 Why are you here? Wow, to see me, that's a terrible reason. No, you're here and or your company gave you time to be here because you're here to learn. At least that's why I hope you're here. And the thing I want to talk about is learning because I'm really into learning. Learning for me is very, very important. Now, I'm going to tell you a little bit about me. I am Mike Stonkey. I work at Puppet Labs. I run release engineering and product security. I wrote a book a long time ago. It's really out of date. You can still buy it. I still get royalties. It's awesome. Don't read it. I also started the Apple package repository also with some people at Red Hat way back in the day. My story is mostly about growth. At Puppet Labs, we were 35 people. When I got there, we're 390 now. I've done a few in-person interviews to hire people. And I buy a few, I mean like 125 or 140, something like that. But the thing that I really try and evaluate when I'm trying to hire somebody is what's their drive to learn? What's their passion? Can they learn? You can hire people with experience or you can hire people that want to get experience. Learning is very important. And it also means that they enjoy their job. People that, you don't hire somebody to do the job they already did. You want to hire someone to do the next job, the next thing they're excited about. Happy people are people that are learning all the time. You want to be happy in your job, you need to be learning. So, this title was really about organizational learning. Well, organizational learning means that the individual is learning, that's expanding to the group, and that's expanding to the organization. But most of your learning happens in unstructured ways. A lot of people think you need to go to a class, or you need to buy a book, or you need to have some type of formal thing, but you don't. You can learn through trolling. So, really what I like to do is just start talking and come up with the worst idea possible and see how long I can talk about it and get people to believe me that it's a good idea. And then we start figuring out why is this a good idea? Is it not a good idea? Wait, was that bad idea actually a good idea? It turns out that sufficiently advanced thought leadership is indistinguishable from trolling. So, I love bad ideas. I love bad ideas so much that we have a day on the calendar once a week marked for bad ideas. Monday, we dedicate it to it. Why? Because Mondays suck. So let's just add bad ideas on top of it. And actually, it makes Mondays very fun. So I'm going to give an example of coming up with a terrible idea. When we were switching away from Ruby, we had to deliver a JVM onto our on-premise software. Now, delivering a JVM is not necessarily the easiest thing in the world. There are some problems there. So, I come up with the worst idea possible. Let's ship it inside a Ruby gem. So, why is this a terrible idea? Well, you're like, okay, we can deliver it in a post install. We can do a compile thing. You're gonna have to have Lib also already there. We can't define C-Libs with Ruby gems and say you need this. You're not gonna have to wait 35 to 45 minutes for the compile to happen. I don't think you can sign Ruby gems in all versions of Ruby gems. We have no security. This is awesome. So, that wasn't the best idea, right? But, what did we learn during that? Well, we learned that, one, I come up with absolutely terrible ideas. And the other thing is, there's some new approaches to a problem. So, my team didn't know a ton about post install actions on Ruby gems. They didn't know a ton about what the security model for Ruby gems looked like. But we did get to learn that. Because we were like, wait, is this a terrible idea? Or is it actually even possible? The possibilities you wanna know about. The junior folks were like, I have no idea what you guys are talking about. Why is this a good idea or a bad idea? But in the end, they get to participate in the conversation, they get to absorb it, and they get to learn. So, during this debate, one of my senior colleagues and I just decided to switch sides. And I'm like, nope, this is a terrible idea. Let's not ship the JVM as a Ruby gem. Which, by the way, it is a terrible idea. But you switch sides and you start attacking the idea. And you're like, well, these reasons I don't like it. And it's really important that you attack ideas and not the people. So, this teaches healthy debate on a team. Healthy debate on a team means that you're a tight knit group. You're enjoying each other's company. You're actually leveling up your entire team. The organization, like Soil and Green, is made of people. Teams are made of people. I want the organization to improve. A quick word about sarcasm, though. Some people don't like it. I don't get it really, but other people don't. So, be careful about sarcasm, especially if English isn't your first language or you don't know somebody or things like that. It can be weird. I mean, if you're talking to someone who's English isn't their first language. Anyway, invest in your learning. When you invest in your own learning, you level up yourself. You level up your team. And that levels up your org. We also have other days of the week where we do crazy things in my team just because I like to enjoy things. And also on Friday, please don't forget about Dr. Dre. Anyway, I'm Mike Stonkey. You can follow me at Stoneman Twitter. I will rant about AIX and packaging and software and security and all sorts of proprietary crap all the time. So, anyway, cheers.