 practice this before so we'll see how this goes so anyways my name is Brad Herman I'm with Hired 5.0 over 30 is the unofficial name of this talk if you can't tell this is actually a hired shirt that I tie dyed for the Grateful Dead 50th reunion concert if there's any Grateful Dead fans out there let's talk so anyways once again thank you all for coming it's super super early right now at least for me I know that you're all actually just here to see tender love but luckily my company paid you money so I get to stand up here for 10 minutes and talk about whatever the hell I feel like it's super amazing to be on this stage after all these years believe it or not I've been a part of this community for 10 years now almost at nine and a half technically the last 10 years I've got to sit in the crowd and you know look on confreaks and see some of my programming heroes stand up here and talk guys like DHH got to stand in front of people like you and say really cool things like shit and fuck and now I get to do it today this is amazing I never thought I would get to do this so when I was asked to get up here because we paid you I figured like oh I just have to give you like some sort of speech about what hire does I don't like selling though so I'm not gonna do that and luckily some guys from indeed already told you what hired does so I'm just kidding we're all friends we hung out and drank last night it's a big world so I'm gonna talk about what I really want to talk about today anyways so this is our third year sponsoring RailsConf and we do it because we like this community we love it we want to give back we're a company that's built for engineers by engineers we're built on Rails we have been since day one if you go to hire com slash RailsConf which I'm sure some of you have you can see and hear from some of hundreds of Rails engineers who've already found their dream jobs on hired there's thousands more non-rails engineers who have as well if you go to GitHub you can check out some of our open source projects we've got a ton of them and some of them are pretty cool actually not all of them are and a lot of them aren't well tested but you know that's where you guys come in so this is a community that I'm immensely proud to be a part of and I'm even more proud to be able to support it if I wasn't proud of this community and I didn't love it I wouldn't be standing here in front of you all the way from San Francisco on my 30th birthday I turned 30 this morning thank you thank you y'all can buy me drinks later I probably would have called in sick to work actually so that I could hang out in Dolores Park and dance with robot dance party and truffle man which if you've been to San Francisco you may know both of these people so that brings me to the theme of this talk I don't really like applying labels but professionally for basically the last decade I've been a Rails engineer nearly a full decade my entire 20s was spent building software in Rails and well with Ruby as well Sinatra here and there whatever I'm not always the best contributor to the community but I do love and respect it dearly because of all the brilliant curious people that many of which are in this room the amazing feedback never ending discussions and countless hours of work that we all put in there we've built so much and we've made rails something like greater than we than I ever thought it could be when I started working with it at like the 1.1 days the community is awesome it can be a little annoying sometimes go read the coffee script gets introduced into rails core comment thread and you'll see what I mean but I love it so eight years ago I dropped out of college like all of the best entrepreneurs have at the time my only real dream was to be Kevin Rose I saw this on business week and I thought it could be me in hindsight not the best move at the time I could have picked a better role model but so in 2007 I did an internship for a little company in Indianapolis building things in rails it was the only thing that I'd ever had exposure to outside of like a little bit of PHP and I won't even make a joke about that so I decided to buy a book and actually learn rails and turn this into a career of course in the 1.1 days by the time I bought the book it was severely out of date so I had no idea what the hell I was doing I had to dive headfirst in the rails community get involved in message boards groups email lists IRC channels stack overflow everything because I needed help sometimes people were assholes and you know that'll happen but mostly everyone was like pretty cool and excited to help me I was just some dumb young stranger on the internet asking for help and the rails community was there for me it was awesome because of this community and all the help that I received I was able to you know turn myself into somewhat of a real engineer start a company and raise over a hundred thousand dollars with some friends within the next year we basically just flushed it all down the toilet though so I won't talk too much about that one after that though I bounced around some companies for a while consistently throwing myself into the deep end of the pool hoping that I wouldn't sink and you know might learn to swim luckily the rails community was there for me to save my ass pretty much at every turn and it helped mold me and turn me into the engineer that I am today my parents like many in the 80s came down with a very nearly fatal case of disco fever and that resulted in me entering the world when my mom and dad were pretty young I was 12 years old when my mom and dad were as old as I am today and that's crazy when I was like 12 I thought 30 was 70 until recently my perception of 30 was that I would be retired by now and instead I live in a lovely apartment in San Francisco luckily a continuous theme throughout our lives is growth though we continue to alter our perceptions of the world as we gain new wisdom through experience along my journey over the last decade personally adapting and growing figuring out what I really value I've also had the pleasure of watching the rails community grow I've watched rails grow as a modern web framework and I've seen us mature and adapt as our own perceptions of the world technology we use who we want to be and what we want from life have changed as we all sit here this week talking interacting making new friends discussing technology learning about the future of rails I've really felt a sense of excitement much like I did at 20 years old rails 5.0 is coming soon today marks the first day of my 30s those are two things I literally couldn't have imagined a decade ago a decade that I spent building products learning and growing with you guys after watching the community framework and myself mature over this last decade I couldn't be more proud to see where we're at today the last decade we along with our framework have developed new senses of maturity stability and direction 10 years ago I was just kind of excited to build shit I was excited to use rails which was the hot sexy new thing on the market you know I didn't know what the hell I was doing now I'm not so excited about that stuff I'm really a lot more excited about the maturity and experience that we've gained together that's what really helps us build great products anyways I couldn't be happier to be up here and you know be able to give back and support this community it shaped me for like I said nearly a decade from the bottom of my heart thank you guys thanks for turning me into an engineer and I hope that I can give back more in the future and I hope that hired can can continue to tribute contribute to the community as well anyways I'm speaking at 1050 and 350 1g which I don't believe is closed down so come check it out if you want to learn a little bit about more about hired some of the features that we have and are basically our development culture I actually recommend going to the packy out one instead because that seems really cool but if you want to if you want a cultural soft talk come listen to me anyways here's the next 10 years guys cheers