This year, when people asked me what I was speaking about at RubyConf, I got to say “absolutely nothing.” This is the first time in 3 years I’ve been to a conference and not actually had to give a talk.

Instead, I was blessed with the honor of curating a track of my choosing. I was further blessed by having an amazing selection of proposals to choose from. My choice was a track composed entirely of “soft” talks that ask us to question the way we think about our work. Originally, I wanted to call it “Harder Skills” in order to bait the people who think “soft skills” are a waste of time into watching. In the end, at Avdi Grimm’s suggestion, we renamed the track to “Wetware”.

I’m posting the playlist here because I think these talks are important. The playlist is in the order they appeared throughout the day, so if you missed the conference, or missed a few of the talks, you can get a sense of the arc intended for the track.

I’d like to thank the organizers for trusting me to put a track together, but most of all I want to thank Laura Eck, Amar Shah, Brandon Hays, Joe Mastey, Sonja Heinen, and Nickolas Means for putting in all of the hard work to make this track the highlight of my conference-going experience. They were incredible, and your conference would do well to invite any or all of them to speak.