 I should be able to come up in front of this room and convey all of my mission that all of you can understand. And a format doesn't need words. So it actually works out well anyways. And something that I've learned from speaking over the years is that sometimes you speak in rooms that have lights, or actually skylights. So everyone has fancy, colorful slides. And literally, my slides are black and white because I knew this was going to happen for some reason. So my talk today is entitled, Advice that I wish someone told me 20 years ago. And the free animal is, first of all, I don't look like I've ever been programming 20 years ago. But in reality, yeah, I have been. My first programming job was in 1994, so I've been programming for 22 years. I just turned 40, which in programming years is, and I was kind of old. But I'm actually not an old person. And if I could go back a few years and say, hey, younger Brian, if you knew these kinds of things, you would be so much more awesome than you are today. So the first thing that I was going to talk about, this would be like you would see a slide here, but there's no slide. So the first thing we're going to talk about today is this whole concept of being the smartest person in the room. And the scenario is, I hear this all the time when people are saying, you should always be the dumbest person in the room. You know, you're going to learn more that way. Things are going to happen for you, because when you're in this room, actually sucking up all this knowledge would be better for you. That's kind of interesting. But I will give you all a little secret. I'm actually the smartest person in this room. And I will be willing to challenge anyone on that. You want to go, if you want to go score standardized testing, I scored 36 on the ACT. And I scored a 1590 on the SAT. On the old test, when we had two parts, we couldn't count that high. But I didn't score that. So measurably, I'm probably the smartest person in this room. But that's not what I'm here to talk about. But what I want to talk about is that when I say I want to be the smartest person in this room, I actually just want to be the smartest person that I can be. Because smart is one of those really nebulous things where we have people who are book smart. And sometimes we say things like, they're on the spectrum. They're really high up on the spectrum of autism. Or they're really smart, these things. But they can't actually tell you how to type or shoot. And then you also have people who are super smart in sports. They can go out there, and they can see the bills play. And they can just look at these plays, and they can be up in the booth, and they can be calling these plays. And they're not actually that smart, because they've been boosted to ravens on Sunday. But they can actually see that. And hold on, Sidebar, I'm from Baltimore. And I will tell you right now, the hottest thing's happening in the Bill's team is Kate from Baltimore. Tyrone Taylor, I love him. He was one of our greatest back-up facts. Ed Reed, one of your newest coordinators, he's actually the greatest safety in all time in football. But he was the greatest safety in all time in football in Baltimore. But now, we do love you all. Thank you all for letting us win the first game. And I actually like that game because it's a friendly game. Buffalo and Baltimore are actually kind of the same. We're both steel towns, or ex-steel towns, because the Japanese took that from us. But we're coming from the same cloth. We're a lot of good people here, a lot of good people there. And Eric's my cup here. It's my second time. I'm really enjoying this. Sidebar, over. I'm exactly one Brian. And what I'm actually telling you is whenever you want to be the smartest person, you can be only the smartest person that you can be. And I can't give you those rules because guess what, that doesn't make any sense. I can't tell Nicaranto how to be a smarter Nicaranto. I would just say keep on doing those amazing things. And that's just something that I want everyone to remember. I am exactly 1.0 Brian, not 100% Brian, because multiplying with percentages is harder than multiplying with rational numbers. So, whatever. So, I like to give this little brand before I actually start doing my talks, because I hate when speakers come in and they're like, hey, I'm such a such, just following on Twitter. But I haven't given you any reason to follow me on Twitter or Facebook or GitHub or Google+, or LinkedIn. But we should do that anyways. So I just have to give a little bit before. So my name is Brian Liles. I tweet at Brian L. And it's actually when I wished I did have slides because I still grind the proper way. My name is Brian, Brian, B-R-Y-A-N-L. And I feel bad for all you people who are spelled B-R-I-N because that makes no sense. I actually work for a company called VisualOcean. Who here has heard of VisualOcean? All right, so the awesome, see, VisualOcean we're out here. One of the things that people always tell me to say, the market people, they say, you gotta talk about us. And really, I think our slogan today is we are a cloud for developers. So if you're a developer, we're a cloud for you. But what does that really mean? We know what it means is that we are a company, we are a four-year-old Victor-back startup who has the expressed interest of helping small companies, small teams of developers and the individual developer get their projects online. Yes, I know there are very big incumbents in this market. I will not mention their names. But do we offer all the features they offer? No. But guess what? For 90% of the projects, for the smaller projects, you don't need all those features. And with our simple offering, that's actually going to be increasing in the next few months, immensely, is actually more than good enough. So what do I do with VisualOcean? Well, the first thing that's funny, I'm actually going through my slides and you can't see them. This slide is a nice blue. It has the new VisualOcean logo on it. So now, actually, I cut up the solutions scheme. Someone asked me earlier, it's like, what does solutions mean? Well, really what it means is that I was a developer. There, I was one of the first developers of VisualOcean, but I didn't want to be an engineer anymore. I think that being classified as an engineering is awfully limited, because everyone just says, oh, you're just an engineer. And that's why the lawyers, whoever you pay more, we still do cool stuff, but we're always going to step a little down. So as I go all smart, you guys out, I'm just going to be a salesperson. So I work in the sales room, my boss is actually a VP of sales, and I run solutioners and developer advocacy. So my job is actually just to tell people how to build awesome things with VisualOcean. So whether you want to do ops, I know Terraform, I know all these ops and projects very well. But if you also want to talk about programming, I do know Ruby, I actually spoke in Apple Suite Ruby like next door a couple of years ago. I also know Ghost Plus Plus, I know Hat School, I know Channel, I know what I'm for. I think one of the over 20 languages that I can sit down and write code in, and so it allows me to just talk to developers on their level or administration people, or people who are into DevOps. So that is another brand. And it also on our solutions architecting, which is a fancy way of saying that we have a kind of a repository full of Terraform tricks. So let's get back into this. So about being the smartest person possible, I mean, I'm telling you to be 1.0 of whoever you are. You know, I think that I need to give you a guide on how to do that. So I actually do have a simple guide to learn anything, and this has gotten me through so many, so many tribulations over the years, so many hard problems. And this all comes from a sketch on Saturday Live during, I guess a little bit during Obama's first election, and it was a slow sketch, and it kind of went like this. There's problems, and we have all these problems now in the world, and they hired an expert, and the expert was there to solve all the problems. So he's explaining this problem, and the guy says, this is how you do it. This is first, you identify the problem, and then you fix it. And then you find another problem, and then you fix it. And I'm like, wow, that's actually pretty crazy how easy that is. So I actually have a way of learning anything as well. So the first step, and I hate to tell you, you have to learn something. For you to learn anything, you're gonna actually take this hard step where you're not gonna have any knowledge or you have to learn something. And I'll give you a good example. I wanted to learn machine learning. It's a few years ago, actually. And I wanted to really get into machine learning. This is more deep learning, which is just regular old, this is talking about regression. Everyone here know what regression is? It does not matter what regression is. I'm not going to teach you that if that's the case, we know what regression is. Regression is really kind of a funky way to figure out if something else is going to happen given some inputs. And a linear regression is, let's say you have a chart, and you have dots on that chart representing something on two axes. And what you really want to do is you want to be able to draw a line on that chart, figure out, can I predict some other feature in the future? So it's like baby weight is smoking. So how many packs a day do you smoke and the baby weight would be on the Y? So how many packs do you smoke to be on the Y axis? And the baby weight will be on the X axis. So we could get this data into creative regressions. Probably not a good path, but I'm sure something will happen. So I want to learn machine learning. And the problem is that you need to know something. We can't all, we can't walk into computers and programming without knowing something. So really what you need to do is I'm saying, when I say learn something, you need to know something. In this case, I just need to know a little bit of linear algebra. And to this point, I mean I went through school and I was actually good at linear algebra, but I was only good at it in the book way where I could pass any test that you gave me on linear algebra that I would never know. I would never have an application where I would say this is where I'm gonna just bust out a matrix and this would solve all my problems. But just remember, learn something. So here's, so that's step one. Step two is actually more interesting. Step two is if you want to learn something new, you should always learn that new thing in the kind of context of something you already know. And the example here is pretty cool. So let's say we know the Pyrographic theorem. Does everyone know this? Shout it out, everybody knows that actually. You'd be very surprised how much our country is so happy to be ignorant about the simple things like that. If I'm here, I expect everyone here to know a squared plus b squared plus c squared. But you know, I went somewhere else and I gave this talk to a general audience and I said by Pyrographic theorem, somebody might say that I yelled a slur of them. So we need to, so it's a weird thing, but it is a truth. So I want to learn how to do something in the new programming language. Let's say I'm actually going to start learning F-sharp, something I'm gonna do. So what I would always do is since I know the a squared plus b squared plus c squared, if I'm learning F-sharp, I will always write a Pypagorean theorem, solver in the new language because I'm only learning one thing and I'm not learning two things. A lot of times, and I see this with bootcamps, people who are, you know, they're teachers or they're something else. And they're like, well, I want to get programmers. They hop into these classes and they're like, and they say, well, you're just gonna learn Rails. So they go somewhere else to them, but we don't throw any of the theory of HTTP behind it. They don't understand what happens when you do a get. And, you know, they tell you, oh, we have controllers. They don't tell you why. They don't understand why. You know, you have the HTTP RFC. Why that is like that is. Why do we have all those verbs? Why is this actually this way? What is the history behind that? So really what we're trying to do is, if we're teaching something, we should be teaching the new things in the context of something we already know. And the third thing that I always say is that, now that you've learned this new thing, so now that I've learned F-sharp, now I need to stretch. I need to take that knowledge of F-sharp and I need to write something that will probably be pretty hard. Maybe I won't solve it. Maybe I will. So now you know what I'm going to do. I'm going to write a Monte Carlo similar to F-sharp. Why not? Because I actually do know what a Monte Carlo similar is. But it's a stretch because it's not something that's trivial. It's something that, you know, I would have to actually think about for a few weeks. And really all you're trying to do is you're not trying to accomplish that goal. You're just trying to see with the knowledge that you've learned in step two and it's something that you can actually talk about. And the fourth step is we just do this over and over again. And you'll find that if you get into this pattern, what you're going to do is you're going to realize that you're learning all the time. And no, even though as we get older and we get better in our craft, we find that I just want to go, I want to go peek around this corner because I always want to know all about these new hard things so I think we can learn from them. So that was the end of my diet learning. The next thing I want to talk about is passion. And passion is one of those words that I was going to, like everyone's like, I got passion. And I'm going to probably say that a lot of us don't have the passion that we think we do. So the first thing I want to say is that we're lucky. How many people write software at home when no one will hate you? Yeah, I'm going to guarantee that unless you're a weirdo that you're not a doctor that goes homes and operates on the stuff. I'm not that lucky. And you know, if you're an accountant, if you're a good accountant, you know, your CPA, your CPA plus, plus, plus, so I don't know how that works in CPA land. But if you're a CPA, you don't just go home and say, well, I'm going to have some devils, and I'm going to have a sick race. That's what I said. We leave our jobs at the end of the day, and we go home and we write more job stuff. That is, that's pretty lucky. And not that we have to is because we want to. I mean, I have friends here. I was actually in the virtual room when Nick Caranto says, I'm going to create this thing and it's going to do Ruby channels. I'm going to serve Ruby channels. I was there when that happened. And I remember that conversation and we were kind of like, all right, Nick. Okay. But that's what he did. And it's still going on. It's still amazing. Jim Cutter, good job, Nick. Oh, so we are the lucky ones. I like to, I mean, I am not afforded all the privileges in life due to just things and things, you know, my parents weren't rich. I have to be brown, but I will definitely recognize my privilege when it comes to being an efficient and caring person and actually loving that I can come and share these crazy ideas to other developers. So I didn't recognize that as my privilege and I am one of the lucky ones. And now I do want to talk about passion versus obsession. Some of the times people are like, I'm really passionate about Ruby. I'm really passionate about Elixir. I'm really passionate about JavaScript people. Actually, JavaScript people are way worse than this about Ruby. I'm really passionate about systems programming. Really passionate about containers. In a lot of cases, it's not passion. It's actually an obsession. And I'm not here to tell you whether you're wrong or right because who am I to tell you that you're wrong or right? I can sign up to judge you all day long. But you know what, when I actually, I don't ever want to tell anyone that you're a weirdo. I'm not trying to look at anyone when I say that. Sorry. You mean we're not all weird? Yeah. No, no, we are. We're all weird in our own ways. As a kid, we just go since they're based on the maximum of a computer, but not just a little weird. But I want us to understand that we can, and a good example would be kids and they're on their devices, they're iPads, and they watch things on the internet. When we were little, whenever I got bored, I wanted to say go outside. She would be like, Brian, you are annoying me. Leave the house. This day, kids expect to be stimulated all the time. We did it. We created all these cool devices where they can have constant stimulation. You know when we watched cartoons, it was Saturday. Or maybe in the afternoon after school. I could go turn on Nickelodeon right now and there's cartoons on. I can go to their app and watch anything I want. Any time. And what I'm trying to say is that just because code is in front of you all the time, we should not feel the need to edit all the time. Be in it until it becomes enjoyable and then we stop. And that's a heart blessing. So what are my passions? Well, I actually care about, I know I don't know all of you, but I do care about all of your successes. I mean, I want you to succeed to the point where you were like, 0.9 of me. But I do care. And that's horrible. But it's true. But I do care. The reason I come and speak at these conferences because I want to show that when someone sees someone like me come up and speak and they get some kind of inspiration, I'm like, at that time when Brian spoke about that thing that really made me go do this thing. And that's the thing that I really happen about. I really want to be your person and help you do whatever you want to do. Talk about that again a little bit. So what are your passions? Do you ever think about that? Do you ever take a step back when you think, well, after you make enough money to pay the bills, hopefully you will all make enough money to pay the bills. I mean, I really hope that. And not because I think that we all are paid that way. I just hope that anyone, I hate to see that we have jobs out there that have wages that don't actually allow people to pay. Their friends have a car and then eat. Why should they have to make a choice between those? So I hope that everyone has that. So there was a funny picture. There was a slide that says sidebar. I don't even know why I put that in there. But the next thing I want to talk about is leveling up your career. And the caveat that I have here is it's leveling up your career without becoming someone you hate. Because it's really easy. I'll tell you, if you want to be rich, I don't know, if you want to be wealthy, there's an easy way to be wealthy. I actually tell you how to do this. You basically, you do go to high school. You go to a pretty good college. You learn computer science and stuff. And then you go apply to a couple of companies. You either apply to like the Google, I mean, or Google, Facebook, Apple in the Valley. Or you go to one of the big consulting places. So you go to day in Tennessee, day out in the center, you do that. You, your first year, 22 years old, you will probably make $100,000 a year. I mean cash and equity. 10 years ahead, you might be making $300,000 a year. And if you take that, you take $300,000 and you add for $33,000 and you multiply that by three. Just think about that. Every three years, the Ford's axis, you're pulling in a million dollars. I mean, you got to pay them for Sam and you have kids. You got to pay for that. If you're the next wife, you got to pay for her. If you're the next husband, you have to pay for him. Ford is the next spouse. But think about that. You've actually created for yourself a million dollars, but you might hate yourself for doing all that stuff. There's another way, and I'm actually, I'm not talking about money. I'm not actually just crazy about money as it sounds. The first thing I would say is that you only strive to attain what you need. And what does that mean? Well, what's your passion in life? What do you like? What makes you happy? I've had a couple of examples in my career where I've actually been extremely successful and people gave me stuff. I didn't know what to do with it. And now, I work for a startup and they pay me pretty well, but the money, past a certain point, past paying for my house, my bills, how much of our money I have to give away, and then a fun thing or two. Everything else, and then savings for whenever I get older, everything else is an extra. And I'm not in the mindset where I think that, you know what, if I had $2 million for what I do with it, well, I'd probably get none of it away because why, I'm spending all this money, and it's not doing the world any good. All I'm doing is keeping this wealth and I'm basically making banks money. And why would I want to do that? I mean, I'm not hitting on banks. I actually think banks are very important, but I can be doing so much better with my life. So I'm only thinking to myself I'm only gonna try to get what I can actually do. And a lot of things that I want people to understand so you don't want to hate yourself, you don't want to know how to distance your work from a chore. Because everyone, you know, we write code, we love career pill projects. I love starting a new project and just writing it, compiling it, and like, then I, yeah, I say compiling it. I write Go and C++ mainly these days. So I actually have to compile that. For you Ruby people, it's like, when you run Ruby, whatever, it creates an executable so I never need to Ruby command anymore. So hopefully that helps. But really what it is, is that I want to learn how, or actually I do know how to do this now, is that I don't want my work to be as short. I don't want my career, anything that I've ever decided to do, to actually feel like, oh, I have to get to work. And I'm like, you know, I gotta work, I work from home now, but I do travel a lot. Every morning when I work for Digital Ocean, I'm always like, hey, you know, this is pretty exciting, I'm gonna do some pretty cool things today, and I'm gonna stick to that to myself. At the point where, even though it's not even a testament about the company, the company's great, I would actually encourage everyone who'll apply, and really want to work there. But think about this. If your job is something where you're like, oh, I have to go write this code again, or I have to write these tests, or I have to talk to this person. At that point, your job, your work, have become mature, and there's a couple things you can do. First of all, I would, probably for me, I would quit because I value being happy over anything else. And the second thing you can do is you can figure out what that problem is, and you should go fix it. And you know we have a higher amount of burnout in our industry, and one of the reasons we do is because people internalize that stuff. Whenever you just, when you look at what makes all your money as a chore, you start to hate life. And when you start to hate life, you get this burnout thing and things never are good. So think about that. We're in an industry where, you know, a low, inter-programming job, me and my 60 kids, that's still above what middle classes. And I had this conversation with someone last night, think about it, developers in our industry, for, you know, I'm not talking about regional areas, but software developers in general, aren't that middle class that we're, that our government is thinking about helping? They're actually making less than we do. So we need to think about that, we're making all decisions and thinking that we're the middle, we're not the middle. Not even close. So this is, this next thing is a particular rant that I have and I hear this all the time and I just want to, I'm glad this is being recorded. I'm actually gonna snip this piece out of the top. I'm just gonna send this to people when I see them doing it. Lastly, I just want to podcast. And the young lady out there said, I see this person and I just love what they're doing. They're following, they have this site, they're talking with this conference, they're doing all these amazing things and I wish I could be like her. And I'm like, well no, actually, that's the wrong thing. We need to stop, first of all, we can't model ourselves on someone else's successes. We gotta stop doing that. When you idolize someone else's success, you forget about all the hard work. You forget that the only reason that they know how to do that thing is because they have no friends and the only thing they can do is at home was practicing this thing. Like, what will they say playing the piano? The reason they played that melody so well is because it's all they did for five years and we don't like to talk about that piece. What we'd like to talk about is, look at how nice they play now. So we gotta stop modeling that. We have to, if you wanna pattern yourself off someone else, you need to ask them. So, how did you get here? And not only did you need to ask them how did they get here, you gotta ask them how they felt as they were getting there. You just need to understand that because that success only comes from all the hard work and all the feelings that they had before. Next slide. I don't know if you can see these toilet slides. So, this next thing is one path not hitting yourself is this term's actually died down but I still have to talk about it. The term of a 10X developer. Nothing worse than a 10X developer. And you know what? There are 321 million United States citizens. There are 7 million people in the world. Best believe just, I mean, I'm not great at math but I know math. That math says that there are people who are 10 times better than anyone in here. There are people who are 15 to 20 or 40 times better than anyone in here. You probably will never be that person. And we see on forums, we see in job descriptions that people are looking for, I hate to say it, I know here comes the French part, Rob Starr, Ninja, you know, 10X developer and you're like, I hate that. But people are trying to be that developer, trying to be a 10X. So, I can actually give you a simple prescription of how to be a 10X. Unless you are a one person consultant, see, you aren't. And really, we should not measure, I mean, only when it comes to review time and still be very careful about measuring the end of the output of an individual. What we really should be doing is measuring the aggregate. And as a, and really all we should be doing is trying to make everyone around us better. So, you know, if you're better at this kinds of algorithms and actually just doing algorithm work, you should be giving that knowledge to others. And if you understand how testing works or you understand how systems work, you should be giving that knowledge. And really what you're doing is every time you give that knowledge to someone else that has to ask you, you're actually increasing the multiplier of the team. Because you were, you're very important because you were there on the team, but you're also sort of important because you give other people tickets that they can grow. So now you're just multiplying and your multiplier will fill up. So just think about that. So, because it's keynote, I can talk about whatever I want. And slide 31 says my life playing on it. So, I always knew I was going to go to the computers. My father taught me a computer when I was 12 because he was in the army. And he said, he worked to actually, I'm not kidding you, my dad works at some secret military base where they did crazy stuff. And he's like, they're all talking about this stuff right now. Maybe you should learn it. And he brought me a computer and he bought me books. And these are programming variables in C. So I thought that programming was C. Like I didn't get the, I didn't get any, I didn't, this is way before the lab. I mean, I was only 12 years old. So then in the 80s. You want to remember the 80s? Hang on the old ladies, dad. No, it's not bad. I remember almost all, I remember most of the 80s. I hope you had the best music. Are you kidding me? I remember most of the 80s. And now, you know, I have some of the people that I've been to are in their low 20s. And I'm like, and they're calling me sir. Matter of fact, FU and your premise, I'm not going to use, I don't use those words, but yeah. So I had a very young age. I do those things in computers. So I knew that I was going to get a job doing computer things. But you know, people who aren't in this industry, like you say, so what do you do? I program computers. And they're like, yeah, pretty cool. And they keep on walking. And think about it. There's people who write a Fortran. There's like people who wrote all of the Fortran calculations for doing everything that's fast on the internet right now. You'd realize that there's one map, there's two mathematical projects that power like every other back in the internet. And it's written in Fortran. Pretty crazy. But then you have people who who are starting off in HTML. And they call themselves programmers. You know, they're starting on JavaScript. They call themselves programmers. But are they the same thing? No, they're not the same thing. And that's not bad. Because you know what? There's doctors that pull babies out. And there's doctors that do other things as well. So there's, like I always say this, it takes all types. But I knew I was gonna do this. So now that I've had some level of success in this, I'm actually having a new plan. And my new plan now is sharing my life lessons, whether they're hard life lessons or soft life lessons, about I want to help people who are getting into software development. I want to help you level up your career. But you know, and that's where a lot of people stop. I wanna help developers. But there's another thing that we don't realize is that there are people who could be great developers that don't even know this because due to life, they didn't get the high school education that couldn't afford college. Now they work to do things like, I drive a bus because guess what? It's a job and pays me every week. Or we do sanitation. Or we do this. And those people could be good developers too. So now I've been thinking about is how can I create a launching point for people who can't find this career? Because I'll tell you what, it is a Thursday and it is 10, 25 and I have basically just been shoveling stuff with you. It may be right, it may not be right. But look at that, it's a great privilege. And I want others to be able to at least have the opportunity to one day get in front of a crowd and just talk crap for half an hour. But you know, I say that to a lot. But really what I'm saying is that we as an industry would figure out how to increase our, I think it's the word type lines because when we say type lines, it's about diversity and then it's about the size of it. I'm not talking about that. What I'm talking about is that our industry isn't very accessible for people who aren't in the now. And I don't know how we do this, but it's something that I think about as I am not waiting actually, as I am approaching my climates. Because I have 20 more years. And the last thing that I think of in my life plan is being happy. How many of you can say that you're happy at what you do? A year's like, this is amazing, I'm super happy. And that's just, I mean, most of you in here are like, yeah, I'm happy, come on. I've worked, my brother does, title change electionable events. It's dangerous. As a matter of fact, last year, around a year ago, we literally got blown up and they thought we're not getting those congrats, but it's kind of a jerk, yeah, I'm a fighter, so we lit it. And I think about that. My job, the hardest thing that I might get is something that might happen to me. I might trip all the way to the bathroom. I might get carpal tunnel. Or you know what, I might get a little bit of headache. I look at computers for a long. And I think that, you know, those are the worst things that can happen to me. Physically, I'm super happy where I am. I don't know how other people would be super happy where they are. So, we're on a dance move now. So where do we go from here? And I really wish I could show you this slide. I'm not just number eight, we're down. It says, I'm keeping an event, a coding conference, and not talking much about coding. And then there was this whole face. Okay, maybe there's something that says spoiler alert. I don't know what I was thinking here. It's better on the screen. Ah, I don't know what to talk about. So this whole thing, we call most of us in here our developers, or we work in some process to support development and sales software. I'm pretty much, I'm going to guess that's most of us in here, Keith. But we have to realize that, you know, creating software is more than typing on a keyboard. And sometimes you forget that. We always think that, hey, we're developers, I developed this. But now we have a generation of developers, and I'm going to give you one of those back in my day talks. In my day, the people who wrote the software actually had to deploy the software. And we didn't maybe, we didn't make any maybe noises. We didn't complain when we actually had to take that tar file and copy it to a server. These days, I'd actually be running to the developer and be like, won't we just write software so someone else can voice it? And I'm like, no, no, stop that. Stop calling yourself a full stack developer and think that's all you can do. Which gets me onto another ramp. I'm going to pick on someone in here. Does anyone here have a title, full stack developer? And it's not your fault, the man didn't see you. The people who figured out what the stack was, you know, the stack is tall. Stack goes down to bits and bytes, and it goes out to whatever else you're delivering. But, you know, if you're writing JavaScript, and you're in a web, you can write code for web browser and you actually happen to be able to write code for a server, that's actually really promising you can call yourself a full stack because there's networking code. There's code that's actually, you know, there's, we think of the OSI model. I know I'm using the word about, you know, turn function, OSI model. It's talking about the layers of networking. So you go all the way down from the physical and you know, basically what your presentation layer is. So you can see what's coming out of your web browser. There's a lot of stuff in there. And if your stack only touches the top, like layer seven, which is actually the top of the OSI model, you are not a full stack developer. My point is that we actually need more full stack developers. We need more developers who aren't afraid of SSH. But then we need more developers, and this one we're all like, yeah, I'm not afraid of SSH. But then we need developers who understand why actually logging into servers is wrong because every time you log into a server and people put it behind, it actually makes that server different than every other server in a cluster. So by logging in, you're actually shooting yourself in the foot, and we need developers to understand the power of automation. And then that all of us will understand that servers are, I don't know, points at which you give a server a name. You basically have made, I know there's this whole tech versus cattle conversation, but you make a head. There's so many, and the only thing, the only point that I'm trying to make to you is that there's so much more involved and that we can constantly be improving. Because I'm sure that I've said something here, we're like, why? No idea what he's talking about. So hopefully, just don't wiggle it. It'll be, I have some good pictures on the internet where I'm actually bigger than I am now. I'm actually, best year, I'm down 30 pounds. Yeah. Thank you. My plan was, actually I'll tell you what, this is just shows on my mind things. You know how I lost weight? I went to the doctor because I wanted to, I was going to India and I wanted to sit pro because I was sure that I was gonna get something while I was drinking water in India, even though I stayed in hotel the entire time I was there. But what I did, it's like I said, sit pro, I took my blood pressure and I'm like, you have pre-hypertension. I'm like, well, what the hell is that? And I looked it up and I realized that the way to solve that was to lose weight. So I didn't lose weight because I thought it was heavy. I just lost weight because I thought the world needed me for a little bit longer, so I'm gonna be healthier. But you know, think about that. In my mind, that's what it took for me. It didn't take the eating healthy to do that. It's like, no, I just don't wanna die next year. So just think about that. That's what drives me. So I'm gonna link you with a couple things. Understand the power of words. Notice I gave you a talk with no slides. And I was pretty confident in doing this. I actually had no problem. I probably couldn't give me this talk mostly from memory. And I know why because I only wrote it yesterday. But I had the notes for weeks. I just like to wait until a half-school the last minute to create slides because you never know how you feel about colors. So remember the power of words. The power of words are good. I actually have more than three or four people now who work at big companies that said that I am here now because of something you said to me in passing in 1995. Or something you said to me where you were yelling at me about how bad my code was and I didn't understand. But now I see what you were talking about. It's the passion. I want all of you all to do good. I want all of you all to be great. And then whenever you get there, I want you to say that it's something that Brian said to me on September 15, 2016, got me there. I don't want any money. I just want that footnote in your memoir. And I'll leave you with one last thing. I want to be your Apollo. I can't be your muse, because I looked this morning up and poured out your muse. Actually, it's a ginger turn. And I had to go figure out what the male counterpart of this is. And then it's been like way off on the internet. I actually doubted the simulations of drugs. I don't understand how I got there. But then I wound up with Ash and I found that Apollo is actually the proper word here. So I want to be the reason that you think, or now I actually should say it like, I want to be one of the reasons that you think that you can be great. And I want to be one of the reasons that you go out and do great things. So with that, the end. Thank you. All right.