Hey everyone and welcome to Developer Tea. My name is Jonathan Cottrell and in today's episode, I have a chance to speak with Ishmael Bersiaga. This is the last of the Squares Conference series. Ishmael is actually the creator of the Squares Conference, as well as Lines and Circles Conferences, each of these with their own focuses. Go and check out each of these conferences, which will be in the show notes. The websites for these conferences will be in the show notes. Today's sponsor is Rollbar. With Rollbar, you can detect, diagnose, and defeat errors. Go and check it out, rollbar.com slash developer tea. We'll talk about a special offer that Rollbar has for Developer Tea listeners later on in the episode. But first, I want to get this interview started with Ishmael Bersiaga. I'm here at Squares Conference with the creator of Squares Conference and the creator of Circles, Circles, and Lines Conferences, Ishmael Bersiaga. Did I get that right? You got it. All right. I always kind of fumble on these names if I've not pronounced them on the air before, so I just want to make sure. Yeah, I do that all the time, too. I feel your pain. Ishmael, tell me about what these conferences are created for, who they're created for. I know Squares, for example, is created primarily for developers. Yes. And for you to talk about it a little bit. So I'll expand a little bit on that. So Circles was created first. It was created for, actually, I worked in the nonprofit world for almost eight years, maybe, maybe. And so I noticed I love going to conferences, hanging out at future front-end design or front-end design conference, like all these different conferences. I love going to them. But anyways, I noticed there wasn't a conference for people who worked in nonprofits or worked for nonprofits. So I got a few of my, speaking buddies that I knew at the time, like Dan Maul, Cameron Maul, Joshua from New Spring Church. Actually, Phil Kaufman was here this weekend. And anyways, I just reached out to some buddies and said, hey, I'm thinking about doing this conference for these creatives. And they all pretty much said yes. So here we are, like, two months later, I'm launching a website. I have no idea how it's going to go. And we launched Circles Conference in 2011, the website, of course. And then the conference was September 2012. It was fun. We had about 120 people show up, all from different nonprofit organizations. The second, once I got a good turnout, I'm like, everyone's saying, hey, we had a great time. I was like, oh, I'll give it a shot another year. And then we literally went from 120 to 420. Wow. So yeah, so we more than doubled. Yeah. Of course, a lot of the work doubled as well. But, you know, we kind of at that point noticed that we were getting not just nonprofit designers, but other creatives that just wanted to, you know, get involved. So we kind of, you know, I still mix in a little bit of nonprofit designers into the speaking mix. But, you know, because I want people to know that, you know, everyone can design, it's not just corporate, not just startups. But, you know, nonprofit can do some really good design. So I did that for three years. And then I forgot who I was with. And I was just kind of joking around. Oh, I should do one more technical and call it Squares. And it just kind of, I went home that week and I was like, hey, actually sounds kind of cool. Yeah. So again, I did the same thing. I reached out to a few buddies before making any kind of announcement, seeing if I could get a good number of friends to come speak. And in 2015, we launched the first Squares, which Squares conference is, again, it's not, I wouldn't say it's really dev heavy. It's more of just a technical side of what Circles is all about. Circles is all about creativity, inspiration. Whereas we come with Squares and we talk more how-to sessions. You're going to see code on the screens. You're going to see, you know, whatever it is it takes to get, you know, code done. So it's a mixture of design, UX, front-end development, back-end development. Um, what else do we have? Business and product. So pretty much what we target is an actual agency. The agency could have a designer, they could have a developer. And so we want to try to bring an entire agency to a conference, not just web developers or not just, you know. Sure. So that was the whole idea behind Squares. And then when we did that and we had a great success at Squares, I was like, well, you know what? I kind of want to do a blogging conference. Now that I don't have any, like, I'm not a blogger. So I'm not in that world. So it's a little different. Yeah. But last year we launched a website and we're going to have our first lines conference, blogging conference in August. So that one's geared more for bloggers, writers, social media. I don't even know what the titles are, like experts, I guess. Sure. But it's all about content strategy. And so we're looking forward to that one. Yeah, podcasters. Yeah, that'd be great. So, yes, you know, that's kind of our mix. And then again, last year with Squares being our first, you know, second conference, we actually threw in Designer Trek, which is a non-conference, it's more of a retreat. An unconference sort of thing. I mean, I hate to say the word non-conference, but I just like to say a retreat or a vacation. Sure. I have to be very specific with certain words because, you know, they're like, oh, vacation, we're not going to send our designer there. It's really loaded, right? Yeah. So I would say it's more of like a getaway, you know, a retreat, just a refresh. Like a summit. Yes, exactly, a summit. So anyways, so we're having our second one this year. We're going to South Lake Tahoe for three or four days. And so looking forward to it. You know, I just, my thing is I love bringing people together. And, you know, I learned a lot going to conferences. I think it's a big tool for people who want to learn or are hungry to be better at what they do. Yeah, I totally agree. You know, the thing I love about this story, about how you've kind of ramped these conferences up from nothing to, you know, really successful designs, especially circles, but the other ones now are growing into that same space, is how approachable it is, right? Sure. The people who are speaking at these conferences, many times as a developer, if I go to a conference, it feels like the people who are on the stage are so much further down the road. Sure. You know, they know so much more than I do, or, you know, somehow they've accomplished something that I haven't accomplished. They're on the in-club. And I have not gotten that sense at Squares. Awesome. I've actually been able to approach every speaker very easily. And I think, you know, it's important that the people who are listening to this show and the people who are going to conferences, whether it's Squares or Circles or other conferences around the country or around the world, that they understand that, you know, these people are people. Yes. That you had this joke idea of starting Squares and then it just became a reality because you decided to do it. Of course. It wasn't like a mastermind group of people got together and decided, you know, through some long, arduous process that Squares was the next thing that was going to make the world better. It was, you know, an idea that you had that you just decided to act on. Really, really incredible. That's pretty much, yeah. Thank you. I appreciate it. Yeah. It's just, again, like, you don't know if you don't try something. Does that make sense? Like, you know, we all have dreams. We all have things that we want to do in life. But if you don't, like, step out there, you never know what it could be. You know, I almost canceled the first Circles just because I got scared. I was like, oh my gosh, no one's going to come. Or even doing the second one, like, you know, we, you know, we weren't here trying to make money or anything. We were just like, okay, I had just left my job of six years. I just had a kid that year. It's a lot going on in my personal life. So financially, it probably wasn't the smartest time to do a conference. But, you know, we made it through. You know, it's scary as always, you know, but we made it through. And I said, you know what, let's give it one more shot. And we more than doubled. And, you know, ever since then, we've sold out the third year and sold out the last year, which was the fourth year. And, you know, we are looking forward to this new fifth year anniversary. We're a little bit about that. We're going 80s. Oh, cool. Yeah. So, you know, it's... I've seen some of the design around the conference. Thanks. Yeah. Appreciate it. So, yeah. So our thing is, you know, my thing is you won't know unless you try. And so that's what kind of pushes me. You know, it's scary. You're taking a risk. But I guess I wouldn't really say I'm a risk taker, but when it comes to conferences, I am. So. Yeah. I think the first couple episodes of Developer T were technically a risk, you know. Sure. Anything that somebody steps out and does on their own that somebody is not directly telling them and handing them money to do, that is some kind of risk. Of course. It's incredibly important that we are willing to, you know, calculate those risks but also step out and take those risks. Yeah. Right? You know, don't be foolish. Sure. But also don't be timid. Yeah. Right? Exactly. There's somewhere in between foolish and timid that is kind of that sweet spot of taking a daring step and doing something that you've never done before. Of course. And it could be anything. It doesn't have to be a podcast or a conference. It can be, you know, maybe trying to do side projects on your own. Of course. Building your own website and marketing something. Or starting your own agency, you know. Yeah. Sure. I know people who've been wanting to do it for years and finally after like three or four years they just finally did it and went out on their own. Yeah, it was tough. But now they're successful. They're, you know, they have a small team. I mean, you think two years ago they didn't have anything. So it's cool to see people take risks. You never know what's going to be like two or three years from now. I don't know where lines is going to be two, three years from now. I don't know where squares is going to be two, three years from now. Maybe squares is a part of circles in the future. You know, we don't know. But right now we take it one step at a time and we're looking forward to a third year next year, which we haven't announced and I should probably tell my guys that. But yeah, so we're, you know, we're excited. And, you know, with everyone saying how much fun they've had and how much they've learned here, that's the stuff that excites me. Like, man, like people are coming. You know, we did, when I did circles in 2013, I met with a guy who was a circle guy. I met with the creative director of the, Houston Astros came out, which is a major league baseball team. And he sat with me one night at Waffle House and we talked and he was like, man, I got this idea. I want to do something like this, but for the creatives of the major league baseball, for the teams out there. So that's cool. That sounds great, man. Well, you know, we just chatted. I gave him some tips and like what I've learned and the mistakes I've made and how that has caused me to grow even further in what we do. And so we just kind of planned about it. And then like a few months later, he's like, ish, I'm in, let's do it. Now it's not my conference, but I love helping my buddy out. And we had our first major league, it's called major league creatives or major league creatives conference. Wow, that's cool. So yeah, so yeah, we geared just for the major league baseball and we had about 32 people. Now the crowd size is a little different. It's not, we're not appealing to every designer. It's just people who work in a professional baseball team. Right. You have a large coverage with 32 people, right? So even at that, planning for that, with no budget, no sponsors. And we made it happen. We did, had a great year. In the second year, we opened it up to all major league teams, sports. So we had NFL network there last year. We had, we had the major league soccer and we had NBA there. So it's again, it's just something that my friend had an idea again. He asked me a few ideas, some questions. He just wanted to know more about it. And here we are two years later, we're actually going on to our third year. So, you know, it's, it's fun because I grew up playing baseball. You know, some of these designers, they're not like, you know, they're not like you're going to see them speaking at conferences. No one probably knows their names, but I grew up playing baseball. So hanging out with the, you know, hanging out with these creatives that work for the Houston Astros or the Chicago Cubs. It's like a dream for you. It's like a dream. Yeah. Like, wow, I'm hanging out with these people that actually like work for a baseball team or a football team. So yeah. So it's cool to see those types of things spring up. And then we also had another girl same year wanted to do something similar to that with circles. And we talked for a couple months and then like literally four months later, she launches a website called Yellow Conference. And it's geared more for women and entrepreneurial wanting to make a better change in the world. And that, you know, they, again, they did great. Now they're going on to the third year. And from what I've heard, they sold out their second year. Wow. So it's cool to see the stuff that if I wouldn't have done what I did, maybe those conferences wouldn't be around as well. Right. Yeah. I hope you're enjoying my interview with Ishmael Bersiaga. If you are, go ahead and take a minute and talk to him on Twitter. Let him know that you appreciate him being on Developer Tea. His Twitter handle is at Bersiaga. That's B-U-R-C-I-A-G-A. Of course, that link will be in the show notes. Now, while you're tweeting to Ishmael, I'm going to talk about today's sponsor, Rollbar. With Rollbar, you get the context, insights, and control you need to find and fix bugs faster. You know, let's face it, dealing with errors really sucks. It's very stressful. And it can be difficult to rely on users to report errors. You have to dig through all of your logs. Maybe you tried to create your own notification system like I did, where it emails you every time it hits an exception, but that ends up being ignored or somehow doesn't work properly. But Rollbar does this right. Rollbar works with all major languages and frameworks. And you can start tracking production errors and deployments in eight minutes or less. Now, the way I set it up, is I integrate it with Slack. Of course, you can integrate it with HipChat or create issues in Jira, Asana, maybe Pivotal Tracker. You can integrate Rollbar with all of these things. Some of the people using Rollbar, of course, I said I use Rollbar, but also people like Heroku, Twilio, Kayak, Zendesk, Instacart, Twitch, major, major organizations are using Rollbar. And you can use it for free for 90 days. That's 300,000 errors. You get to track for free by going to rollbar.com slash developer T. That's rollbar.com slash developer T. Of course, that link can be found in the show notes at spec.fm. Thank you so much to Rollbar for sponsoring developer T. So you're starting a conference consulting game. Yes, right. You know, I don't know if I like to help people out. Yeah. You know, people have asked me, so do you do consulting services? Like, nah, just if you're my friend, we'll talk, whatever. You know, I just love sharing. You know, my thing is, Sure. I love the community. I love people. And it's cool to see things happen because of you started something, you know? Yeah. Yeah. So to me, it's just a privilege to see that. Yeah, absolutely. I hear some similar feelings coming from you that I have at Spec. We have other podcasts that are running through the network now. And if we hadn't started Spec, they wouldn't be able to, you know, Of course. create this content that people around the world are listening to. It's really, really cool. So I want to switch gears to a totally different topic here regarding conferences. Sure. Let's say I'm a developer. Sure. And I'm wanting to go and speak at a conference. Sure. Right? Can you give maybe two or three kind of like lessons or tips to developers who are, or even developers, designers, anyone really, who want to go and speak at a conference to maybe help them gain the confidence to put that out there? Yeah. So I guess the few words I would have is, you know, something that we look at is, I mean, what we want to bring is someone who, one, knows their content. Mm-hmm. And that's something that you want to talk about and being, you don't want to preach something you're not doing. Sure. Because you can say, you can speak about CSS3, but if you're not a CSS3 animator, you know, people are going to notice that, you know? Yeah. So you, one, you got to know your content. Two, if you want to get in the speaking role, I think starting at workshops or starting in panels, that's what we do. If we, if you've never really spoken at a conference before, we'll work your way up in a way. Mm-hmm. Because, you know, it's, I've been at conferences where the developers just, you're like, oh, oh, wow, he's, you know, he's a good speaker. Mm-hmm. And then, oh, wow, he's not prepared, you know? Yeah. Yeah. And it makes the organizers look bad. Sure. But, you know, so we, I like to, okay, let's try a workshop. Let's do a workshop first. How did the workshop go? Mm-hmm. Oh, this guy's great. You know, let's move him up to, you know, let's move him up to speaker next year. So we have a little process that we go through. But, you know, just be, being yourself. Don't be, you know, I know some people are shy, like I'm shy. I don't like to speak in front of people. So I'm more of the behind the scenes guy. Yeah. I'd like to just put people together and let, and let them speak. Because I don't want to see these Pharisees run this show. So, but even being up there and saying hi and, you know, I get, I get nervous. I don't know why. But, but yeah, so it's like you got to learn how to overcome that. And I think the more gigs that you can, you can learn at and more workshops to do, or even like doing a podcast. I mean, being yourself is always, is always the key. Yeah. Yeah. Something that you said earlier while we were here at the, at the conference is that you actually don't like to, like you just mentioned, you don't like to get up on stage and speak. Sure. It's another really important thing for really anybody in this field to know is, you know, learn what you're good at, right? Learn what you're, what you are not good at or what you don't really want it. Maybe you don't want to speak. Maybe you're feeling the pressure to speak because you're a developer. Maybe you just don't really have the, the, and don't use this as an excuse to just not speak. Right. But maybe speaking isn't something that comes natural to you or maybe you just don't even want to, you don't enjoy it and there's no reason to do it. And instead you go and organize the conference, right? Or you go and do, you know, do something else of value. I love putting people together. That's my thing. It's like I can, I can find speakers. I can find volunteers. I can find a great team to support my idea. And because I worked at a church for about three or four years and we're talking about a mega church that runs events for like two, 3,000 people or even more, you know, you learn, okay, for this event, you need graphics, you need banners, you need, you know, video screen, you need an MC. So being around that for, for a long time, uh, when I did circles, okay, I had a list. Okay. We need banners. We need programs. We need, you know, we need a website. We need. You had those details. Yeah. I had the details covered because I did it for so long. Um, so the thing to me that has been a breeze, however, it's managing sometimes the conference details. Like, yeah. So why should I do it? So I've always hired a, an event coordinator throughout the years. A couple of years ago, I brought in an event coordinator full time. Circles has been. At a spot where it's successful and it allows me to hire a full-time event corner to handle all the details. That's awesome. Cause now we have three, four conferences to, to put together. So that's a full-time gig. Yeah. Absolutely. So, you know, she's done a great job and, you know, her name's Joe and, you know, she's, um, she's my backbone to everything I do. That's great. That's great. Well, Ishmael, I appreciate your time. I appreciate you creating such a great environment for developers, designers, and all the people in the, in the digital field. Uh, I was blown away by the almost. The exact middle split of designers and developers in this audience. Uh, so thank you so much for, for doing what you do. Thank you. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. Thank you again to Ishmael for coming on to developer T and for having me out to squares this year. I look forward to, uh, future conferences where I get to come and talk to Ishmael again. Uh, hopefully I'll get a chance to go to squares again next year and some of Ishmael's other conferences. Thank you so much for listening to developer T. Of course, another huge thank you to today's sponsor roll bar with roll bar. You can detect, diagnose and defeat your errors. And it takes just a few minutes to get it set up. Don't forget you get 90 days for free to use roll bar 90 days for free. That's 300,000 errors. Just go to roll bar.com slash developer T. Now, if you are like roll bar and you want to reach out to a large group of developers for your product, head over to spec. Dot FM slash sponsors. That's how you can get a sponsorship spot on developer T. And we have a few opening later on this year. If you're enjoying developer T, let everyone know by going to iTunes and leaving us a review. This is the best way to help other developers just like you find developer T. Now, I'm not just saying that. Think about how you found developer T or how you find podcasts. You go and read reviews. This is the easiest way to help other people understand. Why they should check it out. So go and leave a review in iTunes. It's a huge help to the show and to other people who you think would benefit from listening to this show. As always, thank you so much for listening to developer T today. The show wouldn't exist without the incredible audience that you are. So thank you again. And until next time, enjoy your tea.