 So this is the imposter monologues part two. This is a sequel of sorts to a session that started in Dublin. And what we have today are eight individuals who have bravely volunteered to share their stories and experiences with imposter syndrome. And we'll start with Jeff Eaton. So this is a little weird, because usually I do like the pacing and gesticulating thing, but this will work. So I'm Jeff Eaton, I've been in the Drupal community for like before I had gray hair. And I like Drupal 4.5 was when I really felt like, okay, I know what's going on here. So I've been around for a long time and I've been incredibly fortunate to meet a lot of amazing and really cool people. And the quick little story I wanted to tell is actually about, although I've done a lot of dumb things in my life, one stands out. It was years before I even started working with Drupal. It was my first week on a new job for a tech company that I'd been hired by. It was a small company, but among other things, they had a giant framework for their enterprise software that everything it did was driven by this file called Schema.xml. You see where this is going. And you had to edit it in some sort of arcane fashion. It was like literally a two meg XML file that drove the entire operation of their enterprise software. And I was told, oh, you need to add a field to such and such. And I burnt my first two weeks on the job, sitting there and staring at this damn thing and trying to get my local build to work and getting increasingly more freaked out about the fact that literally the first task I had been given was something I couldn't even make heads or tails of, how it worked. And I got called in, hey, what's the progress on this issue? And what I said was finally, yeah, I've been having some issues with that. And in that fairly short conversation, what ended up becoming clear was that, no, nobody knew how the hell that file worked. It was just trial and error. That was just what everybody understood and that it was, that's sort of, you got to wait in there and ask if anybody else has touched that part. And what occurred to me was, I had just burnt two weeks of my life and the company I was working for because I was deeply afraid of anyone realizing that I didn't know what I was doing, even when not knowing what I was doing with that was perfectly reasonable under the circumstances. But I was afraid to let anybody know because I thought that meant they would realize in some broad universal sense that I did not know what I was doing. And I think part of the reason that that sensation has been something that I carried around for a long time is that although that I've worked in tech for a long time and stuff like that, like I never went to college. If not even I didn't major in computer science or something, I just didn't go to college. In fact, I didn't go to high school. Technically, legally speaking, I have a fourth grade education. I was homeschooled through the end of high school and it afforded a lot of interesting opportunities to explore and learn things in cool ways. But it also left me with a lot of deep gaps in my knowledge and in my education that I had to work really hard and to a certain extent secretly to try to fill those gaps and study and overcome that. And I didn't ever told anybody, but I didn't go to college at the time because I didn't think I could hack it. I was convinced, oh God, no. They'll be grading me. It'll be obvious, everyone will realize this. But I got lucky. I got into tech like in the early to mid 90s when you literally, if you could slap two tags together and weren't literally on fire at your desk, you were golden. And I just, I have no illusions about getting into that point in time not having been an amazingly lucky break for me because I was able to learn as people were just figuring things out. And slowly but surely over many years, I learned that I was wasting my time by hiding. I was only making it harder for myself and I was only making it harder for the people around me by hiding when I didn't understand something. And I also really lucked out, I eventually realized because I also looked the part. I mean, I am a nerdy like white guy from the suburbs who grew up with an Atari. I literally, no one ever questioned whether or not I was qualified because they just assumed I was if I was sitting there. And when I was afraid, people didn't punish me for asking a question because they assumed it was just, oh, this little thing you'd happen not to have run across, not an indication of some broader not being capable thing that I had to deal with. I wasn't punished for admitting those things even though I expected to be. And this year on Reddit, I ended up spotting somebody asking a question in the Drupal community and it was somebody said, hi, so I just wasted like two weeks of my life trying to figure this thing out because I was afraid some of my coworkers would realize I didn't know what I was doing. And I think that really occurred to me that I and all of us, I think have a real responsibility not just to stop trying to hide as much but also to keep an eye out and to watch for other people who are trying not to hide and to help them and to support them and to protect them and to make it clear to everyone else who's around us that they're okay for asking those questions. It's not just okay that I am but I'm now at a point where I have my Drupal gray hair literally it's no one asks, do you really know what you're talking about because I've been around but I need to pass that on and I need to help other people be safer saying that because yeah, I got through it and I think part of overcoming imposter syndrome is also being able to help and protect other people who may rightly be afraid that they'll be pushed back for them if they admit those things and we can make it a safer place to do that. And so thank you, it's really cool. I didn't even know who I was gonna be here and these are like some of the row of people I respect and admire and love and it's really cool. So thank you. I guess you're high, oh okay, oh no. I'm just gonna go for it, I'll just take that. My name is Satima, you might know me as sugar, you might have heard me laughing in the exhibit hall. So I saw the email for who was gonna be on the panel and I freaked out and I was like, oh my God, I shouldn't be on this panel, I don't know why I'm talking. I saw the names and I was like, oh, are you sure about this? And then I really sat down and thought about it and I was like, you know what, everyone starts at a smaller place and takes baby steps up to something and maybe I kinda jumped into it but there is a story I wanted to tell and it's from last year, it was my first triple con. I came by myself and in the beginning it was really hard to kind of make friends because I said hi to everyone but I didn't make some long conversations or lasting connections at first and two people I really admired invited me to dinner but they had a meeting in the Sprint Lounge. So I went over there because all the cleaning was going on and all the other rooms were closed and I sat in the corner and I fell asleep and a few, maybe 15, 20 minutes later when their meeting was done, I woke up and I was like, oh wow, I fell asleep in the Sprint Lounge and talking to people this week, I heard a lot of things where people were like, hey, I'm really nervous to even step into the Sprint Lounge. It just feels scary. Like even when it says Contributor's Lounge, people feel nervous about even going in there because it's such a big leap for mentally to prepare yourself and so I told people, I was like, yeah, I went in there and slept. So you don't necessarily have to go in there with a laptop and feel like I'm gonna go in there and I'm gonna code, maybe you could just go in there to have a chat or bring someone a snack and take that really small step and maybe those really small steps can help us become more comfortable in certain environments and feel less like imposters because like now I'll go in there and be like, I slept in here, it's not so bad, you know? And I don't feel as like, oh my God, you know that voice inside that says, hey, you don't belong here and hey, you don't know what you're doing and it's kind of like, yeah, I kind of have another voice that says, hey, you're okay, you're a triple novice, you passed your exam, like you're gonna be okay, it's gonna be fine and I hope that like everyone who's at the session and listens to these other speakers who I really admire a lot and I aspire to be like, takes away something from each of us and the thing I'd like you to take away from me is like, take baby steps and do what's comfortable for you and eventually you might not overcome it but you'll learn how to manage it better and then you'll hear this little voice inside that says like, you're gonna be okay, you got this and just listen to that voice and maybe one day I'll see you speaking here telling your story, thank you. So I'm gonna remember to do the slide. Somebody has to, yeah, oh it's that, I'm good. So my name is Ron, I'm a sales engineer or at Akra, I'm a senior solutions architect which means I'm a professional problem solver which is great because I've been solving problems forever and it's a really tough thing to kind of get out of that mode. I've got a friend of mine who is like, ridiculously smart, he's a really good friend and we have debates all the time about who's the bigger imposter. I thought I had him for a while because he almost got a PhD in information science and I'm a college dropout but now I'm kind of feeling like after Jeff, good grief man. I was hoping this would kind of give me the up that I'm actually now considered a really good imposter but I don't know, again, looking around the room that may not be true. So I thought today about what I wanted to talk about or what I would like to share that could potentially be useful and I could talk about all the times that I really screwed up but there's too many of those or I could talk about the times where I didn't speak up because I thought that my ideas weren't right or that I didn't have a place there and it turns out that I was right and I should have but I'm not gonna talk about that either. I think what I will talk about though is that coming into the role that I've had now which I've been in about two and a half years and was a pretty big shift. I've got a pretty varied background so I kind of have a lot of different skills and a lot of different areas that all mash up to be really great in this role because I'm a situational extrovert, I have a little bit of background in sales so I know how to talk to people. I absolutely love Drupal. Talk about it all the time even if I'm not paid to. I'm a horrible procrastinator and I've learned how to deal with that so that when things go crazy or go sideways or I'm putting something together and it's not quite right, in fact, we're talking about it coming up to this and I'm working up to the last second while the guy next to me is finishing up talking and I just finish fixing whatever it is I have to show and then pretend like everything's cool. I've got those skills. Which is a good skill to have, honestly. But in this position I end up being in a room with people and sometimes it's a real room, sometimes it's virtual and some of those people have titles and positions and probably salaries that would just blow your mind. Director of this, senior VP of that, CEO, CTO, C something O because there's always new ones and then those same people are in charge of organizations and teams and budgets that are ridiculously large and global organizations and in fact when I was interviewing for this job the vice president that was interviewing me told me so technically you're really good and I think you've got the basic skills but I'm gonna be honest, I think the big problem we have is that you have no experience with enterprise sales, architecture, what have you. Going into these things, I've learned a few things. So one thing that I've learned is that regardless of the title, regardless of the position or the experience, these are just other people and so reacting and working with people as people works no matter where they are in the position. I've also learned that being honest about what you know, what you don't know, where you're at and being very careful on how you couch your opinions so nobody leans too heavily on it can get you a long way and sometimes even if you don't know something there's immense value in having that kind of beginner's mind. The other thing that I've noticed and honestly I think this has really helped me tremendously is that there are times that I'm in these meetings with these people who have all of this power, who have all of these titles and accolades and it becomes clear at some point that they don't know as much as me and not only that, they don't know as much as they should and I honestly have no idea how they got that job. This has happened more than once. And the other part of that is I often notice that those people seem to be very confident. They don't have any problem with being unaware of the basic things they should know and I'm trying to be diplomatic and I'm trying not to call them out on these things but I think the thing that it's really helped me to realize is that there are times when you feel like an imposter because it's a good thing and I think we should embrace it because if you feel like you're an imposter that means that you're pushing yourself. You're just a little bit uncomfortable. You're outside of what you normally know and when you're talking about tech where things change literally every day you're always gonna be uncomfortable so I think we should embrace that but the other side of that coin is that if you're sitting there and you feel completely at ease and you're very confident in what's going on and people are looking at you weird but you don't care, maybe you should have imposter syndrome at that point and if you don't that could be a warning sign. So for anybody who's actually in the room or listening to this later if you come across a situation where you're feeling like you're an imposter just remember that Ron said he's a bigger imposter than you. Imposter syndrome's a good thing and if you have it, you should actually be proud because it means you're probably not like those other guys. So thank you. This room got fuller since I sat down. Hello. Jeff reminded me that I was also homeschooled. Not that that's something that I forget but... And so when I started college I was like oh my God I actually, I haven't been in a real school in a long time and this is gonna be terrible. When I started my job at Divx which was my first full-time developer job about 10 years ago maybe, I had already been teaching algorithms for seven years and when I got my job as a programmer I was like I'm not qualified. I've only just been teaching people how to be a programmer for seven years but I haven't done it. I'm for sure not qualified to have this job. And then over time I got comfortable being there and I was like okay you know what, I'm good. This is okay, I'm a good developer. Everything's okay. And then I got involved in Drupal and I started coming here to Drupalcons and I was like oh okay I'm for sure not qualified to be here. I'm qualified to be a developer but not a developer here at Drupalcon and then enough time passed and I was like okay, okay, okay this is cool. I'm for sure now a part of the community. And then I started contributing code and I was like okay well I'm a part of the community but I'm not that part of the community. I'm like I don't know how I categorized it. And then I started doing community organizing and I was like okay well okay. I'm a part of the developer part of Drupal but I'm not a part of the organizer part of Drupal and I don't belong here. And so what I've realized is that my imposter syndrome personally is super transferable. Depending on whatever context I'm in I will rationalize feeling like an imposter in that context. And so my new, the 2017 way that I'm an imposter is as a community organizer. Having started the Drupal Diversity and Inclusion initiative last year and rallying people for that which I'm super proud of and we're doing really good work but I haven't done it before so I'm feeling totally fake about it in my role as it. And that's okay is where I'm at. Like that's okay it's okay that this feels weird because I felt weird in other contexts and I've gotten over it. What's hard though is that now I know that I'm gonna have to wait a couple years for the imposter syndrome to transfer into another domain. So that's something that I've learned. One is that imposter syndrome is transferable. I work with someone whose imposter syndrome is very up front. Like I'm super repressive all the time and so I don't really admit it except in public. Like this right here. But I work with someone who anytime she makes a choice that can be debated which has so many choices in tech. She'll make a choice and then she'll message me like was that okay am I qualified to do this? And I'll say if your imposter syndrome is showing I can see it and we'll talk about it. And so it's so easy to diagnose in other people. It's so easy to say look at that person having imposter syndrome she is so qualified. I cannot believe she has it. And it's so easy to be in denial about it yourself. It feels kind of like alcoholism that way. We're like look at how messed up that person is. I don't have it. I just have rational reasons for feeling like I don't belong here. So that's been helpful also. And the third thing that I have learned about imposter syndrome is that I don't have to overcome it. For I have really bad anxiety and so for a long time I was like I have to overcome my anxiety to be like a functioning person in the world. That'll never happen for me. I will be anxious forever. And that's okay my anxiety has done a lot of good things for me. It helps me be prepared. It helps me be meticulous. It makes me really nice to people sometimes. And my imposter syndrome I've kind of learned to embrace in that same way. I'm never gonna and I have enough we have enough to overcome y'all. There are enough things to surmount it feels like. So this is not one of them for me. I can just feel like an imposter and let that be a part of the experience that I'm having. I started doing improv a couple of years ago because someone told me that I would fail at it. And I was like I'll show you. And then I spent years feeling like an imposter in that community also. And now I teach improv to students and it turns out that telling someone something enough eventually it rubs off on you. And so I've been telling them for years like you just have to be okay with being scared and be okay with being brave and tell yourself that those are good human things to do and you're doing a good job being a human. And that's kind of what I tell myself. So thank you. Hi, it's been an overwhelming week. Sorry. Yeah. So in 2011, Drupal Khan Chicago was getting put together. And there was sort of this groundswell of feeling that Drupal Khans are getting too big and they're getting really corporate and they're getting sort of separated from what they used to be about, which was getting together and building Drupal. And so they decided to build this new track called Core Conversations for the first time. And they said, people can submit here and the people who are really deeply involved in doing Drupal for the development and being involved in decision-making in Drupal can get here and we can really dive into those topics and the rest of those business guys can all hang out in the hall by themselves and it'll be like the old days. And so they got a bunch of things together and I had been speaking and talking a lot about configuration management and content staging and deployment and stuff for years at Drupal Khan and writing about it. And I was already kind of visible in the community at that point, but I had never really been a core developer or participant or anything like that. And it was at the beginning of the Drupal 8 cycle, which seems like an entire lifetime ago right now. And so there was a lot of stuff on the table around Drupal 8 and that was really something I really wanted to make sure was a priority for people. And so I put together this talk about sort of some ideas I had around that stuff. And I proposed it and they put me in the very first Core Conversations slot of the conference. So I had to give the first ever Core Conversation and I has never been a core developer or anything like that. And so about an hour before that talk, I was walking around the hall and I literally felt like I was going to vomit all over the floor. I was freaking out. It was a very tumultuous time in my life too. And I was going crazy and I went into the speaker's room and Addie Berry was there and she's like, hey, how's it going? And she kind of talked me down a little bit. And I had just moved to Europe and she lived in Europe and we were talking about all of that and stuff. And she and I was like, it was getting court's time and I was freaking out and she's like, you're going to be great, just go do it. And on my way there, I just at some point, something snapped in my head and I had a very kind of fuck it attitude about it. And I just leaned into the whole thing and I walked into the room and it was about twice as big as this room. It was filled front to back, standing remotely all the way in the back and people sitting on the floor all the way in front of here. And it was like, YChed, Chex, Larry, Katch, Angie, all of these people right up in front and all the way back. And I was just like, all right, let's do this. And I went and did it. And it's interesting because it was one of those times when I realized I actually knew what I was talking about because I was interacting with these people and it just came like that. And YChed's throwing questions at me and Sun's throwing questions at me and I'm just like, yeah, we'll screw you. And going at it and after it was over, I was just like, I couldn't believe that it had happened. And Dries comes up to me and says, that was great. It was exactly what we wanted out of these. And a couple of days later, he invited me to breakfast and asked me if I wanted to lead the initiative for Drupal 8 to do that. And I was like talking to him about it and I was like, I don't know if the community is going to accept me in that role. And I don't, because I've never done, I've never been a core developer before. I've never, I've run my mouth a lot. But that community is very much about earning your place and paying your dues and being, and respecting the people who are part of them. And he just looked at me and he says, you can do it, I think it'll be fine. And I was thinking about that time when we talked about this because there's been a lot of times in my life when I felt really impostery and somebody saying you can do it has been a really big thing. Just something simple like that has been a really big thing in pushing me forward. Eaton was one of the first developers. I met in Drupal, he came to train us at my first Drupal job from Lullabot. And I was talking to him about a core problem I was having and he's like, oh, you should submit a patch and get it fixed. Which I did, it got won't fix to eight years later. But that's sort of a separate issue. And I remember being really interested when Summer of Code was a big thing in the Drupal community and I wanted to be a part of it. And Angie was like, you should be a mentor, you should get involved. And when I wanted to apply for my first full-time Drupal job at Palantir and I was talking with Ken Rickard who was trying to encourage me to apply and I was saying, I don't know if I can, all of you hardcore rock gods of Drupal or working at Palantir. And he basically ordered me to put in my resume. And one of the things that I think has helped me since then and since all of that happened is being the one who says you can do it to other people because it's such an important part of building our community because other people's imposter syndrome makes me really angry because you guys are all geniuses. I'm just a slob over here. And so anything I can do to encourage the geniuses to be geniuses makes me feel better. And I remember the next year at Denver running the CMI sprint table and this wacky English dude comes up and says he wants to be a part of the initiative. And I'm like, great, come on. And we started talking about some issues and I gave it to him and he did what was, if not his first core patch, one of his first core patches and he became more and more involved. And when I walked off the initiative, I handed it over to him and his name's Alex Potten. Now he's a core committer. And seeing that happen makes me feel better about myself. And so I feel like all of us owe it to our own communities and to the Drupal community in general so like when we see the imposter syndrome and other people to say you can do it to them because it's like so powerful and you never know who the next webchicks is gonna be or who anybody's gonna be because unless we encourage it, they could just sit there in that bubble their whole lives. Like I would have if nobody had done that to me. So, thanks. You didn't give me the full title. That's okay. So I wanna start this off by first introducing myself because I don't know if any of you who are not like on the schedule know who I am. I'm Stephanie Alhage. I used to help run the Drupal Association's DrupalCon. It's a thing. So to start off real quick, when David asked me if I wanted to do this, I was like, why? You guys don't know who I am. What relevant things can I say to you? And so instead of telling you how you cannot be overcome by imposter syndrome, I'm gonna treat this instead like a therapy session and part confession and just explain to you all the things that I'm doing actively that you might not know about. So to start, I'm not a developer. I don't know how you guys develop. I sort of am there while you are doing your things. When you make your issue queue jokes, I laugh also. I do maintain a module, but it's purely by accident because John Alban Winde thought it would be really funny to put this person in charge of the bad judgment module. But the bad judgment module is also maintained by Dave Reed's cat. I think he also has more commits to that module than I do. I am an event planner, but somehow I became a project manager. Not really sure how that's working out. Pretty confident, but so far, yeah. So the biggest thing about my thing is kind of Greg was talking about is that you realize that you have all these things kind of in front of you and your options are either to say I'm gonna be miserable and let this thing kind of overcome me while I'm in the midst of it or you can tell it to go fuck itself. So that's kind of my approach to a lot of things. You can edit that in the video. That's my approach to a lot of things is that if something comes to me and I don't know how to do it, I will barrel through it until I, or the people around me feel confident that what I did was the right thing or they can correct me later. I don't know. So I'm gonna give you a quick overview of my background. I have a degree in marketing and advertising. Somehow ended up project manager and event coordinator through a series of confusing things that didn't quite make sense in the moment. So my entire career has been series after series of imposter syndrome moments, all of which at the time I was like, I don't know why you're giving me this job but I'm gonna do it until you notice. But again, like even being in this, like I was talking to Amanda before this started and found out that I might not have even been the first person to be approached for this particular seat on today's panel. So that sort of just helped encourage that a lot. Thanks for that. Basically imposter syndrome is everywhere and it's rampant and even if you're super confident in everything that you do and can go up on stage and like rock karaoke, it doesn't mean that you're always gonna be confident in everything and you shouldn't let it hamstring you and hinder you and prevent you from doing really cool things but it's also really good to acknowledge that that's what's happening. One of the other ways that I've helped kind of get over this is learning that I can't control everything because previously that was one of my ways of coping with this imposter syndrome is if I can get all the things lined up perfectly then no one will notice that maybe something's out of line and now I actually try to outsource that to other people and get more people's feedback into the process. So that's actually helped a lot. But yeah, overall, still not sure why I'm on the panel but I'm really glad that I was invited. Okay, I was wondering what my title was gonna be. All right, there we go. Thank you for that. I'll put that right there. Hi, I'm Mike. I've had a Drupal problem for 11 years. Thank you very much. I'm a Drupal educator. That sounds more fancy than a trainer or a coach. Podcast or that's also true. So thank you for that. Pretty active in the community. Levels from local to here, all of us. We'll just leave it at that for today. Yeah, so when David sent me the email inviting me to participate, I'm like, absolutely, I love David, he's a great guy and whatever you ask, I'll do. Normally it takes me three or four years to agree to do it but in this case it was a media, I think. But then when I got the email a few weeks later and I learned the other panelists on it, I'm like, oh, what the hell, man? Like Fatima, I'm like, I'm not sure I'm on this list. And at the same time I was second to last for Angie. So first of all, thank you for that because no one should be following Angie. So. But the other part of that is, man, I need to have like a deep well of stories because there's a bunch of people going ahead of me and they might take my story or a similar story. And so it kind of happened but it's cool because it's a really good point. But I'm gonna tell a couple of things. I talk to a lot of people who are learning Drupal. So I see imposter syndrome a lot and I'm pretty quick to recognize it and pretty quick to tell people, okay, just chill because here's what we're gonna do. Here's how we're gonna get you past this hurdle. So funnily enough, as I'm kind of sitting and typing up my notes for this a little while ago, a friend of mine came up to me and said, hey, do you know where, is there a place where I can go and get some help to set up for the sprint on Friday, get my environment set up? She was saying, you know, I know I can do it and she's in the room. So I just, I'm not gonna look at her. I'm not gonna look at her. So it's kind of funny. And you know, because I wanna be ready before Friday and I'm like, well, I don't think there's anything official right now, but maybe in the sprint room or maybe someone else might know. And they said, well, I popped my head in the sprint room but everyone looked busy and I didn't wanna bother anyone. And so I went somewhere else and she found me so I kind of direct her. Hopefully she got help. I'm not gonna look at her and ask her right now. But it was kind of funny because I didn't tell her that I was writing these notes. I'm like, oh, well, there you go, right. There it is, right there. That's one of my bullet points. And I kind of felt like, you know, we're here and this kind of goes to what Greg was saying a few minutes ago. I kind of see it as like our role, our responsibility, that when we spot it, we need to push them. We need to shove people and nudge them a little bit and say, no, no, no. Go in there and ask someone or go here and do this and just don't let that little tinge of fear get in your way of making progress. In my head, because in my head, I'm a lot more aggressive in everything than in actions. I'm like, yeah, we need to get in there just a little bit. Really get them in there. A more personal side, I guess, as a trainer, I feel like I have to not only know my stuff, but I also have to project confidence that I know my stuff. And I think as people learning Drupal, that's a big part of learning Drupal because you have a lot of folks, I'm sure there's probably literally hundreds of people here at the con who feel like they probably know Drupal. They probably know how to do that thing, but they're not sure. So maybe they go to a session and maybe they go to a training event and they learn that thing, but they already know that thing. So really all they're doing is they're just getting validation that, oh, heck yeah, I'm doing it the right way. So I think that's kind of where we all come in is when we spot that and we see that, we have to kind of validate that, yeah, you're doing it the right way, you're fine. Get past that point and move on to the next thing that you're not sure if you're doing right. It happens to me all the time. I was, we're kind of all, not all of us, but a lot of us are probably learning Composer these days with Drupal 8. And so I'm getting ready to teach a new class that involves Composer and Drupal 8. And so I'm doing my due diligence and making sure I understand the nooks and crannies and how to do it the right way. I'm really big into best practices, so I wanna make sure I'm teaching it the right way. And so I do my homework, I read the issue queues, I'll do whatever I need to do. And I got to the point where I couldn't figure this one little stupid thing out. And I didn't wanna like post a new issue. Like I felt like if I post that, you know, I'm supposed to know my stuff, right? But if I post it, it kind of seems like I don't know my stuff. And so it kind of got the best of me that day. So instead of like posting the question and asking this thing, I did what I wouldn't, I don't know if I called the cowardly thing to do, but, you know, I phoned a friend. I said, hey, what's up with this little thing right there? And it ended up where it took, you know, I started with an email chain, three or four. And it wasn't as simple or as clear cut as I thought, which, you know, made me feel better. But, you know, now that I'm on the other side of it, and I understand that point, I'm like, you know, dumbass, you should just post it in the issue queue. You know, I would have saved some time and kind of pay it forward because then there's a record of it. There's a record of, you know, someone asking that question. So I guess, you know, my kind of, my main theme here that I was thinking about is, you know, we're all gonna fight it. We're all gonna have these moments where we're like, ah, you know, what do I, you know, what do I do? Am I, you know, do I belong here? Or do I know enough to tell someone how to do something? I think it's kind of up to all of us to have each other's backs. And just kind of give us a shove. Give us a push and say, you're fine. You know, Greg, yeah, you stole that part of my story, but that's cool, I still like you. But it's fine, you're cool. Go ahead, you got it. And like, give, you know, make an effort to give each other a push. If you see someone who's hesitating about something, just say, just go ask the question or do the thing or just do what you need to do. Yeah, so I had no ending, that's my ending, so. See if I can do this without ruining the whole spiel. Hi, wow, there's a lot of people in here, okay. So I have a couple stories that I could tell. My name is Angie, I go by WebChick. I've been on a magazine covering crap like that just to let you know that no amount of rock starness prevents you from having imposter syndrome. I started with computers back when I was about four or five years old, we had a VIC-20, and I would type in the programs from the back of three to one contact magazine. It was like 4,000 lines of code and it'd be like a little box that went boop, like yay. So that's my, so basically I'm a nerd. I don't know if you could tell this from the everything about me, but that is my background. So in about 1995, I got the internet for the first time and I was like blown away at this amazing thing that let me talk to people from all over the world. And I wanna know everything about how that works. So I looked into network protocols, I learned about Linux, I instilled Debbie and Linux back when it's sit on seven floppy disks, which is like a long time ago. And I was really into open source and free software and this whole idea that oh my God, like these smart people all contribute what they know and they give it away for free and that is amazing. And then like nonprofits and educational institutions, wow. But obviously those people are geniuses and I could never do anything like that. So I was like this silent cheerleader of open source for 10 years is how long it took. And then I was graduating college and my instructor told me about this program, Google Summer of Code, which was like a grant program where you work over the summer on an open source project and they gave you like a little stipend. And I was like, hmm, well I do like open source and it's for students so they must know I don't know everything yet, so I guess I'll try that. And so that was my in a decade later. I just barely got accepted to Drupal. I was, there were 10, there were 11 slots that year and I was number 12 and at the last minute Robert Douglas flipped the names and then I was number 11. So if you see Robert Douglas, give him a hug for me. And I got accepted and then once I got into the community I started writing my first module and stuff like that. I almost flunked out of Google Summer of Code because there were no Drupal books back then at all. The handbook was 75 pages and it was all nonsense gobbledygook for people who knew CVS and developing and was like I could not figure out for the life of me what the hell a hook was. Like I had learned like .NET, Java, whatever you know what I mean, it was like none of this made any sense. And so I almost flunked out of Google Summer of Code because I was too scared to ask a question because they thought I was smart and if I asked a question they would know I was not smart and therefore like bang my head against the table for like a week even though I had a mentor assigned to me to whom I could ask questions. So I was super smart. Anyway, so eventually, so eventually Robert's like you seem stuck do you need help? And I was like I can't figure this out and then he got me up and running like in an hour and then it was like oh that's what a hook is that's weird but sure you know and then it was off and running yeah. So Drupal 8, hey okay. But yeah so it was really funny and then when I got on this side of the contributing fence because back then we were horrible to Google Summer of Code people we were like you're gonna work against bleeding edge head and at the time 4.7 was in development. And so I wrote my entire Google Summer of Code project and then they put the fucking form API patch landed I had to rewrite the whole thing all over again. So eaten anyway. But anyway, so I started because this was also when the Drupal servers went down because like they ran, it was like they were running on a crappy shared host in like Keartan's apartment or something and finally they're like no. So they took the whole website down and they said until we get $5,000 we're not putting the website back up and I'm like shit, I gotta do my project. And so I figured out how to set a local API.drupal.org site up and then I documented how I did that and I posted a page because it was like that's something I can do. And people were like oh you write documentation? Oh and then all of a sudden I'm like sucked in. So it was really funny because on the other side of that wall I thought like oh you have to be like this smart and I'm like this smart because I'm like self taught community college whatever. And then it turns out nobody has any idea what they're doing over here. They really know, they're just all contributing the little bit of stuff that they know. So I knew how to install API module on my computer so I like wrote that down. Chicks knows how to like write a fancy menu system so that's what he does but I can tell you that thing looks like absolute shit the first time around. You have to like go back and forth with needs review and needs work and like you know customizing and stuff like that. So all the Drupal rock stars you've heard of I have reviewed all of their patches and I can tell you. Yeah. The other thing I wanted to share is my first, my first Drupalcon was Drupalcon Vancouver and my first Drupalcon could have been Drupalcon Amsterdam because this guy Jean Van Dyke who's one of the co-authors of CCK offered to fly me up to Amsterdam to go to this conference and I'm like why would someone in Iowa wanna fly me to Amsterdam? That doesn't make any sense. Yep, must be a joke. Ha ha ha, you know kind of thing like that. But then he asked me a second time in Vancouver I'm like okay, well I guess I'll go. And I was terrified so I like wore my Google Summer of Code t-shirt and I huddled in the back corner hoping someone would maybe talk to me, you know. And then they did and it was awesome. They kind of knew who I was like from my project and stuff like that. It's quiz module by the way which still exists which is pretty cool. I have nothing to do with it anymore and it's in much better hands but yeah. So I was terrified and I sat by myself and I was like oh you know and they came up and talked to me and they invited me into the Sprint lounge where they were doing actual work on Drupal. It was really cool. And they're asking me like what sessions do you think you're gonna go to? And I'm like oh well I was gonna go to James Walker's like beginner module developer session and Allie Micah's like why? I'm like why would you do that? You're already a core developer and a module developer. You don't need a Vienna module session. I'm like oh yeah maybe. You know what I mean? It's just like yeah that kind of stuff so. I don't know I just you know I guess the thing I try to hammer home is like everybody struggles with this, everybody. Or at least if you don't struggle with it you maybe should question why you don't struggle because you might have the opposite problem as they were saying but yeah. Everyone struggles with it. Everything that happens in Drupal is a massively collaborative process. No one person has the answer to any one thing. We all work together contributing the little bit that we know whether it's you know I know how to write, I gotta get a patch started. I know the coding standards. I know how to get the documentation in order. I know how to test it on IE6. You know like whatever it is. We all contribute a little bit that we know and we all work together to make Drupal awesome. So if you're scared to go to the sprint room please come to the sprint room. If you're scared to submit your first patch please submit your first patch. When you go in the end of this side of the how to contribute island it's awesome. It's fun. There's friends. There's cake. Yes it's rainbows anyway. Thank you. There's literally no other speakers. So just two things. Thank you for coming. And can we have all the speakers stand up again please. If you wouldn't mind bit.ly slash imposter monologues. It's where the, it's not what the slides are. The slides don't matter. It's where you can rate the session. I would appreciate it if you could rate the session. Treat it like an Uber. We'll rate you back highly as well. We technically don't. So we technically have don't have no time for questions which was kind of like intentional because Joe told me that I needed to fill the session with more speakers. So I did. Thanks again for coming. There is a buff on imposter syndrome led by Heather Rodriguez. Heather stand. Yay at five. What room? All right. There is a buff on imposter syndrome at five. What's that? 315. OK. 313. OK. In 25 minutes. And I know some. You're all invited to talk about it some more. Thanks again.