Cinnamon Buns & Commit Bits: A RubyConf Story

Food brings people together. At the first conference I ever went to, I accidentally had breakfast with Aaron Patterson, having no clue who he was. We were in Oklahoma, and a guy wearing a funny brown suit was in the conference breakfast area. The tech lead on my team, whom I was following, sat down and struck up a conversation with him. Later, when Aaron got on stage as a keynote, I was grateful I didn’t realize who he was, or I probably would have been a lot more awkward (being a bit star-struck). Later in that same conference, Aaron helped me land my first pull request in Rails in between rounds of Settlers of Catan (a board game) with the creator of RVM (a Ruby version manager/switcher tool). I’m not saying that sharing conversation over slices of cinnamon buns is what landed me the commit, but I’m not saying it hurt either. .