 I gave a talk in a corporate last week and 90 people showed up for it and I think it was only because there were free sandwiches. Okay, we all settled? Right. Club Monte. Right. So, I'm going to set my timer and go. I'm Brandon Falls. I'm going to give a talk, BalletJS, which is how I went from being a performing artist to being a coder. You know, because of course, that's the natural progression. A little caveat, right? There's no JS in this. The JS part was a lie. I was like using a kind of a hipster irony to make fun of a kind of a hipster thing, which kind of, does it cancel it out or double it? I don't know. Anyway, there's no JavaScript in it that doesn't exist at all. So this is really just about how I made this crazy career transition. The interesting thing is on Tuesday, I'm going from doing what I am now into fun employment, which means I'm kind of reinventing. I've been a web developer and a mobile developer for about 12 years, and I have no idea what I'm going to be up to next. And really, the reason for that is that like anybody who likes to talk a little bit and can do some coding, eventually you get pulled down into the event horizon of management. And I've decided that is just not fun and not hands on enough for me. So am I scared about this transition? Do I know what's going to happen in September when I start playing with my 3D printer and all of my bits and pieces? No, I'm not really scared. And the reason is I've done it before. I've already had a huge career transition where I didn't know what was going to happen afterward. And it was when I went from being a ballet dancer to being technical. I started dancing when I was six years old, kind of a Billy Elliot thing. Most men start dancing when they're about 12 years old. Women start much younger. And I got to say that being in the dance world as a man is much easier than it is for women, just numbers and all of that. And I danced with most of the major ballet companies in the states. I worked with San Francisco Ballet and Boston Ballet and Houston Ballet and Pittsburgh Ballet and all blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and I came over to the UK and I danced with a company called Rombear, which is a contemporary dance company and career lasted a good long time. But in the end, I decided that I needed to change. And about 12 years ago, I started to switch over from that into what I do now. Why did I stop? So there's a couple of things that are going on there. Really, ballet career caps at like 35, 40 years old. You're not going to last any longer. Your body wears out. You're like a professional athlete. Well, you are a professional athlete, but in tighter clothes. And you don't get paid as much, which is the really cool part, because those guys have done that they've got Dosh and Orange Wives. Point is that I'd be retiring right about now anyway. And I thought at the time, I thought, really, I want to do something different. The other thing is that people leave school. And I mean high school at like 17 years old, and you've got to start your career. If you're not in a professional company by the time you're about 18, you're not going to be a professional dancer. So really, you're capping the amount of education you've got in your world experience is pretty locked in because ballet demands a lot. And what I found was I was going to these after performance events. We were on tour 26 weeks out of the year, and I start meeting the ambassadors and the arts council people. And I realized that all the dancers were in the corner talking to one another about the same things that they talked about when they were 17. And they really went that interesting. And once you've mixed the same couples and the same things, you've been on the road with people, it's pretty boring. And I found myself talking to people with a far wider horizon. And I thought, hmm, there's something out there. There's something other than the dance world. And the other thing is that the arts world, everything is a creative pursuit. And it's actually really pretty defined what happens when you're a professional dancer at any one given moment in a performance. You know where you're going to be on stage, what you'll be wearing, how tired you'll be, who just sweat on you, and pretty much the expression you should have on your face. So it's not the creative pursuit you think of. But the question is like, OK, yeah, we can understand why you'd want to leave all that behind. But how do you actually go about this change from like being on stage to being at a computer all day long? So let's talk about JavaScript. So the truth was I was touring 26 weeks a year, and there was a lot of time. And I was really bored of my colleagues, because 24 people, there's only so many combinations if you follow. And had a lot of time, had a laptop, and decided I'd start coding up some HTML pages because that was the thing in the day. And I thought I'd need a little bit more. So I added some JavaScript in, and then added a little bit more, and started to learn some Java, and just kind of started to build up some skills. And then I got injured. And my last year, where I knew I was probably going to retire anyway, I fractured my sacrum doing a Merce Cunningham thing. Merce Cunningham's kind of interesting. We'll talk about him later. Not so great on the body. And had about six months where I couldn't move around very properly. And they said, we're going to either course at you, or you're going to have to sit still. So 15 minutes a day, I could sit up, and I could sit at a computer, and I'd learned a bit of PHP, and I fought with Debian for a while. And I'm not sure which was more painful, the PHP or the back injury, but it was lucrative anyway, right? And so briefly over that time, got my skills up, got things put together, and got back on stage. And I actually managed to perform for about three more months after having paid for my own physio and been out of the company and realized that there was really no future for anybody who wanted to have a future in the dance world. And went right, after three months of performing, made my goodbye to the stage, had my best last performances, and decided to eff off. And so how did I get from there? I still haven't got, how did I get from there into sitting in front of Emacs all day long? And in short, I was very, very determined. And the thing that really happened was I took up a bunch of projects. I did a bunch of free sites. I started working for people in the arts organizations. I set up my own kind of mock internship. This might happen in October. And I just kept pushing and pushing and pushing and pushing and pushing and pushing. And there's a really interesting thing, because that perseverance is something that's a really important part of the dance world itself. It's kind of making your way through. Which is a really important thing of like, what are the transferable skills? Like, what really can you bring from being a professional performing artist into sitting and writing some code? Well, the obvious one is like, everybody knows music is maths, right? Did I mention the thing about leaving school at 17? So yeah, music is maths. We know that there are cadences. We know that there are patterns. We know that there's looping and there's recursion. And anybody who's read at least the first two chapters of Go To Lesher Bach to impress some people at school will know that there's this whole notion of formal systems and an iteration within music that's really fantastic. So I brought that with me in my little bag. The other thing is like, performance is actually data. If at any one moment I might be on stage, I've got to know when the piccolo goes that the girl's going to come down there. I've got to be in line with the guy in front of me and that dude over there, wearing foul clothes they had on yesterday and smells, keep your distance, got to know what's going on. All those mental placeholders are really pretty important for writing code. We have to know where in the abstraction things are going to flow. It's kind of, in a way, object orientation. You've got other human beings who are holding state. There's music, which is setting this run loop that's going along. And all of that becomes very good for holding abstractions that you can continue to manipulate as you go along. That's plausible. The other thing is like, code is actually pretty rhythmic. We've got loops. We've got recursion. We've got ways of manipulating certain phrases of things that we do. It has a vocabulary that's quite malleable. The interesting thing is that classical ballet has a really determined cadence. You know what's going to happen. You know where people will be. Contemporary dance, Merce Cunningham, for instance. They're playing whale farts and kind of rain sticks in the pit. And you don't know what's going to go on stage, because it's more like an aca actor system, like everybody's set up and ready to go in their costumes. But what comes out the other end? Well, let it fail, basically. The other thing is that dance has this kind of lexical structure. Things have phrases of movement. There is a vocabulary of movements themselves. There's certain patterns that you know are going to happen again and again. And that makes it really pretty easy to have this tool set once you've got it in place. And the other thing is, in a human sense, is if you can hold up a quite expensive ballerina and a 10,000 pound tutu, then you can probably deal with the hippo in your board room that wants the button more green and more bigger. Good skill. The other thing is that choreography has that kind of thing of, as you change from one choreographer to another, you've actually got to learn new languages. It's a bit like going from go into Haskell, into Erlang, into Java, and all the rest of it. You start to learn the ability to switch these domains and switch these abstractions really, really quickly. And that's a part of dance is that you're learning every day. Every day, you're learning new piece of choreography. I had a situation where I used to have to go on stage in two hours and learn a new role. And I had to pick it up like that. I'd learn a phrase of movement. I'd think about it going backwards so that I'd imprint it in that ability to learn and learn again and keep learning on the job is something that we all do every day. And that's why we're here in a field. The other thing is that dance has these other things which are the surprising idioms of dance itself, things that people with outside the performance world wouldn't know about. One of them is that there's a front controller. The conductor is, this is Akira Endo, who they control everything. And people don't know this, but the guy talks to you on stage. You can see him. He looks at you. He winks at you. He knows if it's fast. You know that if you get certain conductors, he's going to go too fast because he wants to get home. And you're going to dance your ass off. The other thing is there's switch statements. You need to know how to switch context between one dancer and another dancer. Or if you go on stage and you've got to switch roles, suddenly you're going to go, this happened to me. I mean, a friend happened to me. He went on stage and had to reverse everything on the fly without having ever rehearsed that before. Think about doing everything left and right differently. The other thing is like there's these crazy if and then statements. Surprisingly, I discovered through lots of partnering that if you pick up a woman who's had two shows in a day and you put it on your shoulder, then often gas and crazy things escape from them. And it's not as glamorous as you might imagine. The other thing is like returning early is a very bad thing sometimes. Unexpected things happen if you're on stage doing a loop of movement and all of a sudden you skip ahead to the next bit of movement. You've left your partner with it not knowing where you're going to be. So unexpected side effects. Immutability is a good thing. The other thing is exception handling is also something you've got to prepare yourself for. So once we had a performance in Boston where a stomach bug went through the company and there was a snowstorm and we couldn't get out of it and we had to go on stage. And what I knew had happened was I was going to do a potative for three minutes and suddenly my partner and my partner's understudy and the girl that knew it before and everyone else begged off because they were all throwing up and it turned into a three minute solo in the Wang Center in Boston with 2,000 people. Exception handling. Try catch blocks. They're a thing. So as of Tuesday, the exception handling kind of becomes something different. I don't go in and manage geeks anymore. I don't herd nerds. I don't write code necessarily that for websites and mobile like I have been, I'm actually going to be building new things. And having made the transition once before, I can't wait to do the transition again because you never know where you're going to end up. I'm off. I'm interested in 3D printing and processing and I run ultramarathons and I'm a dad and look me up and ask me questions. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.