 So good morning everyone. A couple things I want to address right off the bat. First of all I know it's kind of got dark in here but I know I have cat ears on my head. This is a new tradition that my daughter started who comes to conferences with me and is actually right back there. So I'm wearing them for her and me because they look good. I was informed this morning that I was only allowed to wear the cat ears now in my talks if I mentioned her in the talk so duty done credit where it's due. The second thing I want to address right off the top of the top of things is that I don't think that my talk topic was available before now so I'm gonna be talking this morning about how to not be an expert and I realize that may be a little bit of a dismaying prospect. He caught up early it's raining it's kind of gross outside and you're here for the morning keynote of the second day of the conference which is always a little rough and now you're faced with somebody who is talking about seemingly not knowing what she's talking about. So I get that it's okay though I'm gonna explain everything and we're gonna get through it and I think you may like it at the end I hope so. I've been thinking a lot about this idea of experts in our software web industry. The idea of like what is an expert how do we get to be an expert and then in this getting to be an expert that means well what are we learning and what are we teaching and also more importantly this idea of what are the goals and ideals that we are setting up as experts that we are sharing with the people around us and setting up as our own aspirations. What does all of that mean? I have questions about all of that obviously. The first one that I start out with is this idea okay what is an expert when we say expert what do we mean by that? I feel like everybody has their own definitions sometimes it's the person who gets to get up and give talks or the person who's written a lot of books person who has lots of degrees and these are all you know worthy accomplishments but it's kind of hard to understand for me personally what does that mean about an expert and how do how do people get there. When I started thinking about this I started thinking about well how how do you get to be an expert who gets to decide that is there a like a council of wild elders that hands out expert labels for people or is it after you have given a certain amount of talks you are automatically an expert and then you're an expert from then on into the future into eternity. I don't know I'm not sure maybe these metrics exist out there and I just don't I'm just not aware of them but I started to look around and see like well do we have metrics for this sort of thing do we have some rules. Some of the first ones I found that they weren't too promising this is one of the first things I found if you can't see this or you may be unaware these are my LinkedIn endorsements. At the top you'll see I have been endorsed most for CSS which makes sense I do that a lot I like it it's good times. My second endorsement however is for Batman which I have definitely promoted and I like the fact that I seem to be an expert in Batman as my my second level thank you. At the bottom I have you know there's other skills in there too I've got WordPress I used to do a lot of WordPress theme development I don't do that anymore but it's still in my list because people endorse me for it. I also have fire breathing on this list which I have never done so far. The point of this and if you have a LinkedIn profile and you get endorsements and not to dismiss at all the lovely people who want to give me credit for for skills that they think I'm good in but there isn't a whole lot of checks on this you can just go endorse people on LinkedIn obviously like there there isn't a test to make sure that I actually am an expert in Batman I am but a lot of people endorsing me on LinkedIn don't necessarily know that. So an interesting thing happened to me recently where I got an email from somebody who wanted me to contribute a an article or something for their blog on a certain topic they were talking to many experts and wanted to get some content to teach people how to do a certain thing and he literally went to my LinkedIn profile and looked at my list of skills and sent me an email and says it says in your LinkedIn endorsements that you're really good at WordPress so would you write something about WordPress for us? I was like I haven't touched WordPress in about five years so I could but it wouldn't be all that particularly useful for you so I learned that this is actually a metric that people do to decide who are experts in certain things again it could be a useful supplement it could be a really nice supplement to you know how you think about yourself all the good stuff you do but nobody has ever come to me and asked for my opinions on Batman so I don't know the whole thing seems a little a little strange to me so I'm not sure if I trust this as a system to really determine who is the best in things or not. Another thing I found is something like this you may have seen on portfolios has anybody seen anything like this to describe certain skills this is a screenshot from somebody who I think has more designary type skills if you read this closely later on in the slides you'll notice that this is actually from a parody site called the worst portfolio ever and so it's making the point here that there's a list of skills and then a bar that indicates how much of this skill this person has for example they have a hundred percent of skills in Photoshop what that means nobody really knows but it's up there in a graph so there must be something to it there's also 50% of logo design so okay that's there I see this a lot and it's really hard to kind of decide well what what does what does this really mean though is there a finite amount of you know HTML and CSS that that exists in the world and I know 35% of it what do I have to do to get to 100 how do I know when I get to 100% is that when I get our certificate or something is that when I'm expert in HTML and CSS I don't know so my point with all this is that we have the system in place to determine how good we are at certain things and who is worth listening to about certain things but we may not always know exactly why can we trust a system like this is there anything else that's better for that how do we measure people the metrics that we use we talk about ninjas or rock stars but how do we measure ninjanas or rock starness can we trust the system to do that if we can't trust the system to give us credible experts can we really trust these experts and can we trust our own journeys and wanting to become experts ourselves so this sounds a little dim maybe but when I started to realize this idea that maybe the system in place for determining experts may not be all that we want it to be or could be it actually was very freeing to me because a thing about me is that I don't tend to really trust systems very much I have issues with authority it's one of those things so when I started thinking that maybe this unquestioned authority in place that make experts wasn't the end all of things it opens up a lot more possibilities for me so this is one of the first people that ever taught me about questioning systems if you don't know who this is this is a man named Joe Strummer he was in a band called the clash if those are unfamiliar names to you you have some very important homework to do after this he was one of my first heroes and he was one of my first heroes because he taught me how to question systems he has a quote that says authority is supposedly grounded in wisdom but I could see from an early age that authority was only a system of control and didn't have any inherent wisdom I quickly realized that you either became a power or you were crushed which it gets a little depressing at the end I know but there's a flip side to this is what I just said that when she realized that a system in place can be questioned can be improved and that the individuals within it have these opportunities to do that questioning and do that improving and the individuals have the power to remake a structure to become trustworthy experts and not just following a same pattern that's really cool actually this idea that oh hey maybe the system doesn't make a whole lot of sense or we're not quite sure how we're elevating people to these spots or how I get to that spot myself but there's this opportunity here to think about better ways of doing that thinking about what we value and how we can put new values into the world so the way that next thing I came to with that how are we making experts how do we do this and really what that is is called education so education is something I've been interested in for a long time especially this tech education mainly because my own personal tech education really really sucked mostly in the sense that I didn't have one I grew up while in rural Ohio didn't have access to internet or computers until I really was in the college jumped into a computer science degree where I was the only female computer science major in my entire class and basically just had a really difficult time learning things I felt the environment was really hostile it was really difficult for me to kind of figure out a way in and to think of things in the way that worked for me personally it just was all pretty awful it's taken me long years to try to figure out ways to learn the things that I want to learn and get better at the things that I want to get better at so I've been involved in education in this field for a while now just because of that impetus like I want to make it better for other people a few years ago I started working with an organization called girl develop it that offers introductory programming classes for women I found it a chapter in Columbus and then moved on to Chicago where I was helping girl develop in Chicago I also taught at a coding school for about a year and a half so I spent a lot of time in this realm of education thinking about how we're bringing people in here and also it made me think too how we are helping people already in the field continuing to learn and one of the most important things that I came I started to realize is that we don't have an environment that really encourages open learning we tend to have an environment that really values people being an expert in things and if you're not an expert in things you can often be shamed for not being an expert in things and that prevents people from learning and so we kind of have this cycle in place where again we have these nebulous experts who are the only ones who are allowed to talk about things but we don't really know how to get other people there because people don't know how to learn things it just seemed very strange and inefficient to say the least so I have another quote from another person who's very important to me this is a woman named Kathleen Hannah she was in a van called bikini pill some more homework for you but her work was in the feminist punk scene and she had a very do-it-yourself message so you don't necessarily have to have talent you can just get up and do something and see where it takes you I always tell girls who say they want to start a band but don't have any talent won't either do I I mean I can carry a tune but anybody who picks up a base can figure it out you don't have to have magic unicorn powers this is true for basically anything actually yeah I'll go ahead and say anything that doesn't mean that you can immediately just pick up something and be amazing at it like you're gonna need some time and practice to learn how to be a surgeon you should you know put some time and effort into that but anybody can start out on that path it's okay and it's okay when you come in there that you don't know in the beginning because that's how it works and that's that's alright the path of how you move along that from not knowing anything to knowing something is what we want to talk about so what I've learned in education so far or a few things about how to create an environment where people feel empowered to keep learning one of the first things I learned about that is that a learning old expectations is way more difficult and way more terrifying than learning something new so as we're thinking about bringing new people into our field and teaching them how to move along a path to expertise something important to keep in mind is that this isn't necessarily about just teaching people new things this also goes for us individually when we want to grow in our own careers it's very important to keep in mind that if you want to learn a new language or any sort of new technology or level up in what you already know your main barrier is probably not going to be just getting information about that thing there are books we have great conferences communities things like that it's all available to you but unlearning old expectations about what you're supposed to do and be and how you're supposed to take that information in because sometimes be more of a barrier than anything else can be I don't think that we need to necessarily turn out people who are confident in what they're doing from day one and move on from there I think it's okay to be uncomfortable in the beginning about what you're learning and what you're embarking on and we should be teaching people that it's okay you can be comfortable you can be uncomfortable you can be wrong about things you can start off down a path and it cannot make sense this expectation that we always have to be right about things otherwise we don't have a right to speak up is more is holding more people back from learning and growing than not having access to information is so the other thing that about this is that there's also a lot of things out there that we don't know we need to learn and if we never let go of our expectations of what it is that we want to get to then we don't discover those new things and this could be anything from again a very particular technical thing it could be a larger human thing and learning about how to learn that sort of thing and this goes right along in the same vein is that education is really about teaching people to get out of their own ways and all of these things I'm talking about education I'm not just saying that somebody that like if you're going to teach a beginner this is all about teaching ourselves to so we want to make sure that we have our an environment in place where you know that you can unlearn these old things you can let go of this expectations that you had in there you can feel free to discover and explore and be wrong and make all sorts of mistakes and you're not going to be derided as somebody who doesn't know what they're doing because you're just going to be on a path of exploration just like everybody else this is another thing that I learned about education it's not necessarily a new idea but the idea that if you teach someone a thing she'll know a thing or if you can teach her to learn and then she can learn anything this is probably the most important thing that I've learned about education is this idea that when we talk about education we're not just teaching people how to do things or how to be familiar with this one particular language one particular technology whatever it is we're teaching people to go through our problem solving and thinking process if you focus on learning that or teaching that then you've opened up so many more avenues for exploration than you would have if you just taught the one thing so again an old idea but something that we should always keep in mind and sometimes again this is harder to keep in mind when we're talking about ourselves so next time you want to learn something new maybe not be just picking up something a new book it may be examining your problem solving process and like how you can explore that too I've heard lots of people and this is something that happens in these communities of people who want to learn new things I've heard lots of speakers before it's tell conferences that if you are a programmer that really wants to level up and learn something new don't go learn a new language go read a psychology book go read something that's outside of the field because it's going to expand your viewpoint and it's also going to expand the way you take in information and how you're thinking about problems so I talked a little bit about my utopia of education this place where we're all thinking about exploring and making mistakes and being supported in that and everything is great and happy and beautiful and it's fantastic and we're all experts in Batman and everything's great the problem is that you can create these little bubbles you can do this for yourself you can do this in smaller groups and yet at some point you all have to go back out into the world and now you're back out into that system that we started with where the metrics are confusing to decide who you can trust with information where you may be judged because you're not an expert in something all of these things that are kind of confusing and may not represent the values that we held in our little bubble of real good education it's one thing to be a beginner at the beginning a lot of us will accept that you know I'm just starting out I'm just just learning this type of thing but it's a lot harder to keep a beginner's mind when you're no longer a beginner when you're farther down the path but you still need to grow and you still need to learn and it's very easy to lapse out of those habits of continuing to learn when we get put into a system that gives us jobs or gives us titles or anything based on our expert status it's very difficult to say well wait I don't want to be an expert and when I say that as we talk about this idea of maybe an anti-expert that doesn't mean that we need to deprecate or derive skills or having expertise I think that's a great thing we should always be learning we shall be getting new skills and we should be owning that if you're good at something that's awesome talk about it you talk about how good you are at it I think that's separate though from this idea of what is a capital E expert and how we distribute respect and skill as experts in our community and the main thing that I think about this is because the way that we treat experts and we define experts determines what people think they have to be as they're growing into this industry so this I have another quote for you this is a long one I apologize and maybe difficult to see but I will read it like most of the others I was a seeker a mover a malcontent and at times a stupid hell razor I was never idle long enough to do much thinking but I felt somehow my instincts were right I shared a vangrant optimism that some of us were making real progress that we had taken an honest road that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top at the same time I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause that we are all actors kidding ourselves along a senseless Odyssey it was the tension between these two poles a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other that kept me going I know it's really depressing now but let me unpack that a bit so this is a quote from Hunter S Thompson he's not talking about the tech industry at all but this is sometimes what I feel about the tech industry that I don't know what we're moving towards and I don't know if what we are moving towards and our heroes are ideals the goals that we set for other people coming in represent the type of thing that I value I mentioned before that I have a daughter I'm a single mom so she comes to me with a lot of conferences she comes to me to a lot of classes and work and all of that stuff and she sees this industry she has no idea that she's used to going to classes where I teach a whole bunch of women how to program she has no idea that that's an unusual thing sometimes or what my own educational experience was like when I think about the representatives that we have in our industry of the experts they don't really look like her usually and there's lots of other people that I know that are really knowledgeable are doing really important things that don't always seem to be represented sometimes they worry that our idea of an expert has been tied to the system that it's in what and what happens when that happens if our experts are tied to the system that we're not questioning then our experts could maybe end up being these people who they are very good in one thing but if they're they all seem to have certain characteristics that are apart from them being good in that one thing that gets tied into the idea of experts and then our idea of expert becomes somebody who has all those characteristics whether they're good in that thing or not and the idea of an expert can get blown up into this thing that's totally separate from from merit or completely separate from what they are actually doing in terms of what they look like what they what they fit that profile but you don't look like an expert what does an expert look like these are all questions that can kind of grow without us paying attention to them I worry that we have an idea of an expert that is somebody who is just completely apart from the system is actually a product of the system in education I've been in the last year or so I've actually had some young men enter the industry and say verbatim that their goal was to be like the guy in the social network which is not a good thing by the way I want to make that clear but these are some of our representatives that we have out there there's a lot of people who are drawn to the idea of an expert as somebody who knows everything about everything is untouchable they don't tend to have a lot of empathy for the people around them they don't tend to be really good working in teams or communities or things like that but they are experts and they know everything about these things and so they are infallible and people are attracted to that but I think that's a really dangerous expert to have and I think questioning this idea of what is that model and who fits that model and what is the system that is feeding into that model something that really really need to do because if we don't the people who fit that model before they even have done any of the work or learning about things are always going to be treated a little bit more like like the experts and people who don't fit that model no matter what they do or know are not going to be treated like experts and we have we have a system that's out of balance and we're all end up losing out of this because really it's just not a trustworthy system essentially so what do we do about this so what we what I think we need to do is we need to really think about the system that we're working in and how it represents our values mine for example when I think about experts I'm far more interested in thinking about experts of people who are questioners and people who are explorers and learners and beginners and fuck ups and risk takers and punks and rebels with causes the people who are out there exploring and pushing and creating an environment where other people can do those sort of things I think deserve to be the ones that we are holding up as our ideal as the expert of the people that we want to get to be like you can know things but remind as you go through the journey remind yourself what it's like to learn new things and sometimes this takes a little bit of effort this past summer I decided to do this myself and I decided to take a class in something that I had never done before and I took a trapeze class and it was terrifying but it was really good reminder of what it's like to put yourself in a situation that you're not quite sure how it's going to go into literally take a little bit of a leap of faith into learning how to do something new if you spend a really long time since you've learned something new you might have forgotten what it feels like to do that and it's going to be it's going to be scary no matter what I'm not necessarily afraid of heights but I'm a human being and most human beings have something in the back of their minds that like oh you know you shouldn't jump off a platform that's 50 feet in the air so when I actually did that even with the harness all that all that stuff it was still very terrifying but I did it and I still remember that now that not only the fear inherent in doing it but what it felt like to know okay I just did something I had never done before and now I have this little bit of knowledge and I have that that helps me when I need to go learn something else that helps me when I'm teaching other people that helps me when I'm part of a community to understand what it's like that there may be a lot of other people who are jumping off their platforms too we need a net underneath for all of us and we're all responsible for making that net for people the more that we can continue and learn ourselves the more we can encourage other people to do this the more that we can teach people people how to learn on their own and be supportive of their own journeys the better we're going to be able to set up our ideals and values to represent what we really want our community to be like so while we may have assist not have a system in place that makes a lot of sense right now of absolutely rewarding expertise and value in the way it should be we can make that we can do this in very small bits by thinking about how we're learning in the world and how we're supporting the people around us and eventually we can create this net that people are going to be able to do it and it can be very small you don't have to go out and change a whole educational system you don't need to go and try to start from elementary school or universities because we're not going to be able to change that all want all at once but we can do is do little bits here and there maybe it's something you just do for yourself maybe as you just go out and sign up for a trapeze class to remember what it's like to learn new things and remember what it's like to be able to have somebody to catch you there when you're when you are learning them or maybe you decide to mentor somebody else at your workplace or maybe you just have a conversation with somebody at this conference about what you can do to create a better environment for people to stretch and learn but the main thing is is that we should always be questioning the goals that we're going for now be learning in this industry isn't necessarily you came as a beginner you started this one point and you're going to move along this clear linear path and at the end you're going to be an expert and then you don't need to learn anymore that is not the way it should be working we're all going to be losing out if we don't follow other paths and bring other people in to follow those paths with us so my message with this that I want to leave you is this idea of let's be comfortable with not being experts let's be in comfortable with being perpetual beginners let's be comfortable with celebrating those people who are still questioning and still taking risks and not necessarily staying in comfort zones because we're never really going to be able to move forward with all the things that we can do in this industry which is considerable we can accomplish a lot we're going to be able to accomplish a lot more if we're doing it all moving forward in a way of exploration and that's all I have for you