 All right I'm going to get started. This session is called pivot points recognizing opportunities and turning challenges into strengths and before I get started I need to call out two family members whose permission was essential for me to be able to do this presentation. The first was my mother. She died of pulmonary fibrosis this spring. In the last few weeks of her life I visited my parents and in that time she helped me sort out details in my childhood that that I needed to have sorted out for this presentation. The second is my daughter. She doesn't realize it yet but she's kind of a superhero. So the journey that begins with two young parents being told that their youngest child was really bright but despite that brightness I've never overcome my learning disabilities. It's too far a stretch and I would never learn to read or write. My parents were told that they should prepare that I might never be independent and so through a series of pivots I learned to read and write. I became an accomplished child vocalist and completed a Bachelor of Arts earned a certification in in non-profit management and went on to complete a master of fine arts in theater and eventually became a technology professional. At many points in my life I was in the right place at the right time grabbing opportunities where they could be found whether whether it was learning to read because I wanted to sing and acquire or happening to be part of a crazy online project with a dance company when the worldwide web was in its nascent form or pushing the boundaries of what an MFA in arts administration really ought to be. Understanding those moments where your life pivots and taking advantage of them can make the difference between success and failure. When I was a small child, that to me is a small child, when I was a small child my parents discovered that I was developmentally delayed in reading and writing. I was having a hard time learning my ADCs. I was ridiculously hyper. I was engaged in obsessive and repetitive behaviors. I had trouble understanding what others were feeling although when it was explained to me I was deeply empathetic. Yet my vocabulary had developed to a degree which you wouldn't expect from a child that age. In today's terms I likely would have been labeled in three ways dyslexia attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and Asperger's syndrome. Back in the 1970s doctors weren't well equipped to make these kinds of diagnoses. In fact Asperger's wasn't recognized in Canada until the mid 1990s. So I was pinned down as being a defiant child with what they called a reversal problem short-term memory problem and an extremely short attention span. My siblings and father were part of a church choir and I desperately wanted to be part of that experience. The choir master had me read from a hymn book and I couldn't do it. He told me that until I could read I couldn't join the choir and I was inconsolable. I felt stupid and I felt left out. But my father was an English teacher and he sat down with me every night writing letters sentences longer sentences and eventually short stories on the back of used dot matrix paper that he got from work. We spent several months every night after supper drilling and I went back to Mr. Renert and asked him to test me again and he was incredulous because I had done so badly 10 weeks earlier and after the test he invited me to join the choir. If my parents had taken it at face value that I'd never learned to read or write perhaps I never would have managed it however my choice to learn to read set me on a path where once I had my eyes on a goal I could achieve it. In 1977 I was identified as a high risk child due to delays in eye hand coordination spacer relations motor skills and visual memory. I had a massive vocabulary and excellent word discrimination however traditional learning was very difficult for me. It was recommended that you should treat Matthew as if you were hard of hearing and maintain eye contact while giving oral instructions and his attention span is so short and he's so easily distracted that it is possible for him to not hear or retain oral lessons. My mind was quick to sort out a problem though but I could only focus on one thing at a time and often it was obsessive. My handwriting was patrocious I would scramble letters up and I had a hard time writing letters in the correct direction. I had behavioral issues which included some pretty angry outbreaks and in retrospect I realized that I was having significant challenges with transitions. Crowds freaked me out and they actually still do there's just too much stimulus. I also didn't understand consequences I didn't get that if I did action A that there would be consequence B and it didn't matter whether it was a good or bad consequence I just simply couldn't understand that correlation and to this day I have to think through scenarios so I understand the consequences of my actions. This happens incredibly quickly but I have to think about it and I never realized until adulthood that most people just naturally extrapolate consequences so learning to do this has been critical to my success. My parents and educators at the time were seeking ways of supporting my needs and this was challenging because I believe there was a misunderstanding of what my symptoms actually meant and how to intervene. My dad the teacher and my mother the nurse worked with my teachers to start sorting out ways to isolate me from distractions and concentrate better. As a result I ended up being enrolled in both the gifted and talented program and also remedial classes in junior high. This meant I didn't fit in anywhere as I transitioned from high to high school. I didn't fit in with the gifted kids because I was in the remedial program and I didn't fit in with the remedial kids because I was in the gifted program and the the kids that were sort of in normal normal classes I didn't have anything in common as well. It was an extremely lonely time for me. This had social impacts of its own that I didn't that really didn't resolve until until university either but it did save me from being relegated to being solely in the remedial program which is what the school wanted to do. I didn't understand this pivot point until much later in my life but it quite likely saved me from being dependent on others for for the rest of my life. So parents of people with learning differences need to demand educational opportunities outside the mainstream. Parents need to be willing to look outside the box and find opportunities for their children even when things seem hopeless and never give up. This was impactful in two ways later in my life. The first was in my transformation in university and the second saved my daughter's life but in a real way also helped me understand my own. When I finished high school I recognized that I wasn't really ready to go to university. I wasn't mature enough. High school had been difficult and while I'd never failed any classes I had a hard time concentrating and was socially extremely awkward. I didn't understand people well and they didn't understand me. I misread intentions and was often bullied. For example I was taped to the football posts, goalposts, two feet off the ground in ninth grade. My locker was broken into and a snake, a couple of crayfish and a fetal pig from the biology lab were left in their stinking formaldehyde. The stigma from junior high had followed me and I was alone, bullied and largely without a tribe. Every success since then has been colored with somebody's going to figure out that I'm worthless and this is where for me imposter syndrome began. I felt happiest when I was able to do things on my own, things that required repetitive actions. This made I was excelled in art classes where repetition with techniques like crosshatching were valued. I was able to express myself in some pretty bizarre ways and rather than being frowned on for it I received praise. I decided with the help of my parents to take a vocational art program for high school graduates and I worked in a coffee shop at the same time but I was really adrift. My parents nor I had any idea really what was going to happen next. I half-heartedly engaged in that program and left it before it was done. I was deeply sad, I felt like a fake, a fraud, and useless. But I was about to pivot and it was a moment of ridiculously good luck. My father had seen an advertisement in local newspaper for a tiny liberal arts university in the eastern townships of Quebec. The school is nestled on the convergence of two rivers and was established in 1843 with much of the architecture reflecting its affiliation with Oxford and Cambridge universities. When we toured the school it was immediately clear that the school's size only about 1700 students at the time would be perfect. I applied in fine arts and theater was accepted and received several scholarships which seemed crazy to me at the time. My largest class was about 40 people smallest about seven and I started school at the starting school feeling a bit like a fraud. I was just waiting for teachers to figure out that I really didn't belong there for it all to fall apart but it didn't and I flourished. Remember when I said the social impacts of being an experiment in mixing remedial and gifted programs didn't resolve until university? Well when I arrived nobody knew who I was. I realized that I could completely reimagine myself without any of those stigmas. At bishops I learned that you can define your own identity. I learned that when you're redefining yourself you might need to fake it until you make it but all of these things are in your control. After finishing my bachelor's degree I moved back to Ottawa and moved as a lighting tech for a local theater. I realized while doing that lighting work that I really didn't want to be a theater technician my whole life so I enrolled in a non-profit management program at the University of Ottawa which led to a job in an experimental dance company. I'd also applied to go to grad school in Virginia to complete a master of fine arts focused on arts marketing. That job ended up being an enormous pivot and one that I realized at the time and leveraged when I went to grad school. It was 1995 and I was hired to work on the website. I glibly said sure I can figure that out but in 1995 you didn't have Google to Google what is a website. I did know what the internet was because I was using a telnet to log into a crazy system called Lambda Moo, a giant free-form multi-user game and I actually met my wife there. I asked somebody on Lambda Moo what this web thing was and suddenly I was a webmaster. One of the absolutely insane things that that company did over the summer, remember this was 1995, was to collaborate in real time with multiple dance companies in different cities across Canada. They were working with the Canadian Broadcasting Company to do live feeds between the different sites and nobody had ever tried anything like that. Collaboration at distance with performers and it blew me away. When I arrived at Virginia Tech I explained to my committee what I had seen and my committee was incredible and allowed me to gather together a coalition of different departments to experiment with bleeding-edge technologies for my thesis work. So rather than researching the business of the arts doing doing marketing I was allowed to produce three works each layering on the previous experimenting with live action, stream live feeds and pre-recorded video and that work was the next pivot because I had to learn to code to manage people to string together networks to learn video codecs. So the boy that wasn't supposed to learn to read or write transformed into a technologist. All of this led to my working with the university after graduating teaching copyright law, videography, developing what I think was the first database driven tourism website with the Virginia Tourism Board and this was back in 1998. There are two parts to this lesson. First of all never be frightened to ask for what you need and want. The worst thing that can happen is that somebody could say no to you. Secondly don't be frightened to do bold and crazy things. Do something that takes you completely out of your comfort zone and assume that if you keep applying pressure to it you will make it work. Be fearless and don't let the perceived consequence fail your cripple you because the consequence of success can be life-changing. Shortly after I moved to Colorado to start my first full-time professional job I discovered a lump in my left left testicle. That lump tripled in size over the space of 15 days. I was off to surgery and then chemotherapy. I listened to calculated and sorted out what to do in a dispassionate way not dwelling on consequences. The chemo was pretty dreadful at times and to this day my hearing is affected. I have neuropathy in my fingertips and permanent tinnitus in both years. It was intense. I was in the doctor's office taking chemo through a port installed in my chest pretty much every day for two months. I brought a work lap talk to the clinic and spent my days coding. When I got home at night I would spend my evening sweating curled up in a miserable little ball. Remember when I talked about my childhood though? How I was impulsive short tempered at times often inflexible obsessed by single things and bad transitions? This caused me to be impatient with people. I would often quibble about small details and found it extremely difficult to let those small details go often to the detriment of my personal and professional relationships. This experience forced me to confront the fact that small stuff doesn't matter. I learned that holding on to those kinds of trifles and letting them stress you out was counterproductive. When I completed my treatments and came out on the other side that part of my personality had changed for the better. In 1999 I joined a company called the Western States Arts Federation. It built software for other non-profits and as the senior director of technology I was the architect for a job board. I led development on online registers for artists, writers and performing artists. I was the lead on the software that is used by nearly every street art festival in the United States to adjudicate artists to this day. I designed what I believe was the first online grant making system and all of this was written in custom G-H-B in my S-G-L. In 2006 I attended a technology symposium in Vancouver that included participants from two of the first Drupal shops in Canada. At the time I recognized in this pivot I knew that I knew that Drupal at least for a time could become a career. In fact 13 years later it's still central to my life. Later I attended a training session in Vancouver with Bright and Rain City Studios. I started building my first site in Drupal 4.5 and came to the conclusion shortly thereafter that I wanted to dive into Drupal completely and I joined PingVision, a young Drupal agency in Boulder, Colorado. A few weeks later I was at my very first Drupal con in Barcelona. Barcelona was a small Drupal con, only about 600 people but I became friends with core members of the community during that trip. Making those connections became critical about two and a half years later. Near the end of my time with PingVision I did a presentation at Drupal con Paris and it was approached by chicks after it was done. He was pretty cryptic but said that I should talk to Mike Myers. He was one of the co-founders and now public. After that conversation with Myers I was invited to come on board with the examiner.com team that was being formed. I was to shepherd the largest Drupal migration in history with people like chicks, moosh, cyberswatt, and Jeremy Andrews. Our team actually built 18% of Drupal 7 and we did this while migrating this site from cold fusion. We were using MongoDB before it was out of beta. The project had no real right to succeed but it did. I needed to be able to manage our giant remote team. I needed to communicate and work with an executive team sourced from Disney, Access, and AOL who had no experience in Drupal. I separated the consequences good and bad within the working relationship of the executive team and the dev team. I didn't focus on what could go wrong. The entire time I was working on examiner I was convinced that somebody was going to figure out I didn't have the education or the experience to have that job. I think that all of us though on that project realized how successful it could become a launching point for many careers and indeed that is what happened. But the real pivot occurred near the end of the project when Myers suggested that I offhandedly that I should run for the Drupal Association Board of Directors. That pivot wouldn't actually affect my career until about three years later. After a few years clear of the cancer my wife and I decided that we wanted to adopt a child. We'd always known that we wanted to be parents and we decided that we adopt through the foster care system because so many terribly abused children in the United States need parents. We adopted a five year old girl she had had had very difficult first few years of her life and had a lot of emotional problems in many ways that mirrored my own issues. Mine hadn't been born from a childhood of trauma but I kind of understood this kid and I'm not going to go into her stories but parenting this child has been the largest pivot of my life because I wouldn't understand my own challenges if I hadn't been confronted with hers and had to learn everything I could about reactive attachment disorder, ADHD, post-traumatic stress disorder and most recently bipolar disorder. If it hadn't been for my daughter I would have just continued coping and I wouldn't have understood my own ADHD and dyslexia and I certainly wouldn't have had the explosive realization that I was on the spectrum. When I left the examiner I cycled through a few jobs. I did a short period of time with Trellen. I worked with a small company called Fiverings Web. I joined Atten Design Group and it was at Atten that I ran for the Drupal Board of Association Board of Directors and I was elected and served for two and a half years. I sat on the board with Mike Lamb. He was from Pfizer and had a large Drupal team. Micra represents the next pivot in my story. There are three convergences that made this moment work. I knew that my time with Atten was wrapping up. I was at the second Drupal Con hosted in Barcelona and there was a Drupal Association Board meeting which meant Mike was there. I asked Mike if I could balance my ideas off of him. I wanted to talk to him about where my career might go next and he and I met over a couple of drinks, talked for several hours and at the end of it he said something like Matthew I have some ideas of what you could do for me. I'll be in touch in a few weeks. That pivot had occurred exactly four years ago. I was brought on to the team as an engineering lead for the healthcare professional portal system in Drupal 7 utilized worldwide impacting people everywhere. So you should build friendships and bridges at every point in your life because those friendships become vehicles to your success. Never be afraid to talk to those friends about what you need. Every job I've had for nearly 22 years has come to me because I asked through my network. Now you know how a kid that was never supposed to learn to read or write went from his first goal of being a chorister to being a senior manager at one of the largest companies in the world. So I have some takeaways for you. When working with your children do not set expectations through the lens of what others tell you. Let your children fail forward. Let them be fearless and when they seem adrift be present but don't dictate. When you perceive your weaknesses what you perceive your weaknesses to be might well be hidden strengths. For example being on the spectrum drives me to be a nerd and everything that I set myself to figure out. Having ADHD has allowed me to focus on many things at a time and my dyslexia has given me insight into how to teach and learn differently. What seems like personal disasters at the time like cancer can have a positive impact on your life. Look for the good not for the bad. And finally imposter syndrome is real no matter how successful you are and lots of us have it. So have empathy for others. I hope my stories have resonated for you. I thank you for listening and if you like my presentation my presentation number is 346 and I'd love you to rate it on the site. Thank you very much. And I think I might have a minute for questions if anybody has questions. If not I'm happy to meet people over coffee or beers or whatever. No. Well thank you very much for coming to my session. I appreciate it. Thanks for sharing.