conference. We wanted to make it our way. I'm not sure that anyone else could do it in that way.

Don't get me wrong... someone else might do it better than us, and that's fine, but just not in our way. I would very much prefer having three editions that rocked and it's done rather than have two era's with different types of polish and different vibe. We didn't want Friendly to be that rock band which didn't age ok and still tries to "rock on" when they should just retire gracefully. I'd rather us remember Friendly for the incredible happening that it was.

The event where everyone hugs when they meet.
The event where smiling is not mandatory but happening.
The event where people come to create connections.
The event where folks feel like at home.

Sponsors

I want to take a moment to thank the sponsors.

And I want to urge you to go out and say thank you yourself to them. Seriously, when you meet anyone from a company that you see sponsoring events, go to them and say "Thank you for sponsoring our community!" That's it! It's going to make their day better and make them do it more. Only with their help we will be able to continue to put on these events and make the community better.

Without them we would not have had the funds to add this level of polish to our event or be able to create that warm environment for everyone to connect.

So thank you Andy Croll, Flagrant, Nick Sutterer, Softia, Evil Martians, 2Performant, Prowly, RoR vs Wild, Sibiu IT cluster, Wolfpack, ClickFunnels, Typesense, Stripe, Buzzsprout, Bitzesty, Trmnl, Agile Freaks for all your work and investment.

Ruby Triathlon

This is something that happened naturally, and not planned. I hope some other event comes and fills the Friendly slot in September. I hope it will carry the torch and be the island of friendlyness and small-conference-vibes between the giants like Euruko and Rails World.

The Ruby Passport

We got something very powerful out of all this conference planning and attending. We have the Ruby Passport. An in-real-life way of keeping track of the events we visit and connecting with our community. For now it's a physical mock Passport which you can stamp at each conference and claim digitally on rubyevents.org

There's plenty of work to be done there and it's an open-source project so let's meet on the repo and make this community even better.

Future plans

Many ask me if we want to pitch for Euruko. My answer is "No!" We ran a great 120-140 people event. I'm not sure we want or are ready to run a 500-600 people event. So no "Friendly Euruko" anytime soon.

We're going to take a break. Personally, I want to see if I get the itch to do it again.
More importantly, I want to wait until I have the time to do it.
I want to feel "bored" again, and think to myself "I have some spare time. What should I do next?"

We will meet at future events for sure!
Please come and day "Hi!"
I'm genuinely happy when new folks approach me to do that.

Outro

Friendly has been a transformational event for me. I learned a lot about Ruby, our community, sales and marketing, about what matters to people and how to approach them, but most importantly it helped me create this connection with our community like I could have not be able to do differently.

Thank you Lucian, Jakob, Stefan and Alex for bringing this vision to life.

Thank you sponsors for making this possible.

But most importantly I want to thank our guests for coming and being so warm and friendly.
Without you, Friendly wouldn't have happened like it did.

I hope we inspired others to go out there and do something outlandish. I hope others will want to organize the conference they would like to visit. I hope we will get other islands like Friendly.

Friendly is going to be heavily imprinted in my memory and caracter forever.

Thank you 🥹