 All right, I guess we'll start. Hi, my name's David Wong. I'm the least relevant person in this in that. All I did was submit the D.O. session submission. The people who are going to speak today, there are six people who are going to speak about imposter syndrome. Actually, a quick question. How many people here have heard of or understand what imposter syndrome is? Perfect. OK, great. OK, we'll skip the introductory part then. So we'll have six folks. They'll be speaking individually about their experiences with it. And then we'll have a question and answer session at the end. So the six folks who are speaking. And yes, it was intentionally obscured in the write-up. So apologies if it was kind of a mystery. Megan Sannakey, the executive director of the Drupal Association. Gabor Hoichi. Emma, I always get your name wrong. Carrie Anas, Kathy Thays, Ryan Srama, and Angie Byrant. So we'll start with Megan. Thanks for coming, everybody. Hi, everyone. Well, I'm here to bear my soul. And can you raise your hand if you've ever watched the TED Talk by Brene Brown called The Power of Vulnerability? A few of you? All right, so she's basically a social scientist who does research about vulnerability and shame and lots of really those messy feelings that we have. And she goes into a lot of research about the power of exposing those feelings and how by putting the flashlight there, you get a lot stronger. So hopefully that's one of the things that we can help with today. I think just shining a light on imposter syndrome and any kind of mental health that's just holding you back is really important. And hopefully it starts a dialogue. So here's a little bit of my story. So I joined the association six years ago. I was the first employee, helped build it to what it is today, working with executive directors and the board, built many of the programs. I don't code, so I did not do drooper.org or the tooling, but definitely helped raise all the money for that. And we had a change in June. And Dries asked if I would step in and be the executive director. And Holly Ross has been a phenomenal executive director. She had named me as the number two in case she got hit by a bus. And so she even mentored me and always made sure I was involved in all the big conversations and in the special board retreats. So I was certainly groomed for the position. But it's a big step to go from the COO position to the executive director role and in short, I was really anxious and not really sure if I could take that step. So I had lots of questions of like, could I really do this job? And then of course, staff and community really love Holly. And I love Holly too. So you kind of wonder, will I stack up and really step into this role in the way that she did. So you have all these kinds of questions and it's certainly really overwhelming. It's especially overwhelming. Just as a side note, I have chronic anxiety, which is just a simple disorder type of thing. I guess you'd call it disorder, but it just means you're like always twitchy. So I just go through life always twitchy but laughing at the same time. So that's not anything we need to really get into today. But that could be a whole another topic. Anyhow, I will say that I have these feelings they come up all the time. I think they come up for everyone all the time. I think that's natural. But I just want to use the rest of my time just to talk about what I do because I think it's important to have tips and coping skills. So just one thing is I have mentors and I had a boss who once said if you're not scared, you're not growing. So it's kind of like embrace those feelings. And this is a funny one from Richard Branson. I mean, I don't know how many people get inspiration from him, but he said if someone offers you an amazing opportunity and you're not sure you can do it, just say yes, then learn how to do it. And that resonated with me because sometimes I've held myself back. And just I got to a point where I was tired of holding myself back because of these feelings. And then I also rely on grit. Drew's talked about that. It's a lot of research coming out of the University of Pennsylvania. Right now the research says we don't know how to teach anyone grit, but I can say my mom just always said suck it up. And Nike says just do it. And that's what I was raised with. So I kind of lean into that. And then on the more softer side, I also rely on mindfulness or positive psychology, which is research is coming out of University of Pennsylvania as well. And so there's just a lot of tips of learning how to pause and breathe and accept where you are and the feelings that you have. And then to be able to come up with a plan from there once you're kind of like centered again. And then the other thing is to talk. You have to talk these things out if you have these feelings because you don't need to figure this out alone. And usually just talking about it just helps you move forward as well. And then lastly, I'm just an operational person by nature. So make a plan, right? You have a plan, you stick to it, you can do anything. So anyhow, that's my story and my tips. Hi, I'm Gabor Hoichi. I work for Acquia for nine years. I work with Drupal for 13 years. And when I was asked to tell a story, I had a hard time picking one because there's a lot of them. So I decided to pick a dream that I have or you would say a nightmare that I have and that reaches back to my high school years and is actually very, very relevant today. So when I was in high school, I started out, I think as a mediocre student at the start, I've had sort of okay grades. So in Hungary, you're graded from one to five and I had threes or fours. So it was okay, I was fine. And I started doing a lot of community things. So I was organizing freshman camp. I was working at the school newspaper, a lot of other interesting things. And my grades started to reach up and they were like fours and fives. And I always thought that my chemistry teacher was seeing the true me because she was giving me threes and I was like, yes, she's seeing what I'm doing and the rest are really mostly probably just grading me well because I'm this well-known person and if the guy's doing so much in the school, he must be learning well as well. And I was ignoring some of these things so much that when I went to the graduation exams at high school, I totally forget to shave. So that was strange. And then I went on and then I finished university. I've had a lot of interesting stories there but even after finishing university, these dreams started to came to me. Whenever I've had something big to do, like go to a new conference and do a totally new talk or organize a conference or make some big change in life, that's something that I was struggling to figure out how. Then my dreams started responding in interesting ways. So the recurring dream that I have, recurring nightmare, is that people gonna figure out that I have a master's degree in university but I never finished high school. That I somehow need to get back and finish high school so that I have some way to prove that there was something that I based my master's degree on so that people didn't just believe that I managed to do this but I actually managed to do this. And I had this dream for years and it didn't occur in the past few years. So I don't know if it's over yet or not, you never know. But it's been always the same thing and I was always strangely intrigued to try to figure that out. And I read about imposter syndrome later on and that really resonated with this thing. Is that, okay, so I'm actually thinking that the people believe that I achieved something that I don't believe myself that I actually achieved and that's kind of a repeating thing that comes back to me all the time. And I don't think I managed to get over it in any way. So a couple months ago, I was presenting at WordCamp in Vienna and I've been speaking in English which is a foreign language to me for like 15 years and I organized conferences for 12 years and I did a lot of stuff. And I was presenting at a WordPress event and for the whole day before, I was like talking to myself that I shouldn't even be there and my heart pounded, I got on stage and I was totally nerve wracked. And the only thing that saved me is those like 30 people in the audience. And then I started with, yeah, I'm the Drupal guy at the WordPress event and please forgive me. So we started off choking and I got the nerves down. But I don't think this is something that you can get out of, at least not for me. It is something that you can try to ignore and try to somehow get over it for the moment. And once you jump off the point that you didn't wanna go over because of your anxieties, then you'll just recognize that you may be capable of doing more than what you originally thought of. So that's my story. Okay, so I'm Emma Cariannis. I work at Tesglobal in the UK and I am currently a core maintainer, Drupal 8 core maintainer. I am part of the community working group and I am the track lead for this track where the session's in. So I'm very glad to be part of this. So confession. I have doubts every day, like to this day, that I am not good enough to be contributing to Drupal on the technical side. So the sprint room is a very, very, very, very scary place to me. I went there yesterday, it was fine. But yes, I started contributing to Drupal in 2013. That's what I tell people when I stand up here. But realistically, it was 2012. But it took a whole year for me to overcome just my fears, my worries, just accepting that I could be a part of it and I have a valid contribution amongst everyone else in the room. So I basically just spent a lot of time saying nothing, comparing myself to others. Like, there are such clever, amazing people in the Drupal community and I just thought, right, okay, that level is up here and I'm here. So yeah, and I just took it out on myself far too much and I also tried to be something I'm not. I thought I had to be like this big shot PHP developer and I was just this junior developer who did front end. And I thought there was nothing I could do. So this went on for a while and then I had this realization that this is not healthy. I am a completely different person. I'm very loud and silly and open and honest and I was just a frozen horrible, like it was not fun. So what did I do about this? I still do this every day, like I said, like I did it yesterday. I use my strengths. So my biggest strength is just being honest about it. I went around to nearly everyone, everyone who I could sit in my mentor, everyone who smiled at me and went, I'm freaking out about this. I mean, I'm on a panel with like lots of my mentors and people I look up to and it's just me and they're like, but you have such valid contributions. You do all these things. You come up, you stand on stage regularly and speak about your fears and how you got over things and how you achieve really small things. I was like, oh, this is, this is okay. And I try to do things that scare me. So if I hadn't stood up on stage, I think two years ago and just spoke about, how common I spoke about, it was contribution again and how I got into it. If I hadn't done that, I haven't do, oh, I lost my words. If I hadn't done any of these things, I wouldn't be here now and it wouldn't be the person I am today. So I always do things that scare me. And I let the real me out. And also I took my demons that I had. So imposter syndrome, feeling good enough, feeling terrified and I personified it. It's, I will tweet the picture that it drew afterwards that completely encapsulates what my demon is. But this big dark looming person behind me is just like, you shouldn't be here. You shouldn't be doing this. You shouldn't be standing on stage. Like all these things. And I just basically just do things that I know will annoy it. Cause right now it's like heading out the door cause I'm standing here and showing it up. So that's another thing I do. And I just accepted that things like this will always like your encounter every day. I've said that many times, but yesterday I was a mess and today I woke up and I was like, it'll be fine. And I think that's it. I'll say thank you for coming. Hi, I'm Cathy Thays. I like to try doing new things. I really like learning new things and I really like working with other people. And when I'm about to try and do something new, I have no idea what it entails and I don't know how the experts that I look up to actually do it. So what I'll do is I'll lurk for a while. So I'll think, oh, I'd really like to try this thing. And so I'll try and watch other people do it without them seeing me. And what really helps me is when I see those people that I admire, that I'm lurking, watching them, when I see them make mistakes, I get to see how they handle those mistakes and also how the people they're working with respond when somebody makes a mistake. And those, like the ability to do that helps me kind of prepare and say to myself, well, if the person I admire, the way they do their fantastic work is by making mistakes, then surely I can do that too because I'm really good at making mistakes. I find that the way that people respond to mistakes can really help other people have courage. And when I take the first steps to try and do something, often my first steps are questions. Like, I don't understand what's going on here or how do I do this, I'm trying to do that. And the way that other people respond to me when I ask questions can really make a big difference in what happens to me next. So when people respond to me with something like, that's a good question, it helps me feel like I'm not a complete idiot. And when I ask a question about something and they respond with, oh, wow, yeah, that's a bug, we should fix that. It makes me feel like, oh, so it's not that I just couldn't figure out how to get this to work, but there's an actual problem in the project. And having people respond to questions in that way is really helpful for me. And that's, you know, I'm talking about something kind of specific there, but I find that I get afraid a lot and that I worry that I won't be able to do things. And when it gets to the point where it's stopping me from doing anything at all, I remember when I think I heard Angie say, and that is a mantra that I repeat to myself. And it's fail early, fail often, and fail in public. And because it comes from somebody that I admire and that I want to emulate, that I find that that really helps me move through that part where I get stuck. I'm like, no, no, no, Angie says, just fail. And I'm like, yeah, I can fail, I can do that. And so that's kind of how I get through it. Hello, I'm Ryan Zarama from Commerce Guys. I'm previously the developer of UberCart and then of Drupal Commerce. And now I engineer a team of people to do things instead of writing code myself. And one of my favorite places in the world is Notre Dame. Has anybody been there? Yeah, a lot of us have. Every time I visit Paris, I make sure to stop by. I'm a religious person. I'm not Catholic, but I like to sit there during the evening services, smell the incense, hear the music that I can't understand at all. And I just meditate myself while I guess the folks trail in to look around or worship. It's really kind of a weird thing because you're worshiping and then people are just sort of milling about and kind of maybe buying things or lighting candles or whatever it is that you do. I've always been religious. And I remember really distinctly as a teenager, a pastor that I respected who thought, I guess he had the handle on God and his motivations and said to me, you know, I don't understand, Ron, why it is that you always doubt God? I guess that's just your way or just who you are. And that was really, really discouraging. Last time I was at Notre Dame, I wasn't really thinking about that instance, but I did end up standing in line beside a man and his wife who were new to Paris and I got to sort of be the tour guide and sort of just explain to them, Notre Dame, the towers, the gargoyles, whatever else, you know, just the whole experience that I love and had a great time getting to know him and his wife and then we separated and I was getting annoyed with my roommates. We'd been there for a week. And I was really disanxious to be alone. So I left them to go get pizza, like Domino's in Paris. But then I went to Harry's New York bar in Paris, which is another one of my favorite places in Paris. And instead of an American pizza, I had an American Nathan's famous hot dog in Paris when I sat back in the corner by a couple. I'm not sure what sort of a couple, but I was kind of like eavesdropping on their conversation as you do in a Paris cafe to hear, like, okay, who's talking about love or psychology or romance or history or whatever it is. And the woman leaned over to the man. He was maybe 40s, good looks from California and she said to him, I think she was, she may have been French, but she said, my tarot reader told me, I thought, oh, this is gonna be an interesting conversation. My tarot reader told me that whenever you're telling someone's fortune, you always have to sort of tell them a story, not just the news. You're not just delivering news or fortune, you're making them believe in some sort of future version of themselves or whatever it is that tarot readers, you haven't been to one. And then from there, began to realize that the man had, I guess, I was being very observant. I wanted to tell this story later. You know, like a white ring around his finger, right? That you could just sort of see. And so the question in my mind as well is this man married? And like me, does he wish that sometimes that he wasn't? Is he cheating on somebody? Is he recently divorced? And this is his chance to sort of escape and find a new life with a fringe mistress, I'm not sure, but waited around, ate my hot dog, had a couple of very expensive cocktails because it is an American tourist trap. And just sort of thought about people who'd sat in this chair before. Ernest Hemingway used to hang out there and sit next to James Joyce and probably talk about Ulysses, as you're wondering, on Dublin and see the placards on the ground. And in walked the dude that I was hanging out with at Notre Dame, he apparently was meeting a couple of his buddies. And then they were waiting on the daughters of some Greek-Australian diplomats to show up who then took us to some four-star hotel bar because somehow their story became my story. And before I knew it, here I was on my last night in Paris staying out all night long, bouncing from place to place and following my little train of revelers which was really an interesting and fun experience. And I'm a father of three, I've been married for nine years now. And I would definitely do it over again where I was a single 33-year-old. And wish that maybe I didn't have kids that I had to provide for and go home to and take care of. And maybe wish that I wasn't married young. And these are all really hard things to think and to feel because to me, success results in leadership and leadership is tied to character for me in a way that maybe it's not the same for non-religious or out-religious people, but to me like nothing can invalidate a leader more than some sort of egregious moral compromise. And like I know that that seed of, well, I could just disappear in Paris or London or Prague or Amsterdam or Bogota, Shanghai, any of the cities that I visited and I could just be gone. And like I really sometimes want that. Hi, everybody. I'm WebTick, I'm a nerd. I don't know if you can tell that by my physical appearance or by everything about me, but yeah. I've been into computers for a long time. Our first computer was a VIC-20 when I was about three years old. And nobody else in my family knew anything about computers, so I was the one who had to kind of figure it out and how it worked, how to hook it up to the TV, how to program in basic, copying little programs out of three to one contact magazines, stuff like that. And then we got the internet when I was like 16 and I was like, holy crap, this is amazing. This is so, like this is gonna save the world because I can talk to someone in Pakistan and we can understand each other and then fast forward like 20 years later and Donald Trump is running for president, so that didn't quite hang out. But it is what it is. But I got super, super, super into everything that made the internet work because I just wanna learn everything about it. And so I learned about Linux, I learned about open source software, I learned about all these really smart guys that were like doing all this cool stuff. And I was like, wow, this is amazing. These are all these smart people putting together what they know in order to make something that everyone can use, nonprofits, educational institutions, like, you know, not everything, like anything that you want, you can use this software, it's free. But, you know, they're all really smarts, like they're like university educated, like blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, they've been doing this for a million years and you know, I'm just like, you know, in community college and so like, I mean, it could never be like that but I totally wanna cheer them on from the sidelines or whatever. And so that's what I did. I first installed Linux when it, Debbie and Fit on seven floppy disks, so this was a long time ago, it was like 96 or something like that. And it wasn't until 2005, which was like 10 years later, that Google ran this program called Google Summer of Code. And the deal was, if you were a student, then you picked an open source project that you would apply for and if they picked you for your project, then you would get paid over the summer to work on open source. And I was like, wow, well that sounds amazing, you know? And it kinda cracked a little tiny fissure in that you must be this smart to participate thing in my mind because, you know, obviously they're looking for students and you know, I'm a student so they know we don't know everything yet, so maybe I'll try this, you know? And I applied for Drupal because I'm one of those people that goes around viewing source on every web page that I visit and they were actually powering the Spread Firefox website at the time, which was this really cool, like grassroots marketing thing where anyone could upload a poster or like an event that was happening at their college or that kind of thing. And I was like, Drupal, huh, that sounds cool. But I wrapped my own CMSs, why would I have to use that? Oh, terrible. Anyway, so I applied and they accepted me. Turns out I was almost not accepted and at the 11th hour, Robert Douglas put my name so I was in the accepted list, so thanks, Robert, that was great. And then I got into this side of the contributing fence where it's like I actually had to write a module over the summer and figure out what the hell Drupal was and stuff. And I realized, oh my God, like anyone can do this. Like, and these people are like really nice. Like they'll help you. If you show a willingness to do stuff, they're gonna totally help you and get you wherever you need to go. So I just received it to go bananas and make up for 10 years of lost time. So I was like doing core development, patch reviews, documentation, contributed modules. I even did a theme once, it was awful, but you know, whatever, I'll try anything once. I got on the security team and the webmasters team and I just went like helping out with everything that I possibly could because I was so passionate about this community and the people in it. And then John Van Dyke, who's one of the creators of CCK, offered to fly me to Amsterdam for DrupalCon 2005 at the time. And I was like, what? That doesn't make any sense. Why would someone in Iowa wanna fly me from Vancouver all the way over to Amsterdam? I think it was in Montreal at the time. Anyway, that did not compute and I was just like, that makes no sense. But have fun at your conference guys, that's cool. And then in Vancouver in 2006, he offered to do it again. And I'm like, all right, well, it'd be rude to say no, so I'm gonna take him up on his offer. And so I flew out to Vancouver and I got to meet all these people I'd only known online in little blue nicknames and stuff in real life. And I had this big plan, I was gonna put on my Google Summer of Code shirt and sit in the corner and really hope that someone would talk to me because I was so shy. I didn't know who to talk to and this kind of thing. And fortunately they figured out who I was pretty fast and they were super nice and all that kind of stuff. So we were talking at lunch about what sessions we wanted to take in. And I was like, well, there's this beginner module development tutorial that I was thinking of going to. And one of the other attendees, Allie Mecca, her name was, who's like this badass chick in the Drupal community who I really look up to. She was like, what? Why are you going to a beginner module development session? You like write core patches, you don't need to do that. And it was like, oh, yeah, I guess I don't need to do that. And it was interesting because it's kind of like what Megan said, having somebody in your corner who brings you out of that thought process that you're just not good enough for things is really, really important. And so what I try to do these days is be that person for other people because I feel like I still have imposition. I still want to throw up every time I have to give a talk like this. It doesn't go away. But I feel like I'm in a position where I can help other people. I encourage you, if you're thinking about ever being on a stage like this, but this is too scary, go give a talk at your local user group. Smaller, more intimate kind of thing. If you're terrified to get started contributing to patches, come to the Mentored Sprint. There's tons of people there who want to help you. Because it's so, so difficult when you're on the outside of that, you must be this smart wall to see that there's anything past that wall. But if you can possibly make your way in there, you'll find the most warm, welcoming community you could ever be part of. And I would love you to join us. So thank you. Thus ends the prepared material portion of our speech. I want to thank everybody who came up on stage. This took a lot of guts, and I had to beg and plead with more than a couple of people to please, please, please come up. This was sort of a little experiment. I hope it went over well. And we have 27.39 minutes for questions. So if anybody has something to share or questions, the floor is yours. Hey, David, I have a job for you. You get to run. I'm the Nick Cannon of the staff. Hello? Yeah. The Ryan Seacrest. And that's the generation guest, right? Yes, that's good. I'm thinking of a white hair, man. I know, but that's the point. Okay, we should all move very much closer. I'm quite nervous, Stanley. I just wanted to say thank you for sharing your experiences and insights. I know that must have felt quite uncomfortable for you, but yeah, thank you. The mic is hot. Anyone else? Oh, great, there's hands. This was going to get super awkward otherwise. No, no, no, I think they're just pondering and taking notes about the questions they want to ask us. I just want to tell you that ever since I came here three years ago, for the first doubling Drupalcon, I mean, Drupalcon, I was overwhelmed by the fact that there are so many people like you who do all this incredible coding and all this incredible work and still can share your fears and the way you overcame your failures and that you are not afraid of talking about it. I still cannot, I am amazed of this group and I really, in this year, I have realized that I really belong here and I am very grateful to you, especially the six of you that have done this today. I am really grateful and thank you very much for pouring your heart out. I think that's a great thing to do. Maybe we can take a moment to think about that a little bit. So I know I have a physical reaction to speaking in public that involves some kind of adrenaline that flows through my body and I get really nervous, but I still do it and for me one of the ways that I get through it is I think about the very, very first thing that I have to do that I can do in any talk to start it and I always say hi. I say it a lot every day, all day long and so it's an easy pattern for me to repeat and so that kind of helps me with that a little bit. I don't know if anybody else wants to say how they managed to do it despite their fear. I tell a terrible dad joke at the beginning of my talks and it breaks the ice. So hi, I wanted to join in thanking you guys. I learned about imposter syndrome my first day of work at Google. It's part of our training. Like we talk about it very early on and I think one of the best tricks I have come to kind of get over it is knowing that so many other people experience it. So the fact that you guys get up here and say that in front of everybody and your leaders in this community, it's huge. So thank you very much. But also know that everyone, like almost everyone in this field unless you're a complete arrogant jackass has this problem. So I think it's really important to, like I know it doesn't help make the fear better it doesn't make that bit of anxiety any easier to deal with but know that everyone else thinks they're an imposter too and it's okay. Who in the room believes they are imposters? I'd agree with some of those. Yeah. Oh, that, get off of this. That's my dad joke or bad joke. Anybody else? Yeah, there was, get him. Hi guys, first of all thanks again for doing this. I think this is a great opportunity for the whole community here. One thing I had in mind was, well first of all I think it's so great that you guys are kind of putting a human face to the companies involved here because when you come to Drupalcon you go to the exhibit hall and you see all these fancy booths and all these big name companies and that you've seen online and so it can be very intimidating to go to the exhibit hall for example and see all these companies and you don't know who to approach. So first of all it's just great that you put a human face on it. And so you guys gave a few tips on how to deal with imposter syndrome but I was thinking, I don't know if we can start some kind of community initiative at some point. I was thinking some kind of mentorship program almost because we could talk about, I think that is our current theme of finding a mentor. I know maybe a couple of you mentioned that and I've started trying to do that now. So maybe that's something we can start as a Drupal community initiative somehow. I don't know how that will work but maybe I don't know if that could be a community sprint project or something like that but if you guys have any input on that, if you've ever thought about that before I'd like to hear about that. So I always like to volunteer the DA to do things. And the DA has this really awesome newsletter that you can subscribe to via checking a box in your Drupal.org account. Oh by the way, you should have a Drupal.org account. And I don't know, we could have like imposter tip of the day in the newsletter maybe? Imposter of the day. Imposter of the day, you're awful. Well yeah, sorry, I thought you were making a joke. She said, what about a Slack channel? And I was like, haha, that's funny. Yeah, so we actually do have a couple different ways of chatting in the Drupal community. One of them is IRC and one of them is Slack. And if you go to Drupal.org, at the very top of the page one of the links says community. And if you click on that you go to the community page and there's a paragraph there which says chat. And then there's instructions on how to get on IRC and then there's also a link to get automatically approved to be through the invitation to the Drupal Slack team. And what she's saying is that one of the channels in the team is Drupal-inclusivity, diversity-inclusion. And there's real like live meetings, when are they? Every Thursday at 9 a.m. Pacific time. 9 a.m. Oh, Pacific. It time zones, they're tricky. We can ask the internet and it'll tell us. Now the other thing that you mentioned was that you heard us give a few tips as we were telling our stories and kind of on purpose I think we didn't want to include too many tips. So if somebody has a question like, hey, what would you do in this situation? Do you have any tips? I mean we certainly have them, but we kind of wanted to save them for the question-answer period. So that we can talk about those things also. Yeah, you wanna talk about the one that we talked about earlier today, the standing behind them and getting the first step? Why don't you do it? I just talked. So, well like Emma mentioned, how cool it was to be up here talking with people who were her mentors, right? And Gabor is also one of my mentors and so he's gonna talk about mentoring. Yeah, so one of the things we discussed today when we were preparing for this panel is how a big part of the first time contributor are mentoring is about getting people over the first step, is to get them over their fears because people can do those changes that they wanna make. People can review those patches. People can produce those screenshots. But what we see is that a lot of people are afraid to post them in public because of the fear of failure and that people would figure out that I'm not good enough for this. Like I've seen people who would be excelling contributors to the UX initiative, but they are like some big name at some company and they don't wanna publish anything until it's perfect and then we don't see those results. So one of the goals of the mentoring team and the first time contributor workshop is just to get people over that fear and not necessarily, it's not triple mentoring, it's just get them to get them understand that it's totally okay to post that and it may not be good, but we are doing those things as well. I mean, I posted PARS errors to Drupal Core before so I committed them to Core. So like if that's fine then whatever could be okay. So Friday, Sprint day, there'll be tons of mentors there and the experienced mentors will meet with the new mentors ahead of time to help them prepare and one of the things that we talk about is we want all of the mentors to help the people who are attending the Sprint to have reasonable expectations of what they can accomplish that day. And what I tell the mentors is that if we can get the attendees to click save on a comment, on an issue, and in the process of doing that all day long, they have had a good enough time that they might be willing to do it again then we win all the things. And then one of the things that we do with the attendees is we tell them that as mentors like that's our measure of success for you and we help them know that when they have done that, when they've had a good enough time that they're willing to do it again and they posted a comment on an issue, like they have met what they may look up to as leaders in the community, they have met our expectations for them. And I think it's that, you know, click save, it's gonna be okay is the job of the mentor sometimes. Can I ask a provocative question possibly? I know this is totally cheating here because I have the mic. Do you feel for everybody who's on the stage and this may be more applicable to the goblers and the Ryan's of the world here that the bar to participate and or meaningfully contribute or succeed in Drupal professionally is higher now than when you guys had your entree into the Drupal world? Yeah, I think it is a lot harder. I came in about 11 years ago and there were not many modules. Like all the documentation was written for people who knew what CVS was. You know, there was a core was like one 1,000th of the size that it is today, you know. Nowadays, when you are coming into the community and trying to make a name for yourself, like my module that I wrote for summer code was called quiz and it's still around. Thankfully I have nothing to do with it anymore so I'm sure it's better now. But at this point, you know, you're not gonna write another views module, you're not gonna write another CCK module, you're not gonna write another quiz module. All that stuff is already written and what you're doing is more thankless. It's like porting things from seven to eight or it's getting the thing into core, which is great, but you know what I mean? It's not innovating new work and while you can gain a lot of admirable respect from people for doing that kind of work, especially the insider crowd. I love when people work on core and make core better for everyone because that just fixing a bug in core fixes it for like 1.5 million people, which is just like great return on investment. But anyway, but I think it is a lot harder. Core is bigger now, there's a lot more people involved. It's harder to just find trees randomly sauntering around the sidewalk at a Drupalcon these days. I do think it's harder. I think though that we have a lot better infrastructure now than we did back then, because back then like the handbook was like 200 pages, you could read it in one sitting. We have a lot more documentation now to help people get started. We have companies around Drupal training now to help people get started. So reduce the learning curve there. We have things like a structured mentoring program to help new people get matched up with things to work on and that was never a thing, right, like it was like we got a table, a conference table in the hotel. We all sat around and we all just like made stuff up. We didn't know what we were doing. You know, it's a lot more streamlined and you know, there's a lot more thoughtfulness behind it, I guess, for good and for, you know, not so good. So, but I do think it's harder. I think the project application process has definitely made things harder. My project application was process was like, I'm in Google Summer of Code, I need CVS access. Done, you know, so that is unfortunate. So we're working on fixing a lot of these kinds of things, but yeah, I think anyone who says it's not as easy to get in now as it used to be is exactly right. But I think that because the community is larger and because it's a bit more structured than it was back in the day, I think the entry points into the community, there's a lot more of them and a lot friendlier than it used to be. So it's a little bit of a, you know, toss it. I know for a span on the works here. So, like I said, I was doing lots of technical things and trying to be super fantastic. And then I realized that contributing not with code. I really wanted to get into that, but I felt very, like I was not doing a valid, what's the word? Equally valuable thing to contributing code. And I figured out that, like, we can value, basically we need to increase the visibility of non-code contributions as well and have mentors all over the community. So community mentors, not just contribution mentors to support that and to help others. And I have many ideas because, and now I can't think of words. Yes, so more than just code and the code base and everything like that because I just felt super uncomfortable and not feeling like I was doing enough when actually I was. And I really liked the things that I do now to improve the community as a whole. So I think I probably messed that up. I had thought. So yeah, so piggybacking on that. I think the Drupal community is now maybe huge and scary. So while it looks great that it's, if you look at the group photo from this morning, it's huge and scary. But I think if you can find the human connections that will work for you, whatever change you wanna make in Drupal, you will need at least one more human involved. So if you can find the human connection somehow in different communities, then you can get involved, you can get help. And basically I think the trick that you can do is instead of looking at Drupal as this big huge thing, define your small safe space, like the Germans are organizing translation sprints that they like say what time and then people can go there and they're like 10 people and they can work together. And even those who never suggested translations can work with them. There's initiatives who have meeting times together and they wanna get help with fixing bugs and reviewing new patches. And they will help you if you're interested in the same area and you have problems in there. So I think the key is to figure out what you wanna work on if you wanna get involved somehow and then find the safe space, the group that is related to that and then try to get involved with that group because you find the human connections, you get help and you work towards a shared goal. So everybody benefits. I have been prompted to speak. So... I made you do something, surprise. Look, I just did it. So we just wanted to point out that if you are looking to contribute to Drupal, but not necessarily code, that there is a session by Rocky Mandhania. I did not say that right, but Rocky is her first name. I said that correctly. Anyhow, it's a really great session that talks about just how to kind of go through the process and the feelings you're gonna have and talk about what's gonna motivate you to move through and who can help you and actually she interviewed me after she saw my slides this morning. So you're gonna hear about my experience again there. But just having gone through it myself and knowing how I was like anxious ridden during the whole process. I was anxious too. Yeah, right. Anyhow, it's a good session. So it might be a good follow up for you. It is. Wednesday it is in Liffey meeting three at 10.45. I'm not sure whom to ask because I think it's a question to all of you. I have kind of motivation question. So we all know that you go to certain level of success in Drupal community, which causes unpleasant feelings of imposter syndrome and maybe something else. But you still continue doing what you're doing. So my question, why exactly? It's for the people and helping people and all of that good karma and stuff. Like this scares, like everything scares me basically. But I'm like helping all of you and anything else I do. It's you're helping someone out and you do get a little bit self-pattery as well because I feel pretty good right now. Yeah, that's my answer. For me at the end of the day, I do love my wife and my children. And so I work, I'm also still curious, as curious as I was whenever I started with Drupal. And I actually did everything wrong whenever I started with Drupal. I rewrote an existing popular module and then I did it again. And then I got shouted out of IRC. I know Angie has a similar side. But I was curious enough and interested enough that I just kept going. So there was desire, interest, need to fix things. So it's definitely about the people. For me, taking care of the staff and in the community. But I also have a world view why. And I feel like the world's really complex and this community is really special with its culture and how inclusive it is and how open it is. And I feel like we're just a shining spot in this world and it needs to be protected. I think the world needs more of these kinds of communities in it. And I feel like I get to play a role to protect that. And I feel that we can also, as a community, view role models for other communities out there and kind of expand what we have. I think it's very special and worth protecting. I think that's a great way to wrap it. Thanks again for all the six, oh no, okay. I thought I saw Alina had a question. Thanks for putting me on the spot. I was gonna ask whether any of you had any questions for each other. I was gonna turn like you onto you. Oh! Boom! I have a question. Why are you all so awesome? They're not awesome. Let that be on the record. No, I know the answer. I think we're all so awesome because we have been able to work with other people and recognize that there's not that much different between us and other people in terms of perhaps like our technical skillset or whatever. And those people that we work with have helped us recognize the things that are useful about us and they talk to us about what we wanna do and why we wanna do it and then they help us do it. So if we are awesome, it's because we work with other people. They're just regular people that help us do the things that we wanna do. Yeah, actually, yeah. So I think I feel awesome when I make other people feel awesome. So I'm trying to work as an enabler to make other people's dreams happen and if that is successful, then I feel awesome. Okay, we're on for real now. Thanks everybody for coming and a special thanks for everybody who sort of laid their soul bare. Thank you.