 So just like Susan, this next email speaker was someone that I found through someone else. I asked for help to find female speakers and Giles came through and suggested Megan Millard. And I looked at her work online and we talked a little bit, seemed like a good fit. So here she is. So back in Toronto, I run a, also I'm going to say, you know a lot, it's kind of like the Torontonian egg that everyone else gets in Canada. So I apologize in advance, I'm going to say a lot. But back in Toronto, I partner at a web consultancy called Unspace, as well as a co-partner and a little label called Brilliant Teeth. And today, with these credentials, I kind of want to talk about the correlations I see existing between the music industry as well as our tech, you know, corridor that we sort of inhabit. And mostly how Unspace says use that because it's my only point of reference to really, you know, entertain and engage our community and how you might be able to take that to inspire your own as well. And after hearing Leia's talk, this is basically the very, very juvenile detention center version of that talk. So I apologize in advance. But Unspace is a web and application development firm, you know, short and succinct, but we enjoy it and we're really good at it. But more importantly, we're completely and utterly in love, like maybe in fact situated with the Toronto developer community. I've traveled a lot and it's one of the biggest ones I've encountered in the world. Our mailing list is 700 people in the GTA. So it's a pretty large swath of people. And we consistently run three events for them. This has relevance, I promise. Six years ago, we started this thing called Rails Pub Night, mainly because we were the first grouping on Rails firm in Canada and there were no others. And you can't have a business without competition. So we pulled them together, what troops we knew of and we incited this pub night hoping, you know, with fingers crossed that someone else would, you know, pick it up and decide to start another firm. And six years later, there are lots of them and we're still here. So it worked out pretty good. Next, we created technology primarily because I was bored, but event planning sort of rooted in my DNA at this point. But also because the monthly circuit of, you know, tech speaker events in the city was kind of getting corporate and rigid. And that's fine, like everyone has a different flavor. But we're just, you know, once again kind of immature and we kind of want something with more of a conversation piece and a focal point to it. So what we're about to do is fly in one speaker every month. Giles is actually our speaker for June 2nd if anyone is remotely close to Toronto. And we give them carte blanche to talk about whatever they want for 30 to 45 minutes. And then we create a thematic party based around who they are, what their kind of interests are. Yeah, June 2nd next time. But yeah, we create a theme party around it. Just make sure that there's lots of installation or things like that because we want a conversation piece for all of the attendees. We want to create a dialogue that doesn't start with, hey, what do you do? Or did you, you know, finish your work on this project? Because that's really boring and it doesn't give you the tingles when you go home and think about all the awesome people you met. You had those nights in college where you went home and you were just like sweating. You were so excited about all of the conversations you had. So if you give people the premise to talk about something interesting upon first meeting, you're going to get a lot better outcome. And there's going to be lots more ideas generated than on, you know, a standard like stuffy mixer or on an IRC channel. Third, we do an annual job fair. And there's not a lot of mystique or ammo behind this. Getting your friends employed makes you even more friends. And on top of that, you know, there is a drought of rubious as we've said a lot of the time today. So we just try to get everyone in one room and do a very unorthodox sort of mixer so that people can get better acquainted and hopefully, you know, gain better employment. But I'd say the biggest feather in our cap to date would have been Ruby Fringe and then Future Ruby, the latter one being staged two years ago, which is hard to believe right now. We created these two conferences more like gigs because we were disillusioned with the other conferences that were in the market at the time. You know, we'd go down to any given conference in the States and find us and everyone else in our mother, you know, spending most of their time in the lobby. And so, you know, our solution to that was, well, why don't we just make a big giant lobby and have people, you know, coincidentally talk. And also, you know, vodka fountains and whatever else anyone who was there might have seen in passing. It was messy. But everyone really bought and we curated our speakers really well and they delivered, you know, amazing talks. And it proved us right. We felt kind of vindicated about this, that restriction isn't necessarily pragmatic. We wanted people to be excited about being developers again, which in 2008 it was sort of taking on a somber tone. And we wanted to bring people together and have that exciting moment in the same way like say if you were at a party and you find out that four other people were painters and then you excitedly start collaborating on how you could possibly have an art show in the fall. Or if you went to a jazz show and, you know, you found the four people in there that were really crazy about noise rock and then you make plans to book a rehearsal studio or record the EP. It gave everyone an environment where they could find other people to play with. And play is extremely important. And the resounding message at the end of the day is that if your work doesn't facilitate that play, you should probably quit your job. I realize that that's not, you know, a realistic tone to take for everyone and it's kind of a privileged point of view too. But the statement however inflammatory might help if you've got some context about me because I kind of reflect the standard person that works at Unspace. So I'm going to go biographical on you all for a minute. I grew up moderately nerdy, as I'm sure everyone else here did, you know, but I got thrown into my fair share of lockers because I came from rural Ontario and, you know, smacked out in the middle of the Bible Belt there, because it was just up north. And when that wasn't occurring, I, you know, slink off to the library to build scale models of Thomas Hardy's Canterbury or, you know, preside over the comic book club that I helped co-found. But most embarrassingly, well as background, like I did manage to meet other record nerds in Woodstock, most notably and conveniently my father. And when I was 15, I decided to take it upon myself to go on GeoCities and coordinate the world's first Anglophile Index of Every Band and Existence from 1991 to 1996. I'm so embarrassed to ever admit this in public. But, you know what, it was a very fruitless, you know, completionist effort. And I ended up catching the attention of some record execs and street team managers that obviously smelled free labor. And I started creating fan sites for pittance, which meant free concert tickets and praise from people I didn't have a snowbells chance in hell of meeting. I thought I would one day. But I was really enthusiastic to do it because at the time I really wanted to be something, a part of something bigger. And I wanted, you know, to taste self-respect because I didn't really have it at the time because I had no sterling example where I grew up. And, you know, all of this encouraged me to focus more on my, you know, painting, picking up different musical instruments and most importantly to me at the time, writing. And this effort in writing ended up getting me all the way to England where I studied English, which seems apropos, in the hopes of one day becoming a journalist. I screwed that up rather quickly when I was given a bunch of money and decided to take off on Europe on foot and decided that school was bourgeois or something. This is what happens when you give an 18-year-old unlimited freedom. But at some point, actually I think it was in Paris when I had two euros left, my dad's fiscal conservatism kind of kicked in inside me and I realized that I, if I wanted to continue this exploratory travel process throughout my life I should probably pick a vocation that was, you know, a little easier to wrangle my way into and, you know, a little more viable economically. And not being the cleverest of teenagers I picked the music industry. I don't know how I got to England and into a school in the first place but no matter. So to get my feet wet, I ended up first going for a co-op position at the HMV HQ in Nottingham where I was unanimously hated for being plucky, having kind of a nasally accent and being enthusiastic about what was essentially a glorified, you know, retail gig, stacking CDs. But because I was operating on a notion, this fantasy, I was completely in love with the industry and I didn't care what tasks were assigned to me because I saw it as a place of unlimited potential and, you know, the beacon of social capital that everyone wants when they're a teenager. And, you know, with no creative ceiling and this sort of promise ring that life and work, you know, are never going to be ordinary, that no one's ever going to roll their eyes when you tell them what to do for a living. I wanted to do that and I wanted eccentricity to be my biggest asset because, you know, when you're 18 you're also more original than anyone can even see. Your deaths are so profound. I didn't like me at 18. I followed up with that. But anyway, so I ran out of money. We're still functioning on that level. And so I moved back to Canada and probably enrolled in this Toronto school that's a total armpit known as the Travis Institute for the Recording Arts, but of course in artist management. And it was a joke the entire time. On the first day that after we submitted our tuition checks the teachers just started laughing and were like, there are no jobs. And generally we're too hungover to show up to class. There were no supplies, no pens, nothing. And, you know, if you got really bored there was one loan desk you were doing the institution that you could look out of and watch smack deals go down on the broadest area of this Toronto if you got really bored. So after innumerable depressive episodes, eight months and, you know, 12k intuition fees I was under no illusion that I wouldn't be able to get hired at a job. And being an industrious little runt for 19 I thankfully had the skills and credentials thanks to moonlighting with labels and, you know, working, you know, internship positions with various PR companies to start my own PR firm. I did a lot of one sheets, I didn't work for labels and stuff but I primarily specialized in college radio promotion which I don't think is a big deal in Canada as it is here anyway. But I think that I did well at it because A, I probably should have gone to real college and B, I was so close to the program managers and DJ's age that I think I understood them more and I think they appreciated the fact that I was still enthused and I wasn't entirely jaded yet. But I did this for two years and I'm of success, but a lot of abject poverty and kind of clung to my ideals of what the music industry could be in order to keep myself warm at night because my hybrids they did cut off twice. And then I started managing bands and doing tour promotion and things like that and by age 22 I had actually gotten pretty successful at it and... Not bad. But by age 22 I was kind of feigning to be an entertainment lawyer, a distribution expert, things like that and I was so buried in legal documents and merch and all that crap that I suddenly went through the painful realization that I'd never been permitted to be young. After about three years I didn't even think I liked musicians anymore. That's obviously changed. I said I could partner with a label right now but at the time I felt like that because I never got to focus on my own internal and self-development and life was always people who were like 10 to 15 years older than me. And so, you know, when that happens you start to resent the flock inevitably and so I churned out a lot of bad work and, you know, made a less than graceful exit as anyone young and dramatic and having my first major deduction would be. So for the next six months I kind of lived like Wayne Campbell with my extensive collection of headsets and hair nets and through a bunch of convoluted weird circumstances I ended up meeting a company called Unspace which were just fresh and minted and every single person in my organization had a background formerly in the music industry. You know, there were like I'd go to some friends and they were skeptical of people that didn't get music and like, you know, the biggest carnal sin you could ever commit is having crappy taste. I actually think I got welcomed into the fold one night when I was drunkenly rambling about Chicone music, so there you go that's like the foundation of my entire career. But for people who are still in existence today that have interesting stories when I actually started at Unspace Pete had just made it my business partner, Pete Board had just made his own exit out of the music industry where he was a drummer and served as manager and a moderately successful band in Canada and I think we connected because we both had like that sense of nostalgia and we kind of enjoyed, I don't know the emotional equivalent of light shows and we were also kind of resentful at the time for what the industry did to us how it made us jaded. Our director of development can also put on a CV that he punched a Gallagher brother in the face at Gassenbury 1996 which was the most awesome guy to have ever especially if you know Mike because he's like really lovely and you know, passive and wonderful and there's actually some serendipity with Mike too but at the same label I was promoting when I was doing those GeoCities pages as a kid and now I come in every day after you know, being in touch with this guy who I wanted to be through a pot mail mailing list you know, when I was a kid and now we get to be excited about another industry the idealistic about that and so that kind of makes me feel good every day I'm pretty chopped about where I worked for that reason so yeah, Unspace back then was you know, unjaded and intoxicating and incredibly messy you'll be glad to know we've stopped running our business like Tony Wilson and factory records at this point that part we've unmascified but everything else still kind of works in some sort of chaos theory and that's not for everyone but it works for us because you know, we still have our client projects to keep the lights on and our hobby ends up playing the dividend at the end of the day so we do okay but primarily our environment is set up for play and what I mean by that is it's not engineered but it's a playroom it's not a ball pit a video game room or a candy room or any of those other weird things I've read about we don't want to build a more comfortable prison for people we don't want it to be so, you know amenable that people feel guilty for leaving unless they put it in 10 hours we want people to go out for lunch we want them to go home after they've committed 5 or 6 hours of work we want them to get in the rock climbing we want them to, you know, be really into cycling or, you know, play in two bands at the same time because otherwise you're not dealing with well rounded people you're not working with someone you want to be friends with because you all have just one same interest and one thread that binds you together so we don't want any of that but we kind of come together but really like a garage band because for all intents and purposes Unspace is like a studio not a clubhouse but we don't have set hours and, you know, the ground rules that generally go through the organization is just to have focus and creativity and, you know, at the end of the day all you want is a space where people want to drop in and work and then go home as they do when they please we tend to support their independent projects and facilitate introductions to the people who can assist after, you know, the Buddha was saying that the weekly stand-ups have been of, you know, and we feel the same way we recently incited those and the management team at Unspace sort of serves as pro bono managers in that light, like, we don't, you know the things that our developers work on are not Unspace projects but their success is our success like, A, for, you know, the publicity about that generates beliefs because these are our family members and we love them so of course we do that work, you know, on the back end that's really what it comes down to okay, after that ramble why do we create in this fashion and honestly the answer's short it's because you can only do what you know and this is all I've actually ever known like, I'm not a very structured rigid person in general and I don't think anyone else is on space either and this is as much for the developers as it is for the expatriated music business both music and programming are both rooted in math, you know one is no less important to the other than the other to you and you're in love with both so you know this in doing research for this talk I came across a pretty cool guide named Rob Burwell who ended up being a developer musician hybrid and he wrote it really, well actually he's only ever written one blog post but it was really interesting about how music is like programming and so, you know if someone's wrote it down more eloquently than you know, I believe you should quote so I actually wrote down the points even though I've basically been reading the whole time I'm sorry, it's my first talk to share with you guys today so his first point was musicians become programmers and generally not the other way around simply because those gigs actually pay the bills pretty straight forward two, creating music and software are simultaneously collaborative and individualistic undertakings three, musicians regardless of era are generally technically engaged the instruments themselves, the hardware often interface with other devices amps, mixers and needs to achieve different sounds composers often deal with an array of technology to get their music written and performed and or produced four, music is an abstract medium the printed note requires interpretation and execution like the written line of code there is often much more than meets the eye and five, music is a form of dismay of corporate managers try to express themselves through their code I see other co-relations here that he has an outline but I'm more of a cynical person I think than he is anyway the only analogy I can really give for this is you know that awesome band that you saw locally at one point and you know either their album or their show blew your minds and then you see them at the same Burger King for the eight consecutive years looking really sad the main thing with your developer friend who is incredibly brain gifted and creates an app that changes the world and instead it goes directly to the iTunes store and sells 100 copies and at the end of the day we come around yet again to the whole good art of ship theory and that doesn't mean that developers need to be business managers ever in fact I don't condone that it sucks but you do need the enthusiasm communication the same way a band does if they ever want to get off of life the lowest tier level of stage or actually move the 500 units they got manufactured at the plant of records the feel of failure has to be abolished so that you can be connected with the people who matter it doesn't mean that you have to speak eloquently but you do have to speak passionately but there's always people that need help and so what we try to do at the end of the day is facilitate that kind of environment for those artists aka developers we give them face time with people who matter we give them tools and we try to you know spark something that they can inevitably run it despite it's in this sense tries to be the velvet underground it wasn't just a band, it was an organization and it represented a creative community of different facets it was artists and facilitator and it was a network of stepping stone for so many of the artists that we have very deep in the archives of our iTunes and of course you know regardless of taste, big grandfathered every artist that's out there today and I realize obviously that velvet underground is like a bit pretentious thing to aspire to but we do work really hard at it and we are making good with everyone that we try to do this for so it's okay but we do know that you have to work in the right to show about so we at the end of the day we work hard to ensure that our industry is glamorous as it is productive because that helps people aspire and strive to something sort of like the way you rehearse guitar well you know depends on what era you know whether it was David Lee Roth or Johnny Greenwood that you were like eyeing on the wall you could just rehearse and you had something to aspire to and we find that glamour also helps us to explain and promote our art outsiders you know Elvis added glamour to rock and roll things like Ruby Fringe and Future Ruby help us demonstrate to the outside that what we do is exciting and so that's why we created it too is because it gave us something to exemplify outside of our community and I think everyone should be doing that and with all of this stuff that I'm saying I know we're not reinventing the wheel here just like in music nothing is completely original but everyone wants to be able to apply meaning to what they do at the end of the day and they want to sense a pride and we're not doing it for any particular MO because at the end of the day none of this comes easy and none of it is ever as profitable as it would be if you were just like whatever and focused on being an insultancy so if you're in make money don't but you know if we lose sight of that we just you know we muddle our agendas we just become kind of fixed and we become like ass hats and ruin everything that we set out to create in the first place because we're not ready to let go of that ideology yet and cream and dawn is expired early in any industry and even then you know we have a short window of time here and nothing lasts forever and so we create it's like others have to create because if no one else is going to see it then it's over so when I shield this talk originally and it wasn't meant to go off on that many tangents I was using a Hunter S. Thompson quote that he said in either the late 70s or the early 80s but whatever the case it was like the time of like coke float silver pants with the music industry and it was the music industry is a money trench a long plastic hallway where thieves and dogs there is also a negative side and the statement of this vinegar and resentment is kind of typical in the reformist parts of any industry segment and so in this respect we kind of you know refute all of the methods that came before us of how to plan events and engage our community and we you know prefer to create a myth instead because when you give people a stage you know or a potential audience they can't lose sight of why they create because someone is listening someone is watching and it's always inevitably going to mean something to someone and you know when you see your benefactors having fun you can enjoy it more too and conferences like farmhouse are actually really great for this like we're engaging with one another and I think that everyone's going to go home tonight and have something to write or something to create you don't get that with your standard mixer they remind us that we're part of a creative community and they make us feel like we're part of something bigger again and so you know at the end of the day if you want to build an inspiring environment for developers you'll see evidence that something bigger to speak that you were kind of burning for in high school is right in front of you the only things to remember with it is to not spin meals don't try to measure it in this circumstance because you can't be nice always make sure you play and have plenty of toys and you can show that hard results are attached I only have one question when are you going to put on another great event? Well we are doing Technologic right now we decided to scale it down because after it was a weird phenomenon because with Ruby Fringe and Future Ruby like we had you know promotion at the Aspart and everyone seemed really excited about it and I think that on one end it's like Toronto is really accessible but it feels inaccessible to some people and each year there's been some sort of you know wretched natural disaster coinciding with our conference it's like an airline strike garbage strike economic crash whatever people end up like bulking at the last minute so we got kind of frustrated with doing these things because our conferences well I can be you know basically open here it's like $100,000 and we don't sell that many tickets like they're an expensive undertaking and we also kind of went the anarchist approach and didn't allow any sponsors which was weird it's really hard to put these things on and honestly I've got the disease again so I'm going to go out of the live and say hopefully next year but we're not sure yet we want to like test the waters first so come to Technologic