 Hi. So my name is Valerie Shaskis. My talk is about how popular MMORPG made me a better developer. And yeah, I was initially planning on giving this talk in person. Unfortunately, I contracted COVID, so coming to you live from my Airbnb in Dublin. And I do have a Final Fantasy Shartan. It says, have you heard of the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy 14 with a free trial that you can play all the way up to Heaven's Lord? I wish I could have sworn it to be in person, but it is what it is. That's how things are sometimes. So, a little bit about me. Well, first, a disclaimer. I am not professionally affiliated with Square Enix or Final Fantasy. I do not want to openly reveal my character name just completely. It's a unique name. My real life name is unique name. I do not want to end up so. But if anyone is curious and plays and wants to hang out in game, just let me know during questions and I can send it privately. For anyone who is unfamiliar with Final Fantasy 14 or MMO gaming in general, I will give as much context as I can. And if there's anything you don't know that you, like a term or something from a story that you want clarification on, that you'd like to know, please ask. I did have a small giveaway that I can still do if people are interested. I have a little friend with me and if anyone can tell me her name in the breakout sessions, the first person who tells me her name after the talk is done will get to take her home. I'll arrange, I'll disinfect the box and arrange a handoff not at the convention center, but nearby. And yeah, you can take her home. So, yeah, that's my disclaimer. I'm not a Square Enix employee. I'm just somebody who plays the game, enjoys the game and has learned a lot from the game and wants to share that with you all. So, about me, I have 10 years of professional software development. Three of those are in Python. I'm an avid gamer, mostly RPGs, not just games though. I do a lot of Dungeons and Dragons, Pathfinder, a lot of cooperative team building, world building games. My employer is Bendy Works, which is a remote contracting and consulting company. We mostly do rails, but also with some React. We've done GraphQL. We're up at the Python. If anyone needs, is looking for contracting or consulting, I brought me a message after the talk. I'm based in Cleveland, Ohio, in the United States of America. My pronouns are she, her. I'm a cat mom. Currently have three that live with me and three that I'm fostering for when they're ready to go to their homes. And I am neurodivergent. Basically, the term neurodivergent means that you have something different with how your brain works. And it presents, it presents differently for everybody. For me, I am autistic. I have schizoaffective tendencies. It's managed with medication, but in addition to that, I've learned on how that can make me a better developer and how that can, like my experiences and lessons that I've learned can make the world of software development better, just by teaching others and just celebrating our differences. And this is my first conference speaking engagement. So jumped in the deep end, so to say. So it's been quite a trip. Yeah. So a couple of basic questions. MMO RPG gaming, it stands for massively multiplayer online role playing game. So it's an online gaming system where you make this character and you set them in a world. And this world is populated with other people who have their own characters and other characters that are computer generated that are non player characters or NPCs. And they're technically, right? Lots of different things you can do in an MMO RPG. All of them pretty much have fighting you can do leveling up. You can level up your skills in crafting or gathering your materials. You can make money, buy cool stuff to give to your friends. So lots and lots of interesting things you can get into in gaming. Final Fantasy 14 or XIV is, I believe it's currently the MMO RPG that has the largest player base, most active player base. And it's the MMO RPG that I've been almost exclusively playing since I was introduced by dear friend of mine in 2014. It is an entry into the Final Fantasy series of games, which started, I believe the 80s, and has been having new entries up until there's one actually coming out, I believe next year. And only 14 and 11 are online. And 14 has started out, not so great, but then they brought in a new developer and he gave you a complete overhaul. And with every new add on to the game, it's been gathering more and more steam. And that has led to some interesting challenges as well as successful celebrations. So as a neurodivergent developer, and a lot of what I'm going to talk about is analogy, analogous learning. So for a lot of people, especially those who are neurodivergent, analogous learning helps us essentially relating things to other things that have some similarities. Like with analogies, you find the patterns, you find the similarities that makes things stick. And so if you learn one thing that has some traits, you can learn other things that share a few traits, like learning how like it's, oh, sorry. It's a lot of it is linking interests with lessons. So if there's something you're more excited about, something that you find more interesting, you can learn about that and apply it to something that you're potentially weaker in that you find a bit more dry or harder to learn. If you work and find those similarities, find where they relate. And that's what I've been doing in the Final Fantasy world and in learning how to be a developer. So I'm going to be talking about a little bit about how different lessons I've learned. And if anyone has questions, I know they're supposed to be held towards the end, but I'm going to try to leave plenty of time for questions because I want to hear other stories and other ways that more developers have found themselves and found ways to improve the world, not just as like developing games, but being a gamer who brings certain experiences to the table as a developer. So my first lesson, always be nice. And in my time in the community, there's really, I've learned that if you're nice, if you're just genuinely helpful, take the time, help out new players, you'll get opportunities that you would have never originally come across. And if you just burn bridges, you never know what you could have lost. In the Rails community, there's a term called Minaswan, which Matt, which is the nickname of the lead Ruby developer, Matt is nice. And so we are nice. It's a little acronym there. I, Tug and Chief came up with Yena Swan, which is Yoshi P is nice. And so we are nice, which the leader of the FUN Fancy 14 community because by Yoshi P has, he's, he's a really nice guy. He's expressed like desire for the community to be welcoming, to be open. So sending a good example, always being nice and never really earning your chances for opportunities. And a lot of things I've learned about the game that may not have had many applications to real life, I learned because I was nice to somebody. So they taught me. And it's honestly been a lot of interesting opportunities. Next lesson. This was an interesting one. Sometimes it's better to take a chance and ask for forgiveness rather than permission. So the story behind this one is I was at a convention for Final Fantasy in early 2017, 10 minutes left until Q&A. Okay. I was at a convention in early 2017 where the head of Square Enix was there to just present an award, but that was all he was doing. And I didn't quite realize the significance of him being there. So I went up, when he was kind of walking around the floor, chatted with him for a bit and got his autograph. And apparently that was a huge deal because even the community team in that location wouldn't dare ask him for his autograph. But it was an interesting experience. And actually, the next convention, he was more on the floor, more interacting with the crowd and giving everybody autographs. So I like to think that he, that my being a little audacious might have helped out. So yeah, strengths and weaknesses. Essentially, in my time as a developer, I've learned how to, that I should know what I'm good at and excel in it, but also know what I'm not as good at and get comfortable with it so I can be well-rounded. Basically, what can I do that no one else can and use that as my strength? And what can I learn from others? Like, I'm very good at playing the in-game markets, making money, doing crafting, getting the side stuff. But I'm not as good of a fighter, but you need to do some fighting to advance in the game. So always be nice, keep opportunities open, and learn from the people who are good at fighting and teaching them a little bit about the crafting and gathering aspects of the game doesn't hurt. And then this is probably my most interesting story, the housing crisis. I do want to touch on this before we go to questions, but this will probably be the last lesson I touch on before I'll call it and go to questions. So I want to say it was 2018 where there was an interesting switch to the housing system. Now, lots of MMORPGs, you can make your own house. And Final Fantasy's housing system, the decorating of it, is really intricate. Lots of people want houses. And I play on a rather large server. So housing was at a premium and it is very hard to acquire housing in the game. It's there have been articles written on it. Any player who has tried to get a house in the past year or so can tell you that even on the smaller servers it's been a challenge. So they introduced a housing system where at some point between zero and 24 hours an empty house would come up for sale. And so people who really wanted housing would just spend 24 hours clicking there or click as soon as they saw the house to try and buy it. And I thought this was rather unfair and curious. So myself and a few other people on the larger servers, we noticed that data doesn't lie and something was up. The houses weren't selling at any time from zero to 24 hours. Almost without exception, they were selling from 8 to 14 hours after the house went down. And another thing I learned was, yeah, it held true. We dispensed this information, it actually got known in the community as prime time. And we might have helped out a lot of people by just, hey, you don't have to ruin your risks like this. Wait until it's been 8 hours. There was also, and also if you don't like the data, it still doesn't lie. There was a community that I was helping with that it set up notifications of when we found these houses available so that people would know like, hey, it's been 8 hours up now because we found it 8 hours ago. And I ignored signs and data that I was getting overwhelmed that running this was taking a toll on me, that one of my weaknesses was running communities. And I eventually found out that like, yeah, I need to take a step back from this. And I took a step back from leading that in other communities and then stepped aside that more people who are more qualified to step in and things are doing a lot better. They have changed the housing system, but it's a lot nicer now, which if you know a good luck on your results in 8 minutes. One other thing I want to touch on, this is more about a recent change, but I know we don't have time, is my greatest kind of joys and successes have been finding like product viability. If you want a product, you have to make it something people want. So finding ways to provide a unique community service is really going to help you succeed. Recently, myself and some friends, we well, one of friends had the idea of getting a guide together of different fish in the game. Like any good game, Final Fantasy 14 has fish in. And we ended up making an aquarium and it got popular and more popular because people wanted to see an actual aquarium, lots of them couldn't since COVID. And we kind of worked together, trusted ourselves as a team and we didn't find her even though we had a lot of success, it was very overwhelming. Which leads me to the last lesson, teamwork and delegation. Everything I've learned from the game, I've learned that you need teamwork. When you're going into a fight, you need people in different roles, you need to support each other. And even when you're doing unusual facets of the game, like, hey, let's make an aquarium, you definitely need to support each other, you definitely need to tell each other, hey, go take a break, you're doing too much rest. And it's been an interesting experience, which, yeah, I'm hoping, hopefully I'll meet you guys somewhere in game. And, yeah, I think now would be a good time for questions. Thank you all for your time. Thanks, Valérie.