 and the musician. So what's a classical pianist doing at a word camp? I think Simon already told you a little bit about it. Well, I'm mostly here because I'm one of the lead developers for WordPress. I go to a lot of word camps, and I've talked to a lot of you online and in person. By day, I'm the director of platform experience at this really amazing distributed agency called Tenna, where they sponsor me to work on WordPress full time. Going back in time a little bit, I've always been really into computers. This is in New York in 1980 something. I've always been really into Lego. There's possibly a theme around building things here. I'm a mom to a pretty cute kid. He also likes Lego and the notorious BIG and Nicki Minaj and everything else. But like being asked where you're from, it can be really hard to answer the question of what you do. I make WordPress, and I wouldn't change that for a moment, but my identity is still as a musician. I've been playing piano for more than 25 years. I have two degrees in it, and I'm constantly listening to music. Music is a thing that triggers the clearest memories for me. It's one of the few things that makes me short of breath and gives me goosebumps. It might be anything from arrested development, which in my world is not a TV show, just as the Breakfast Club is not a movie. Or it might be the final aria from a Richard Strauss opera. Building things is something I love to do, but it's music that sustains me. Sometimes in tech there's pressure to be a certain type of geek or a nerd or whatever you want to call it. Troops can be funny, but they also leave me feeling self-conscious about my background and identity as a classical musician, as a woman, as a hip hop loving Chinese American, as somebody who's never seen a star or doctor anything at all. So take this comic that went around a couple months ago. It's funny, for sure. But I also think that it's kind of lazy in its humor. So I don't really feel excluded from web development because of a comic, but I certainly don't feel like I'm particularly included. So in typical fashion for me, I made a joke about it as I call it out. So to be honest, I'm still kind of wondering when my beard is going to grow in, but I think my jeans are possibly working against me, maybe in more ways than one. Also it's way too hot for a beard right now, so I don't know if people with beards are doing this. As I move further away from my decades spent as a professional musician and deeper into this career technology, I've come to realize that music and web development and open source software go together a lot better than you might think. I see how our diverse backgrounds, whether chosen or not, can help us all to do bigger and better things with code. Music, like code, is a structured language. A musician's job is to take that notation and transform it into something that the audience enjoys and understands. It doesn't resemble the end product at all, unless you know what you're looking at. And even then, there's a human element of artistry that can set you apart. Everything on this screen means something, from the lines to the dots to the words and abbreviations in both Italian and German. So not only do you have to read a non-language, you have to read words that might not be in your first language while you're at it. Your audience doesn't need to know or care about that, though. They just hear what you heard at the start of my talk. If we were doing a more direct parallel, you could think of a musician as a browser or a server interpreting that code. A developer is perhaps more like a composer, able to take the components of that language and create something that becomes meaningful. But it's the same set of skills, understanding an abstractive form of expression and being able to envision how it translates. Technique without music is penantry. Music without technique is not music. This phrase was on a sign hanging in my graduate school professor's office. It's the same way I approach development today. Without a great user experience, code is just code. But of course, good technique is necessary to make that code truly do what you wanted to do in the first place. It's also a part of maintaining long-term health, avoiding tendonitis in musicians or avoiding bugs in your software. And as an aside at PSA, please also take care of any of your repetitive stress injuries at the keyboard. This is that professor I had in grad school. This is Dr. Jean Barr at the Eastman School of Music. She inspired me in many ways as a pioneer in the field, as a mentor, as a musician, and as a person. And unlike many or really most other fields, going to school for music gets you a personal mentor, someone who is deeply invested in you by way of one-on-one lessons and the shared experience of the creation of art. This mentorship is valuable and something I have benefited from in the WordPress community and strive to be better at. Dr. Barr, or Jean, as I'm supposed to call her now, is always full of pithy advice and has a knack for giving you wisdom applicable to all aspects of your life rather than just platitudes. She'll remind you to stay motivated by possibilities and to look for the joy in those possibilities. She'll sit you down and talk about how, in an ever-changing world, it is important for you to create your own career path, rather than relying on the same old. Without her, I would never have had the guts to step out of the world of music she so carefully guided me through. By far, my favorite piece of advice from her was to constantly be making informed decisions and that that was one of the biggest indicators of your maturation from student to professional. You've got the ability to read music and the physical technique of producing that music down. But to truly produce something faithful and meaningful, you need to make musical decisions based on further data. How would I interpret a tempo marking of Allegro based on whether it's Mozart, Beethoven, or Brahms? How do I determine the proper tempo of a Bach Sarabande without an actual tempo marking? Is this lit and performing with a vocalist happy or wistful based on the German text that's been set? This is the original vocal line of the piece I played earlier. It was on screen while I was playing. This is Vidmang by Robert Schumann and I played a solo piano arrangement by Franz Liszt. Here we see the importance of cross-discipline knowledge. I need to know why Schumann wrote the piece, the history of the Schumanns themselves, some amount of German, and possibly even background about the writer of the original poetry. Vidmang is a part of a song cycle called Merten. Robert wrote for Clara as a wedding gift. It is a declaration of love and joy at finally having her hand through some tough and actually kind of weird circumstances. If you think pop music is weird, you should read some classical music history. But that makes it a jubilant piece. Within the text, though, the treatment of mine hearts, my heart, is much different from mine schmerz, my pain, which is also different from, later on in the piece in the second section, diroux, the piece. I use the same lessons about making informed decisions and embracing cross-discipline knowledge while making software. The phrase data-informed development is thrown around, usually as a counterpoint to data-driven development. We use statistics or user testing to help us figure out what the right next step is. We may need to utilize knowledge from other areas to achieve the greatest possible success, design concepts, almost certainly, project management skills, or an understanding of the needs of users who use their software interfaces in other languages or on different devices. We also hear about the WordPress philosophy of decisions, not options. We, as software creators, make informed decisions about what serves users best, and we look to enable those users to make the best decisions possible for what they need to accomplish. Discussions about making those decisions during our weekly lessons were usually accompanied by a reminder that you should still trust your instincts. We often refer to this as musicality, an intuition about just what exactly the right way is to combine all that notation, technique, and data that sends musicians apart from each other. You become comfortable with expressing this intuition in front of people, even more so if you improvise in your genre of music, something I'm very, very bad at. I rely on my instincts heavily in my work on software, especially when it comes to the user interface. There is a moment where things just feel right, and I'm comfortable with that idea. I do this type of judgment so much so. In fact, that those who identify as designers often think that I'm one too. But I think it's that comfort with intuition, with your artistry, which means that maybe I'm not a designer. My graduate degree is in a very specialized area of classical music, piano accompanying and chamber music. Instead of training to be a concert pianist, which I had never actually wanted to do, I studied the art of playing well with others. I like honing my craft through practice on my own, and I just played a soul work for you. But I get a lot more out of collaborating with other people and creating something that's richer and better because of the variety of voices, the intertwining of different instruments in their timers, the musical decisions different people make together as you rehearse and get to know each other, both as musicians and as people. That has always been far more interesting to me than just the piano alone. All of that laid a really easy path when it came to getting into open-source software developments. Hurting cats is the thing I've done a lot of. Working on several different projects at once, like pieces of music, diplomacy, setting shared goals, knowing how and when to push everybody to the hard deadline of a performance or release, these were all things I already knew how to do for my years as a collaborative musician. That intuition comes into play heavily as well, using intuition to pick up on non-verbal cues. I've played for numerous auditions where you don't get a chance to rehearse with the other person ahead of time so you can maybe gather a little bit of extra data on who they are, what kind of musician they are. You meet on stage in front of people who are evaluating you and you just start performing. It's terrifying. It's a good way to make money, but it's terrifying. Even if you're not strangers, you're constantly switching from looking at music to your hands to your partner, trying not to look at the people who are judging you. But you learn to listen for common cues like taking a breath or a subtle shift in tone and you're constantly micro-adjusting a fit. It makes hurting cats a lot easier when you can quickly identify and respond to their needs. Andre Priven, a famed pianist, conductor and composer, recently said, if you're going to be a musician, you must be interested in new things all the time. The thing that I love the most is that both of these fields, music and web development, involve lifetime learning. Most people spend their whole life learning, even despite their best efforts, but there's something really special about being in a field where you absolutely have to be self-motivated to build the skills that you need and where those skills might change hour to hour. In music, there's always something to learn for every gig you play, a new piece of music, a new acoustical environment, a new composition style, maybe a different style of notation entirely. If you play the piano, you probably have to deal with an unfamiliar instrument. For those of you who were in here earlier as I was practicing and I was doing things that sounded kind of weird, it's because I'm trying to adjust to the piano. Very few people get to travel with their own nine-foot concert grand, like three people. The two of them are not alive anymore. I always say the internet changes every 20 minutes and I'm not really kidding. New things are always happening and there's so much to learn that doesn't just replace what you already knew. It complements it, likely even enhances it. It could be a language, it could be software, it could be a new approach. You're always learning and you thrive on that. Even if staying on top of the game can be really frustrating sometimes. I commissioned this amazing piece of animated art in 2014 from a friend at Boku. And even though it's only been two years, there's a lot that's emerged in the meantime and that's changed. But I think the sentiment still rings true. So, true, it means that even when your paid gig is over, you often still have to find the energy to practice your craft. That ability to practice more isn't feasible for everybody and I think that's what actually makes us very fortunate to be able to do this in the first place. Nobody can stand next to you and tell you exactly how to practice either. You have to be self-driven and learn how to learn. Not only does the self-motivation make me a better developer, it also makes me better at working remotely, both in a distributed company and a worldwide open-source software project. In preparing to give this talk, I chatted with developers, I know who have come from a background in music. It's actually sort of unsurprising that it's a significant number of people. I met someone whose mentor at a major tech company had once told him that hiring a musician who was qualified for a software position was almost always preferable. There are many other lessons I could talk about that we shared. The knowledge of what it means to constantly and iteratively improve on your work. Difficult pieces are never perfect at your first lesson or even your first performance. Just as complicated patches or code or whatever might need more work. A really strong grasp of the concept of execution over time and knowing how to be reading and thinking ahead even as your hands are moving. The value of offline and mental practice and visioning concepts or planning how you might do something without actually producing sounds or code. Sometimes I'm afraid that people will take me less seriously as a developer when they find out that I really identify as a musician first. But I think one of the coolest things about working in a relatively new field like web development is that you get people with very different backgrounds instead of more traditional established paths and you can learn from them. Music and code share so many things and getting better at one has only made me better at the other. This talk is about parallels and skills for sure but it is also about valuing individual identity and diversity. Think about how discouraging and annoying it is to constantly hear WordPress developers aren't real developers. This permeates the wider industry. You're not a real developer if. Why propagate this message through enforcement of homogeneity and so-called nerd culture? There's so much you can learn from a musician or a designer or a content strategist or a project manager or a woman or a person of color. Please celebrate each other and the value of skills we've each acquired through our different backgrounds. My name is Helen and I'm a musician and a developer. Thank you.