 So bear with me that none of the pictures I usually have actually exist for tonight. I had people questioning on CopyJS what DJs actually are but you know the type that have records and stuff done with me. It's really scary doing that kind of thing though. When you're doing something in public you have to learn on your feet or you will fail on your feet and people will ask you to exit. It's worse when you're paid to do it because then there's that extra pressure of doing it. I had a reflection, someone actually asked me about my Twitter bio and they said it used to be a DJ. It's like yeah, it was years ago. So what was that like? So where did I start? And that's why I'm telling you about it tonight. As I started thinking about it I thought about how the different things I did actually still apply to me every day. Which is really strange. Do you think what's DJing got to do with the developmental design or anything like that? So I've got to hold this to things. Things you have to learn basically when you're a DJ and get used to. This is the hard one. Everything you do will fail. Sooner or later it's going to break. The record's going to skip because a needle will snap so you need to spare one of those. The power's going to go out or there's a surge or something like that or you'll slip and you'll hit something or something is going to fail at some point or other. And the lesson to learn of that is you really think twice about the things that you're doing. When you're putting something into production or when you're handing it off to someone else think about how it's going to go wrong because sooner or later it will. Just be prepared really. So you anticipate what's going to go wrong in the outset. And the way to actually get used to that is to set yourself up with some routines. The last thing you want to do as a DJ is turn up at the venue and you've left all your records at home because you might as well have stayed home. The way to actually think about that in a project planning point of view is you can conduct a pre-mortem. It's usually when you've finished a project or you've done a release there's a bit of a catch up afterwards to think about what went wrong and what can we do better next time and everything. The idea of the pre-mortem is you actually really think about it what's going to fail, which issues aren't actually going to make this build and plan for that beforehand. It's something that's a little bit tricky to get into the rhythm of because everyone would just say you've been really negative or something but by thinking around it before you get started anticipating a failure that might come you'll be better prepared for when that failure does come because it will sooner or later, usually when you're not ready for it. As a DJ you've got vinyl records. It's a physical disc that's got etchings in it and you have a needle on it, it's very physical. So many things can interfere with that. I had a routine and I still have a routine where I have to wash my hands and basically scrub them before I go near any records. If you come over to my house and ask to look at my vinyl and note you may not, maybe if you've done like a surgical scrub three times beforehand you can look at them. I mean have fun when my son gets older and starts asking what those things are. So I had my methods of basically ensuring everything was as nice as possible. Before I put a record on I'd clean it several times with brush and everything's going to be perfect. The problem with this is you get false associations. When I do a talk at a conference I wash my hands beforehand because I'm stupid basically. As a DJ that's the last thing I did before I went on stage. And now I associate I'm feeling nervous. What do I do to make me feel not nervous? I'll go through the routine. I'm just going to wash my hands. You hear sports people who wear their lucky underpants when they play and there's special socks or they need their blue M&Ms otherwise there's no way they're going to play. It's a false association basically. It's a cargo cult behavior. See how well prepared I have to read my notes. What you basically need to do is try to think around what you're doing just as a matter of routine. Ask yourself why you're actually doing things. If you're doing... I like that job with scrums. You can do daily scrums that can drag on to half an hour. Anything longer than 10 minutes you're in trouble basically. And it's cargo cult because you know you turn up every day and you do this meeting and it always goes long or whatever and you're actually getting anything valuable out of it. By thinking through the process that you're doing you eliminate messy things like that. And maybe the scrum is really good for you but needs to be tightened up a bit. But that's okay. You're basically questioning what you're doing instead of just going through and following the same routines every time. The DJ might turn up while that setup was on turn table, CD player, mixer, another turn table. In professional circumstances you have another turn table behind you another CD player, another source of audio or a spare mixer because something's going to fail sooner or later and it happens all the time. DJ equipment's really high end compared to anything you'd buy for yourself. So it's designed not to but even with those specs it fails. Servers go down. But no matter how good the salesperson's been to tell you it's got 99% uptime that 1% will happen and it will happen when you do a launch at some point or other. What you need to think about is what you can do about that. And really what you're looking at is a single point of failure when one thing in your process can fail and take everything down with it. An example of this is linking to JQuery or even Bootstrap for your CSS or JavaScript and linking to Google as the source for that. What happens when Google's down? Your site's not going to load properly. Thinking your way through that, planning for what's going to go wrong first is really helpful. If you're looking at a server situation a cluster is going to make it a lot more secure. Obviously there's more stuff that goes with it so you need to weigh out the cost of it. But planning in advance means you can eliminate this single point of failure. It gets abbreviated to SPLF. You'll see that quite often if you've not heard it at the time before. If you just Google SPLF you'll find all sorts of different things that can go wrong and kill everything. But be really careful about your dependencies. These days, especially with a lot of single page architections if the JavaScript fails for whatever reason your entire site fails to render which is Angular. Angular. Angular or who's Angular? Google knows that's what it is. They know it fails. They don't use it for Gmail. They don't use it for any of their core products. And we do for ours which is kind of scary. We're taking second-rate stuff. React on the other hand can render on the server beforehand. It's pretty safe by comparison. Anyway. Noise. Noise, noise, noise. Noise. Back when I was a DJ my parents never understood music and I was spending all this money on records and going out into a club to some strange hour and playing all this really loud music when it's not even proper music and everything. That's their idea of noise. My idea of noise is anything. It's interference. I'm standing here with my phone in my pocket which is another thing I try not to do because as a DJ if this starts ringing or someone texts you and it connects to the cell tower then it interferes with the audio and you hear beep, beep, beep, beep. That's terrible. Maybe someone will think it's part of the song but it probably won't. What you're looking for is... What am I looking for? This is basically getting rid of the distractions in what you're doing. I've just been working at my new company for a bit over a month and Emily works there as well. She'll attest that usually when I'm at my desk my headphones are on. Sometimes I'm not even listening to anything but don't tell anyone that. This just takes away every distraction that's around me. People can be having a conversation next to me and it just doesn't bother me at all. If you start looking at your routines about how you work then think about what's distracting you. Sometimes your distraction might be that you're just staring at a wall that's really uninspiring so it might be a good thing just to pick yourself up and go somewhere else. It might be people having a conversation constantly next to you. Unfortunately not many people use phones for stuff anymore but I've been stuck next to reception before and they're answering the phone all day. It's not good. Invest in a decent pair of headphones. Find something that will isolate yourself because any kind of disruption when meeting, someone talking to you anything like that disrupts you from your flow stops you working efficiently. You will get interrupted. There are legitimate reasons for that but eliminating noise means getting rid of everything along the way. Anything that stops you sitting down and doing your job or it's designing a code or whatever you happen to be doing get rid of the noise as much as you can. Meetings are terrible for this. There was a study done into management groups I can't remember the scope but it was pretty broad and it showed that people who attend meetings think they're really productive yet in fact they're just not. Meetings are things you do when you're not actually doing anything else. I'm a manager, I'm stuck in meetings all the time and I hate them. I even call meetings and make other people come to them and I hate doing that. See if you can say no to things if it's not really that relevant to you but just try to keep the focus of what you're actually doing. One thing with DJs is you see different styles of how people actually do things so a few DJs I've met over the years plan out their sets meticulously they time themselves so they knew that 15 minutes in they're not going to reach for the next record to mix it in. When things go wrong when you work like that they go disastrously wrong because it's too controlling. You're basically hoping that everything's going to be perfect and as I've already said something will fail at some point or other That said you need to plan you need to anticipate what you need to actually think about but don't be a perfectionist be aware that no matter what you come up with however great it might seem to you someone else's interpretation is going to be different maybe they're even wrong but you won't always win and that's okay just let it go sometimes the crowd is not getting into your music and you need to completely change tap for what you're doing at night that's okay the important thing is you just keep soldering on and just get something out there part of what I'm trying to instill in my work at the moment is the idea that everything that you do needs to be released at some point or at all is just no point doing it and we get so easily stuck into that where we pay attention to things not saying that you shouldn't really pay attention to things really closely but if it doesn't go the way that you want it to then just relax and deal with it and be glad that you've actually done something out of the end of it if the audience didn't quite get into your music and you loved your set then that's alright if they loved it and you didn't that much next time find a different venue or something that don't get too caught up when things don't quite work the way you want them to where am I I've got a prop these things are my 16 year old headphones these are DJ headphones so I can do that to them and I've got no danger of actually breaking them I can twist them around and do all sorts of things normal DJ mode like this and you'll have a monitor so you actually have that one off like that so with one ear you're listening to what you're prepping the other ear you're actually listening to what's live the way to think about that from a development point of view is you need to listen to production we are really bad at doing this does anyone track their JavaScript errors in production shouldn't really ask because no one ever does do you even know people are screaming at the screen because something is going wrong usually not monitoring what's happening knowing what browsers people are using there are a lot of like Google Analytics are pretty good even though however evil Google may be it does give you a lot of data knowing that actually gives you an idea of what's going on because you could just be marching to the beat of your own drum putting stuff out into production all right competitor comes along glues you out of the water because your checkout process is rubbish because you've never really paid attention to the metrics on it you need to always keep paying attention to what's happening while you're developing so you can just have a feedback loop and think about how you might change it next time there are so if you get stuck into things like UX there are so many counterintuitive lessons to be learned about doing it and you don't know until you actually find out for yourself generally one of the criticisms you often get if you do UX design isn't it just obvious common sense no there are so many things that just don't make any sense but that's just how we work when things do your wrong and they do terribly wrong you have to pick yourself up and get on with it the worst possible thing that can happen when you're DJing is the music cuts out and it happens and it's awful and you're sitting there trying to work out what's going on you've got all your equipment checking the plugs, making sure that's going on it's not good but you have to keep going you work out what's broken if the turntables died on you you pick up the other one and plug it in and knock it go it's alright but as long as you keep going then they'll get over it really quickly sometimes your hand will slip as your middle of the mix and you've got the bass from this one and the treble from that and it's just being murdered you're swearing at yourself for the rest of the night and probably for a month later because you messed it up so badly but if you just keep going no one else will really care this is kind of what I was talking about before where when things don't go the way you want them to I guess it's you kind of repeating that point when you have a conflict with someone else as well just look for a way of resolving it grab a mediator or something else to help you out and sooner or later you just need to swallow your pride and get on with it I've worked in insurance for over 12 years now and everyone hates insurance because you get the thing that you meant to get out of it but you don't get anything else they'll fix up your car for you as long as they're not bad and they'll put you behind the wheel of your car again and everything's back to normal but it's not because you've had the psychological trauma of having an accident and there's no compensation for that I have a massive dispute with one of my neighbors in Australia over a fence for no reason at all other than they were really bad people I had to take them to court and do all sorts of things so they could just pay me what we had to and in the end they did and I still feel bitter about it because it was just such a harsh experience in the end you just have to let go of it though I was never going to get anything else other than what was due and when you have like heated arguments in the office about you know Angular is terrible if you use it I'm going to walk out the door or something like that don't ever use bootstrap or our medi another person's been using bootstrap forever and maybe wrote it and put them together and it's fun once you get to a resolution that's not the person walking out the door then just accept it take a deep breath and get on with it if you don't then one of you is going to leave basically and I've seen this happen it's hard and you might not even get on with that person but it's okay at least you'll be able to sleep at night hopefully without like waking up in the morning during bad pictures of them or something does anyone ever have DJs much anymore I don't think I don't know what kids do or person when you're DJing in front of the audience someone's going to come up and ask for a sign and this is the worst possible thing you can do to a DJ is you're not asked them for a sign if you're at a wedding or something like that if you're a nightclub DJ and you're playing just leave the DJ alone just respect them from a distance it's alright don't ask for a song because they'll be offended no requests I'm not a jukebox you don't put a coin into me just play whatever you like doesn't work that way the key to a DJ's success is not listening to one person's request but understanding the entire audience that's there and making it work for everyone not everyone's going to get into it that's okay when you're dealing with client requests you'll get all sorts of different voices talking to you at once all of whom have got their own priorities they all know exactly what they need but they never talk to each other you need to basically wade through that and say no to a lot of things because otherwise if you say yes then you'll never get the end of it this is why DJs say no because sometimes someone will say yeah it's a really good song but I'm just not going to play it because I'm not going to respect your own request if you say yes too much then you'll just turn into a dull map and your productivity will go down and you'll spend more time worrying about what you're not delivering and what you are and it doesn't end well this might be relevant to me with my badly prepared talk for tonight no matter what you're doing you might be playing the best set of your life but you need to go home at some point and other people need to go home at some point usually when you're a club DJ you're given your slot for three hours or something like that they'll tell you what you need to play and you go there, you do your thing and you go home and that's it you don't have to worry about it from that there are two different aspects of that that apply to development the first one is in terms of releases and the way to not outstay your welcome is to release things as often as you possibly can if your release cycles are slow then it's not great because everyone wants everything to make it into that release and then they can't wait another six weeks for the next one because they need it now if you're releasing something every week or every day then they're just going to be alright so I can get it for you in two weeks it'll be alright as opposed to well this next six weeks slot is full I can fit you in how's April next year sound it doesn't work, frequently releases are your friend you need to have a really good development process for that to happen you need to smooth process from the request to designers, programmers, testers everything along the way needs to be in sync but when it happens and when it works well the benefits to you are huge because you can just get on with it and you'll have the satisfaction of actually releasing things it's the worst possible thing is to work on a project for months and then turn around and say to the client they've just had enough of it or they've let it or something else has gone wrong frequent releases are your friend the other thing is during your work day you're asked to turn up to your office for a certain number of hours per day go home once you're done just go home don't feel that you need to work for another hour to impress your boss because who cares you need to go home and sleep and rest and actually be more productive the next day there are a lot of studies into this that suggest that we should shorten our work hours not increase them because if you push yourself that extra hour the work that you do in that hour is even rubbish and you're going to pay for it the next day because you're tired and you get into a bad cycle here in Singapore we are terrible at this I think there's the highest rate of sleeplessness in Singapore out of anywhere in the world it's amazing considering what Japan is like just relax lah basically work out you turn up to work at 9 go home at 5.30 just walk out the door you've done your 8 hours you've had your half hour lunch and whatever your hours happen to be it's okay if someone questions you on it just find a study and point them to it your boss is really that obsessed about it usually no one notices I've got a team of 8 people I don't even know how many there are I'm not looking at when they're coming in I'm not looking at when they go home I trust them as professionals to do a good job trust yourself as a professional to do a good job and your work life will be so much better for you this is the best bit this is probably the hardest bit when it's all done congratulate yourself actually be happy about what you've done there's a lot that's being said about this in management recently probably not enough where it's really easy to criticize someone it's really hard to give them praise in a meaningful way that's counter to that if you make a mistake in your job then you might pour over it and try to find out what's gone wrong it's like here's what you need to know what is next time if you do well you'll get well done and that's it, it's not an equal measure and part of humanity is we're really good at pointing out faults and not actually praising things we're not good at this as a species what you need to do is think about it so that when something goes right you get very happy and actually take your people out to lunch or something and make them actually feel good about what you're doing when you've got your release because you've improved your release cycle and you've done it just actually take the time to reflect on what you've done and be glad about it usually you're glad it's over but that's reason enough take a longer lunch that day because you've got the thing out do something to make yourself happy because if you don't do this bit then the rest of it's basically nothing if you're not able to enjoy what you're doing you'll get stuck into a rut or changing jobs maybe first but it seems to follow in that order normally I'd be pointing you to SlideShare where you'd find these but considering how badly prepped my slides are I'm not going to put them up there yet until maybe later you'll find other things on there on my twitter questions stunned silence I'm going to show I think it'll be I'm going to show