 I go by vegan straight edge. I have a website. I am Shane.com. I have a couple of announcements. He sort of stole a little thunder there. Ben Blythe and I, together we are Shaming. We organize a conference in Seattle called Cascadia Roomie. It serves the sort of Portland, Seattle, Vancouver area. We did one last year in July. We're doing another one. Super great. We should come up. It's August 3rd and 4th. We're signing the contract this week, so it's still possible, I guess, that that date has changed. I'm doing another farmhouse comp in May, so on 5-5-12. Like Coby said, it's in my backyard. It's under a 100-year-old avocado tree. It's at my house, which is a whole farmhouse. I just realized that I still have given them an avocado. I apologize for that. And it's sort of like backyard Ted Talks. There's storytelling. There's no slides. There's no projectors. There's no worry of anyone staring at the wall the whole time while they talk to you. And like any provocative talk, it is more not some things than it is others. So I just want to clear up a couple of misconceptions here. Hey, the guy with the pie shirt and the striped hoodie, they just walked in. Be close. Thanks. So I am not a unique and beautiful snowflake. I am not that different than all of you in this room. I think what I'm saying doesn't just apply to me and people like me. I'm not married. I don't have kids. I don't have any mortgage. And maybe you have some combination of those. But I think what I'm saying now applies to Joe O'Brien, who spoke first, and has all those things as much as it does to anyone else. This talk is not an attack on capitalism. That's a talk for a different day. And this talk is also not an attack on work with a capital W, meaning not just the act of laboring to accomplish some goals, not lower-pace W work. But the idea of going to a job to survive this talking is not an attack on that. That's a different thing. Okay, so real talk. If you were guaranteed not to fail, what would you do? That's the thing that underlines everything in my life. I'll put it in a different way. If you were to die right now, what would you regret having not done? Okay, so the obvious second question or the pull of that question is always, what's stopping you? Why aren't you doing this? What's really stopping you? And this travel of the world, hitting a passport is not something that stops you from traveling the world. That's just a thing that you can do. And I don't know you. I don't know what kind of code you write or what project you're on or what your day-to-day bullshit is like at work. I don't know how much money you make. I don't know your hopes and dreams and secret desires. You always have to have a secret plan. Always have a secret plan. But I do know this. You're better than you think you are. In this room and in this community, I see some of the smartest, most creative people in the world. I see all this beautiful, amazing potential. I see it squandered every day. It's squandered. There's just an entire generation of incredible programmers building online advertising. And the next mobile garden, A.S. Silo's social network for bullshit that doesn't matter. So, as you might have guessed from the title of my talk, I want you to quit your job. And this isn't a metaphor. Actually, as a quick survey, who is here, whose boss is also here. Okay. Sort of not pretty people actually. So, there's a multitude of reasons that I want you to quit. So, who here is the smartest person on their team? Be honest. Most of you aren't people. Don't be so humble. So, it's okay to admit that you're smarter than most people. Joe was saying, you were bored in science class or math class because you were smarter than the teacher. You're probably not learning as much as you should be or could be if you were on a better team. I've had the great fortune of working with Aaron Patterson twice. Man, if you want to learn a whole lot real fast, work with that guy. And I share my living room office with Evan and John who just spoke every day. You think you're nerdy? Try being the least smart person on a team or try being smart in the middle. You'll learn a whole lot real fast. I guarantee you're not making enough money. So, we all do Ruby. Who also does iOS? Who also does Android? Okay. So, you people can write your own ticket. Work wherever you want and you pay it as much as you want. It's ridiculous. It's kind of what Joe was talking about, the people's motivations for why they want to work at a place and what excites them to sell. At a certain point, money doesn't do it anymore. But if we're in a boom right now, it's crazy to think of that. Take a whole lot of money and do something awesome and bank a lot. So, I want you to think about your salary, whatever that number is, hold that in your head right now. And give yourself a raise. So, what is that new salary? How much? This guy is real excited. I'm just watching my response. Okay. So, this guy is giving up. Whatever that number is, your new salary, increase it again by 25 or 50%. Sincerely. I promise you, you are worth more than you think you are. So, who here is hiring? We always hear that at conferences and videos. Okay, keep your hands up for a second. Everyone who's hiring, keep your hands up if you're willing to pay big salaries to coach good people from other places. Everyone who thinks they're not going to pay them up, group A. Everyone whose hands are up, group B. Group A, meet group B. So, after we're done here, maybe in the break, you groups can talk to each other. So, that's just step one. That's just a better job. So, maybe you quit your job and go do something fun, like a social network for cats or video games, iPad video games for cats. Or maybe just to do something different. You've been at the same place for 13 months and that's past your one year limit. Or maybe to go do nothing at all. Like, the work ethic in this culture is killing us while we toil away making shit that no one needs. There's nothing wrong with doing nothing. Maybe you go start your own company. Like, Ron Evans and Dan Fisher, they wrote a consultancy and they love it. Like, they are their own bosses. Maybe you go start a product shop because you want to build an iPad game for cats. Or maybe you start a collective with your friends and peers. You take co-working to the logical end. You spend enough time in the same space with someone. Surely you come up with ideas for something to do that you don't need a job. You don't need someone else telling you what to do that you've got it. Or maybe you just never quit the job. You're terrified that what lies just off the edge of that flip. Maybe you do it to gain courage. I quit several jobs. I've fired several jobs and I've had a few quit me. That's the best moment ever. You know when you start a new project at a job for yourself and you say blue skies and green fields, well it's really like clear eyes and full hearts, right? Nothing is better than that moment freshly out of the job before you even start thinking about what's next. And if you're in this room, you've got to work out. What's next is easy. For that moment where you're free for a few minutes, that's the best. Or maybe you're not proud of the work you do. You're not proud of the product that you build. You're not proud of the company you work for. Those are the best reasons ever to quit. Maybe you quit your job and professional program. I don't know. And self-portrait, build a house. You know, travel the world. Throw down some cardboard and do some multiple breakdancing. You just need to get wild. Maybe you quit because every day that you go to your job you're quietly dying a little bit on the inside. And one day you wake up and you're in the middle of an iteration, finding meaning. It's cross-functional where you assign story points to the next bullshit feature. And you realize I've spent too much of my life on this. Or maybe you quit because you realize you have the skills of one of the most important crafts of our culture. Think about that for a second. Software touches everything. It's not just in our lives, right? Because we're nerds and obviously we make the software that we're touching all the time. But the mumble's walking outside. We have no idea what's going on in this room. Even in their lives, right? Computers and phones obviously and websites. What are we paying to sign grocery stores and this hotel? Everything about our lives is mitigated through software. Our entire culture is arranging itself around software. I'm not the only person to think that software is the new literacy. I think Matt Mulway said that first. But the idea that everyone should know some degree of scripting or coding, whatever you want to call it. You shall be able to build things because that's the new mass profession. After farming and manufacturing and construction and service work, programming is the next mass profession. So we hold these skills of this craft that's so important and we build the bullshit that we build. So maybe you quit because you hold in your hands and in your brains the skills of this craft and you want to do something that is more meaningful. You want to build something that outlives you, that makes the world better, a better place, that makes the lives better. It may be the transport culture of that. So this is the tallest slide I have. I'm sorry people in the back. So I'll read it to you. I want to do like a brief computer science history lesson here. And this is a brief, very complete history of noteworthy achievements and a few of the computing as researched almost exclusively over Wikipedia. So some days like C was invented in 72, really means like even working on for a few years. Okay, so in 1820s and 30s, Babbage sets out to build the first mechanical calculator and then later the difference engine. And his friend Ada Lovelace gets into it and writes the first algorithm, Node-G, which was designed to be executed on machine. And that machine was never finished in built by Babbage. She ran out of money and political for squabbling. Years later, a science museum built the difference engine and the analytical unit. And Ada's algorithm worked. So not only did she write the first algorithm, she wrote it for a machine that she couldn't test on. She was arguably the first programmer. Alonzo Church invented lambda calculus in 1925. And Grace Hopper invented cobalt and the first compiler in the 40s. I mean, write a compiler at all. Write a compiler using my C++ and still non-trivial. And then we get Blist in 1958. And then some of these are going to slip down on the bottom of the screen and it doesn't really matter because I'll say them out loud and this will all be online later. So Douglas Engelbart admits the mouse. It's this wood block and it has wheels. And what do you do when you have a mouse and computers as they were in the 60s? You can collect coordinates. What the hell is a mouse for? So he goes on to explore the ideas of hypertext and hypermedia. Those words were first said by Ted Nelson, who's also independently working on those ideas. And Robert Sanadu, who was never really shipped. Like the ultimate paperwork. And in 1968, Douglas Engelbart gets in front of a room with all the people and gives the mother of all demos. And he would show off any one of these things in 1968. I think that would be pretty groundbreaking. But he had a mouse and video conferencing and teleconferencing and a newly in hypermedia and word processing and a bunch of other things that are on this list. He had video conferencing, real-time text editing between machines in 1968, all before the United States. So the ARPANET, which is just one of the pieces that would eventually become the Internet, there was Cyclades and France and England and there was also the Rampover Network. They started using packets, switching to TCP. And then we get units and those two guys. They know a thing or two about a thing or two, right? And then at Xerox Park, Adele, Wilbur and some others and small talk and I could join the program. And then they proceed to invent or reinvent everything. Basically modern computers, that's what we know them. And then before now, before 1972, you can send email, but only on the same host. It's like a Facebook message. And then so this guy on the side with his boss not knowing about it works it out so that on ARPANET you can send email to veganstorage.gmail.com and it would come to me even if he wants on Gmail. Novel, right? And then Ken Thompson and Dennis Richie strike back and then see for this way in 1972. And then Woz comes up with the Apple One. Amazing little board, right? And then we get E-Mats from Stallman and later some jokes about his beats. And then in 1977 we get the Apple Two from Jobs and Woz and then Bob Woz. And then Bill Joy, sort of, you know, clean room, reverse engineers, UNIX and ships, DSD even later. How many of you use them? You're welcome, right? Not from me, from Bill Joy. And then we get, I lose old enough to remember VBSs, right? So, Ward Christensen. I think the origin story for this is he was snowed in in a blizzard in Chicago one winter and sat down for like two weeks or whatever and cranked this out and changed the workload numbers. So you could download software or whatever. And then Woz also used Usenet before web, right? So we got that set up now. Usenet is as old as me. So the mini-tale was this sort of computer appliance that the French government ships, which makes the iMac look super not-appliancy. You would go to the place where you bought a blender and a vacuum cleaner to buy this thing. And it was truly old and wanted a keyboard too. And it was computer-y, but it was also very, you know, like you just go to the store and buy it and it just hooked up to the phone. And you could play chess and check your stocks and get travel directions and it had like a yellow pages kind of thing. But hidden inside of all that was the first sort of real-time chat, right? Oh, and it's been up and running for 30 years. They're finally on an e-commission right now. I can't think of a website I've made that's lasted more than three years, right? And then we finally get DNS in 1983 by a couple of posts, right? And then 1984 with Mac. And so this list of stuff is mostly infrastructural achievements and sort of free and open source even if they weren't called that then. There's some commercial products in there. But those commercial products, you know, again this isn't an attack on capitalism. These things still change the world, right? Regardless of the fact that Apple made a metric clock ton of money from the Mac and the Apple II, they changed the world. And then we get the GCC from Stallman and another foot joke. And the GCC lays the foundation for x-ray planets later. And the squabble and the remaining planets. So in 1987, what is Carlo? Love the pearl. So Larry Wall ships pearl, writes the first bit of pearl code. And then he has to keep writing more pearl code because he can't read the original stuff. And then hole six is right around the corner. Is anyone on IRC right now? Not too many, but we all use... Everyone uses IRC in their day-to-day emergencies, I guess. So we get IRC in 1988. And then the ARPANET finally, you know, makes like their Catholic and pulls out and then all the other pieces finally... We finally get a true internet, right? It's not owned by the military. The enter is finally true. Imagine going to your high school reunion and you're like, oh, yeah, you know, I'm like a mid-level manager of a regional box company. What did I eat, Tim? I mean, I felt quite happy. What have you been up to? ARPDEX train protocol. I made that. ARPDEX markup language? I made that. I mean, it was based on the... I don't know what the S is. What's the SMS to you? Standard generalized markup on the web. I invented all the things. He did them all at the same time because what is a web browser without a web server? And we get Linux in 91 and then Matt ships Ruby 095 and a good 17 years later, we are one version higher. But using Ruby versioning, that's like 30 versions higher. So we're kind of in the wiki 95 and a few minutes later, we get Wikipedia and think about our lives without Wikipedia, right? Like the SOPA blackout was one thing. We really think about our lives without Wikipedia. Remember what's the Microsoft Incarnate? And then it's wacky Austrian guy with a funny voice ships rails and that springcast that shows you how you make a blog in 15 minutes changed my life. I was literally the night before I was about to start a PhD project to solve that springcast and pull a plug on everything and we're all here because of it, right? Well, except that most of us are here for the rails. So it's 2012 and I think about in my life I think about what the hell have I done and the answer is probably soundly not much. I have made a whole lot of websites for other people mostly for terrible ideas. All of us, you know, a few guys in town with my hands don't exist anymore and I wasn't smart enough most of the time to even take screenshots so that we can see the code. So 2012, I don't have a job. I was at engineering until the end of 2011 and this is my year of big projects. I had three big things. I don't really focus on this stuff but I'm a hard-run organizational and I'll probably fall off the wagon and take a contract job or two because nest egg was the one I so did but as much as possible I'm not working for anyone else I'm just building these things and I think these things are important if anyone wants to talk about them offline I'll work in an up-step mode and I think they have the potential to transform both of them and that's what matters to me more than anyone else. I really love baseball. Ken Burns made this baseball documentary called Baseball and I've watched it several times and there's this one part of it this other guy is quoting this other guy and Horace Mann said be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for a commandant and I think that was a lot. A lot, a lot. It keeps me up at night, sincerely. So that plus fuel guarantee not to fail what we do, like, those two things just rock my world when I'm not distracted by you know, it's water and dogs or whatever. So I'm not trying to tell you what to do or how to do it just that you should do something that you're all very smart people that you're in this room as evidence of that yeah, you should do something. Whatever that thing is, I'm sure as soon as I started talking about you know, transforming culture making the world a better place you started either hatching those old ideas of yours or you thought of new ones. They're all very bright people and I don't have all the answers to them I have very few answers about very few things and I don't care about the things that you care about but you've got something in your brain right now, I'm sure and I want you to do those things stop wasting our effort on things that don't matter I look around this room and I see a lot of courage and that gives me strength you give each other strength and I don't want you to squander your potential I'm Shane Becker I know your time is incredibly precious in here and you will never get back so I appreciate you allowing me to do that.