 Thank you all so, so much for making BangBangCon 2018 such a rousing success. Another round of applause for all of our speakers, please. Thank you so much. I hope you all had at least as much fun as I did. And thank you again to the App Nexus folks for hosting us. Thank you again to Confreaks. Thank you again to Mirabai. And also, here is Julia Evans to thank our sponsors. That applause would better be for our sponsors. Okay, I want to talk about a really interesting topic, which is how we fund this conference and what that's about. So there are a lot of things that we spend money on at BangBangCon. For example, speakers need to come here and not all of them can afford to easily, right? From like, far. And so we pay for speakers' travel. This year we started paying honorariums for our speakers to recognize some of the hard work that they do a little bit, even though I don't think we could do that enough, like it's not possible. And we get to do all these cool things, like we get to have open captioning and we get to record the videos and we get to have food. And this is all of this is sort of like in conflict with this other thing we do, which is we try to make BangBangCon radically affordable, right? Like we could be like, oh, this conference is super popular and therefore we will just charge like $10 trillion for tickets, but we don't want to do that, right? That's like not what BangBangCon is about. So we want to make it sliding scale, pay what you want, which we do, which is great. So like one thing I want to talk about is like sort of the emotional experience of being a conference organizer and running a conference. And so the way it works is you're like, OK, we're going to have a conference everyone and you open the CFP and they're like, OK, it's happening. And they're like, great, time to pay for it. Like how are we going to actually have money so that we can actually have a conference, right? And of course, the way this works is we have amazing sponsors who are here and something that was very exciting that happened this year. So the first year we were like, what is the sponsor? How do we do it? And then people helped us and it was amazing. We had to go out and ask a lot of people, right? And then some of those people said, yes, we believe that you're a real conference and we will sponsor you, which was sort of surprising and wonderful. I have a lot of appreciation for those people. But an amazing thing that happened this year is actually like we were like, hey, we need sponsors this year. And then people came to us and like they emailed me and they were like, Julia, I would like to sponsor Bang Bang Con. And I was like, oh, perfect. Wonderful. Thank you. And we didn't need to do as much outreach. I think actually everyone just came to us, which was fantastic. And so I want to call out some of these people. One other cool thing that's been happening is we have repeat sponsors. For example, today, this year, Bang Bang Con is at AppSense. This is last year at AppSense. So they've supported us for two years. Managed by Q and Comcast have also supported us for two years, which is amazing. The RecurR Center and Stripe have sponsored Bang Bang Con every year since the beginning, which is wonderful. And we have new sponsors, right? Who just started sponsoring us this year, who we love just as much. 3M is a phenomenal sponsor who's new this year. And we have Twilio, I mean, the Azure Developer Advocates team and Merrill and Adobe Typekit. And it's like, it's like outrageous. People will just be like, oh, can I sponsor too? And I'm like, yeah, please. And it's really cool because for every one of these sponsors, it's like a pretty significant chunk of our overall budget, right? Which I think is really great. So yeah, thank you to all the sponsors. And one thing that I think is cool is like, I think that a lot of sponsors say to us is they're like, oh, we want to build inclusive companies and we want to make the world better. We want to show that we care about that. I'm like, oh, cool, me too. Like, I would also like to build a more inclusive tech industry. Maybe we can all do that together. And okay, the last exciting thing that happened, there are a lot of exciting things, I'm sorry. The last exciting thing that happened is this year, we ended up with a little bit of extra money. Like we now are not operating on like a zero. Like we were on the conference and then our bank end is at zero. And having extra money allows us to do really cool things which we're gonna announce later. We hope, like April mentioned yesterday, that Bang Bang Khan is a reminder of why you became a developer in the first place or got into software or hardware or whatever it is that you do that you enjoy. And there's a lot of joy and excitement and surprise in computing. And we hope like every year that you leave this venue inspired, engaged and fired up about making the world a better place through the work that you do. I want to share a quick story with you which is tradition here which is the origin story of Bang Bang Khan. So, sorry, the font is a little small. I hope everyone can read on the things but I'll read it out also. So, Recurse Center which is a wonderful program like a writer's workshop for programmers here in New York City who is like affiliated or has been or knows Recurse Center. Yeah, a lot of you. It's totally okay if you don't, that's fine. But now you do. So, every year they hold what's called Never Graduate Week or Alumni Week where everybody gets back together if possible and codes together or whatever. And so, Maggie who used to be an organizer, organizer emeritus of Bang Bang Khan was asking, hey, is everyone coming for Alumni Week? And Alex who if you'll remember from the Pokemon talk, I was like, yeah, hopefully. And Ian said, yeah, well, my boss said if I can find a conference in New York that week that's at least semi-work related, they'll pay for my flight. Anyway, that would save me a bunch of cash and some PTO also. So, yeah, all right, well, I might be able to afford it maybe but hopefully there's like an excuse to expense it. And Alex says, make up a nice conf website, pretend you're going, then go. It's foolproof. I wanna remind you, this is in 2013, Bang Bang Khan, this is before all of this. Julia Evans says, you could organize a real conference by May if you wanted to have no time probably. And Alex says, I'll even do it for you so you don't get fired. And so, Alex suggests the first draft title which is Julia Evans blog posts, Khan. I don't know if you've read Julia Evans's blog post but you should. Allison who was at the time a facilitator at Recurse says, I would attend the hell out of that, is there a CFP? And so Ian's like, yeah, spending a week there should be work related enough. I don't really need a conference, like it's cool. But Julia says, submit a talk and requirements are it must contain at least three exclamation marks in the title. Maybe we'll call it exclamation mark Khan or exclamation mark, exclamation mark, exclamation mark Khan, which is kind of a mouthful. So Maggie says, well, why don't we pronounce it bang bang bang Khan? And then Julia says, well, I would actually go to that. All right, Ian, I got your back. Bang bang bang Khan just needs a website. Ian's like, bang bang Khan is a little easier to pronounce. All right, cool. Well bangbangcon.com is available and Alex is like, all right, great, let's get it. Now we need space, we need a chair, we need everything, whatever. And Julia Evans writes the first call for proposal, CFP, it's a programming conference about what excites us, blah blah blah. The only requirement is that your talk is programming related and has an exclamation mark in the title, which is still pretty much our requirements. The one thing that we have changed is that at the time we encourage what we called upwardly style submissions. You won't believe this one weird GCC bug. All right, no, but we're not actually doing this. This isn't actually happening. No, of course not. Julia says, I'm not even allowed to organize conferences right now. All right, so Alex is just ignoring all of that and charging ahead and says, well bangbangcon is easier to say, so I'm gonna register the website. All right, cool, are we gonna have tracks at this conference and it's like, ah, maybe. And so Alex is like, all right, well I'm about to register it, speak now. One year, three years, five years? This is five years. I was actually, I was going through these slides and I looked at this slide and I said, oh no, are we about to run out of our domain name registration? I gotta go check. Fortunately it's on auto renew now, so now we have to have a conference forever, I guess. All right, Alex says, I am now the proud owner of bangbangcon.com, Julia Evans amaze, wow. Alex says, wait, Leo says awesome. Alex says, did I just register bangbangcorn.com with an R by mistake? Yes he did. I love this, Alan says, don't worry, it's just a pivot. We do actually own bangbangcorn.com. And the funny story is, so we had to make an LLC so that we could do finance things and we were like, oh man, what's the name for our LLC gonna be? Well of course, bangbangcorn, LLC. And so I enjoy the fact that these corporations have to write a check to bangbangcorn, LLC every year. And Nick, a facilitator at Hacker School, says Hacker School will host it, which used to be the name of Recurs Center. Ian's like, yeah, now I get to go to New York City for free. And Alex is like, great, we're doing this. And that was 2014's bangbangcon. So bangbangcon obviously exceeded expectations of which there were zero. And we have thought a lot about how we scale bangbangcon. Like how do we make bangbangcon accessible? How do we make bangbangcon meet the demand for that people want? Bangbangcon, obviously. I actually, I wanna invite the founders of Starcon up here for just a moment to talk about that. Because I think this is a wonderful example of how we want to scale bangbangcon, what we call horizontally, which is that we're gonna inspire other people to start events just like bangbangcon. So come on up. Hi everyone. There's a lot of people from up here. So my name's Arsia, this is Anna. This is Evie. And we're from Waterloo, which is in Canada. So last year around February, we attended a conference called HelloCon, which was held in Toronto. And Josh, who is somewhere in this room, there he is. So Josh helped organize it and we attended it. And it was basically like bangbangcon, but Canadian. And make of that like what you will, but it happened and it was amazing. And I think halfway through the conference, I turned to the two of them and I'm like, let's do this in Waterloo. We can totally do this. And I think that evening over like past though, we were like, we're gonna do this. It's gonna be just like bangbangcon because we attended bangbangcon a few months later and there were so many exciting experiences and projects and stories that we heard from people. And we were like, no way this is like contained in New York. These have to exist in places besides New York and America. And we go to Waterloo, which is like known for computer science. And we were like, this has to exist. There have to be people who have things that they wanna stay and share with people who maybe can't come to New York or can't travel or can't afford to or don't get in. Because there's like what, 30 slots here to speak and how many applications does bangbangcon get? Hundreds, hundreds, right, 300. So last year, no, this year. Oh my God, it was this year. It was in January, okay. So this year in January, we held StarkOn for the first time. And it was really great. I wanna let Anna talk about the meaning behind StarkOn and like why we called it that. Because it was actually her idea. We don't have like a screenshot for that because it was like an IRL meeting. But yeah. Actually coming up with the name for this conference is like the first thing on my resume. I'm really proud of it. So again, we were really inspired by bangbangcon and kind of going off of the whole like, you know, the exclamation point. It means not in a lot of languages. Oh, can people hear me? I lost my train of thought. We're kind of going off that regex theme. I just started like brainstorming and putting out like all I could remember from like second year computer science like the random regex course we had and we came up with StarkOn. So the asterisk has a couple of different meanings. The first one meaning that everyone is welcome. It's the wild card symbol. It matches everything. It matches you. And the other part of it being that we also wanted to like bangbangcon, make it technical but make it broadly technical. So we don't just want to hear about sis calls, fedora. You're really kind of esoteric tech stuff but also culture and ways that speakers are impacting tech and everyone's impacting tech. And I guess the last part of it is it's a light bulb which is kind of cute and fun. Lightning talks? Lightning talks. That was the other pun, yeah. Yeah, that's kind of our story in a nutshell. Yeah, so I just want to pitch in and say that organizing a conference is definitely harder than we thought that rainy night in Toronto over pasta. We really thought we had free time. But we got over 100 applications and it was like our first run and we were expecting like 30 applications for 20 slots because we didn't know how far the reach of this would be. So if any of you are kind of thinking we could do a conference in Insert Your City, you probably can if you have the right resources, if you have enough people who care about this. And I encourage you to like take that idea and like run with it. Don't take too much, just do it. It'll happen, it'll be great. And next year you'll be here talking about your con. So, yeah. Are we gonna get it again? Oh yeah! Yeah! Sponsor us, or apply to speak clear. Thank you all. I want to echo that sentiment. If you are interested in starting your own conference, Bang Bang Con and its organizers are here as resources for you. We're happy to share the wisdom we've picked up over the last five years. We're happy to connect you with our network of other people who have been inspired. And actually, Star Con was our inspiration for paying our speakers this year. So it's great when we can give into the community and then the community is able to inspire us as well. But we have an exciting announcement to make. Over the past five years, Bang Bang Con has been a success thanks to you, our attendees, our speakers, our sponsors. And it's been such a success that the demand for what we're doing is much greater than we are able to meet. Anyone who has submitted a talk proposal to Bang Bang Con probably knows that we get way more strong talk proposals than we have room to accept. And anyone who's tried to buy a ticket knows that we have way more potential attendees than we have room for. That's a great problem to have, but it also means that we constantly have to disappoint people. And there's only so much that our small team of volunteers can really do. So in the long term, the solution for the inability to meet this demand is for there to be a lot more conferences inspired. And a new generation of organizers really to step up. And so, if anything, the demand for Bang Bang Con has only increased as more people experience the magic and fun of this conference format. This year, we got a record-breaking number of proposals, nearly 300, which is about as many people are in this room. And so, it's clear that we need to expand. We need to better reach people who aren't just in New York. And that includes some of the organizing team. So, first, we are expanding Bang Bang Con to the West Coast. So we will be holding our first West Coast Conference, Bang Bang Con West, in Santa Cruz, California in early 2019. Don't worry, Star Con, we won't conflict with your date. Venue will be the campus of UC Santa Cruz, which is where Lindsay, our co-organizer, is starting a new job as professor this fall. Congratulations to her. And UC Santa Cruz is providing seed funding to launch that conference, but we are still looking for more sponsors. So if you wanna help out, please get in touch. The other thing is that we're actively recruiting new organizers to help out putting on Bang Bang Con West. First, we want to make a great conference, but second, we wanna incubate a new generation of conference organizers. So by the time we're done, every organizing member of the Bang Bang Con West team will have the skills and experience to go out and launch their own conference if they want to. We don't just wanna ask people, we already know how to organize this, but we wanna find people we, oh, sorry. We don't want to just ask people we know to organize this, we wanna find people we don't know. So for the first time, we're asking people to apply to join the organizing team. And if that sounds like something that you want to do, go to bangbangcon.com slash west to learn more. That is the last slide. Thank you all so very much for coming to Bang Bang Con 2018. I hope you had a wonderful time. I hope you leave here inspired and make the world a better place through the work that you do. Thank you so much and have a good night.