So Long, For Now
Our last episode, at least for a while. Colleen accepted a full-time job and Joe's third kid is due in September, so we're wrapping up Permission Not Required with a good one.
Our last episode, at least for a while. Colleen accepted a full-time job and Joe's third kid is due in September, so we're wrapping up Permission Not Required with a good one.
Joe went all-in on Ruby Native at RubyConf. No Hotwire Native leads this time. He ran a workshop, hosted office hours, and pitched in Ruby Central's new Ruby Runway showcase. Two people subscribed during the conference and six signups traced back to it. One's running Microsoft SAML, so he's charging a real business $300/year and has to fix that. He didn't go outside once in four days. The hallway track still won.
The real ROI of a conference is relationships. You can't judge it by the signups that week. The payoff is the relationship that becomes a client or a business years later. Joe and Colleen met exactly once at RailsConf and here they are. Colleen recommends Scott Galloway's The Algebra of Wealth on relationships as a core life pillar, and her rule is simple: show up more than once.
Colleen is obsessed with her self-hosted AI assistant. Three kids, seven calendars, an inbox from hell. She rebuilt her assistant on Hermes on a Hetzner box (goodbye OpenClaw) and runs three Telegram agents: a main VA, a health nag, and an email digest. It tracks her open loops and "mosquito tasks" and slots to-dos into the free blocks on her calendar. Security PSA: wiring an agent to your email opens a password-reset attack vector, so she hardened everything and kept email read-only.
Parenting-meets-AI advice. Set up a shared kids@ email now, because you can't change it with a school district later. And Joe tried to let Claude read his consulting-lead emails through the Gmail MCP. Google shut the account down in four hours for looking like a bot.
Then the news: Colleen's new role is AI enablement in-house, the same work she does now at a much bigger scale. Thank you to everyone who showed up and listened.
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