 Hey everybody I'm PJ here to do a talk called urban legends what what you code makes you who you are so this is interesting bear with me for a few minutes first of all that doesn't work because you got turned on so I work at Logs.io we have a nice booth out there we do Elkstack as a service we're very cost-effective in comparison to a lot of our competitors it's really cool and if you're doing Elkstack and you hate it or you're doing Elkstack and you love it but you don't want to do it every day come see us and we'll talk to you really cool stuff but that's not what I'm here to talk about let's talk about me because that's first and foremost the most important thing so I'm PJ as I said I'm a dev advocate so I get to travel the world and speak at lots of conferences and stuff but beyond that I'm also a husband a dad hockey coach I play drums in a band I've been playing drums since I was six years old and I'm a lot older than six we'll just leave it at that occasionally I let my kids keynote big programming conferences because they're better speakers than I am but that's that's what I do I'm not just a programmer I'm not just a dev advocate I'm someone who has a lot of aspects to my life on top of that I also run a thing called prompt so if you're running a meet-up or a conference and you'd like to have someone come and speak about mental health and tech I can help you with that we provide the funds to get them there you give them the stage to talk about it's a very important subject and we need to talk about it more so if you have any questions about that please come see me after the talk so what is this talk about so there's a lot of common misconceptions about programming languages you know something's better than something else and other things are obviously just so outdated we should never use them ever again there's also ideas that parts of the tech community are better than other parts of that community or have rules that don't make sense there's also this idea that you know open source is so much better than the enterprise or enterprise is so much better than the open source for reasons so we're gonna try to work on these legends and see if we can do away with some of the myths if you saw the talk title what this talk is not about is actual urban legend so if you came here looking to learn about the Loch Ness Monster the Chupacabra that's not gonna happen and I apologize I'll give you a moment to walk out cool I just broke my clicker again so let's start with Ruby how many of you do Ruby or have done Ruby Ruby's like my people I love Ruby I was a Microsoft developer for years and then discovered Ruby because I had to and of course I was asked can you learn Ruby in a weekend and I said no I have a family that's not realistic but I did learn Ruby and I'm so glad that I did it's so much fun Ruby's great you know it's designed for programmer happiness right but it gets this this thing this stigmatism and why because rails if you're not a programmer or you work with someone who's not a programmer like say your boss they often think that because you're using rails and the big the big catchphrase is rails is magic you can get 90% of the work done in 10% of the time they think you just everything's really easy the other side of rails is it has a very vocal person who created it who has lots of opinions about lots of stuff and one on one he's a great person on Twitter not so much but it kind of gets this attitude that all Rubyists are just like DHH their opinionated their hipsters they don't care but the thing is Ruby is not rails that's myth number one you could do a lot of Ruby without ever using rails I've developed a bunch of applications that have nothing to do with rails there's so many other frameworks out there you can get Ruby to the web without ever using rails you can use Hanami or Sinatra or anything there's lots of different options so let's do away with the idea that the rails community is the Ruby community it's just a part of the Ruby community the other day is that Ruby is not useful I want you to take this in for a second read this comic this is a personal favorite of mine so the assumption here is that the slightly chubby guy wearing the Ruby t-shirt wearing a hat has a beard making useless apps that no one's ever gonna use this is the average Rubyist now I am slightly chubby I am wearing a hat I do have a beard but that's not me and not representative of all Rubyists by any stretch of the imagination now granted yeah people do make useless apps in any language not just Ruby but this whole you know I built an express something that finds single sources espresso and Soma because everyone of course who uses Ruby works at a startup in San Francisco that makes equally useful products and the other guy is like cool I made the app that keeps this plane in the air good for you hopefully it's not united had to had to slip that in there but yeah I mean like this is kind of the concept you know I even saw this as I was getting ready for this talk as I was coming here this is a tweet that came out like the night before I got to Denver and I was like come on and names have been redacted to protect the innocence but I was like seriously it's 2017 be realistic Ruby is strong there are large scale large scale companies using Ruby logs I owe we use Ruby Zen desk uses Ruby how many of you use Zendesk it's pretty common ticketing system Hulu blue box you know Twitter still on the back end uses Ruby these are huge companies so to say that Ruby is for hobbyists or Ruby is for hipsters is just unrealistic so let's talk about Ruby's mortal enemy of course is PHP how many of you have been or are PHP developers don't be embarrassed put your hands up so the first of all let's do away with that myth that Ruby's and PHP people don't get to don't get along there's some kind of crossbearance and and yes maybe at one point in the beginning there there was because whatever politics and reasons but PHP is an amazing language I mean a lot of hands went up when I said who's done PHP because PHP does a lot it powers like 80% of the internet so when people cope and say PHP is dead man that thing is it's gone 80% of the servers on the internet are running PHP in some way shape or form even within rails there is a PHP tie-in so that you can port PHP code to rails and use it effectively so if it's dead I'm pretty sure 80% of the internet wouldn't be using it what are some other myths about PHP there's no objects in PHP and if the last time you used PHP was like PHP 4.3 you're probably right it wasn't it was just basically jazzed up homepages it said for personal homepages when it first started out so that's realistic if you've used it since then you know 5.0 to 7 we won't talk about PHP 6 because that's a whole other issue that I don't have time for it's all object oriented they're focused on the object is it functional programming no but that's again a whole other talk so it is object oriented it's not realistic to say it's not PHP is slow this is a perspective issue I mentioned Ruby before everybody says Ruby is slow PHP is slow these things are slow and as developers our concept of slow is totally skewed we're like wow that took point zero zero four milliseconds that's taking way too long someone's looking at your web application chances are they don't even notice that it was point zero zero four milliseconds they just know that this page came up when we're talking about users using an application that's when we're about slow and that number is four seconds and if your code is running at four seconds you have deeper deeper problems than the particular language you're using to develop so slowness is is an entire entire myth what else PHP is is not secure this is another issue I know there's a lot of sec ops folks in the crowd and I think they all understand that if you're not developing with an eye toward security you've already screwed up who cares what language you're using you need to have a secure application when you're developing it regardless of the language you're using so PHP is just as secure as Ruby or Java or Python or anything else so let's put that myth to bed security is on the person building the application it's not on the language they're using Java who doesn't love Java Java also considered you okay maybe I shouldn't raise my hand my bad Java is is is another ubiquitous language I mean people yeah hands went up because Java is also a very cantankerous to code language it's difficult it is not easy but at the same time it does do amazingly powerful things how many times do you see this thing pop up because you downloaded you know a doc you sign in your Java is not up to date in order to sign the thing so you can get the new job or fill out your your health care benefits or anything like that if Java wasn't working properly it wouldn't be working for you Java has to be built and it's a huge huge thing and and grand it doesn't have a big loud community like Ruby or PHP but it's still out there people are still proud to be making great apps at logs I owe we actually use a lot of Java on the back end Python when Python came out it was very much an academic scientific language you know pie math and pie sigh and and all these different pieces and you'd never use it to build a web application or do anything you know fun like building single serve expresso apps for anything south of market in San Francisco why would you use Python for that it's a scientific language it's built for analytics that's what Python's all about but Python can be a lot of fun tell two stories here this was the keynote last year from RailsConf which was one of the entire like six talks that I went to RailsConf because you just go to RailsConf to hang out and talk to people but this was a presentation by one of the gentlemen from Spotify and he was demonstrating some of the cool things that they're building at Spotify using Python and one of them this was my favorite thing was called boiling frogs and the way it works is is you name one artist and another artist it will find ten things in between them to to link them up so he used I believe it was who's that girl who sang the call me maybe so I'm Carly Ray Jepsen Carly Ray Jepsen to a monomarth which is a Viking death metal band from Sweden and I was like there's just no way I don't care how good your algorithm is you can't bring this together and he did in ten songs absolutely amazing I suggest you go watch the talk it's it's really cool another thing that that I did at one point time we used to work for a pass and we were very big in supporting the open source community and there used to be this really cool thing called get tip and yes there was controversy to get tip I'm not going to get into that that's not that's not my talk but we wanted to give back so what we did was we wrote some Python scripts that would list a bunch of people that we wanted to give money to on a weekly basis and we put the money and it took it from our bank account and in to get tips so they could get some recognition for what they were doing which is really cool and that's not academic that's not scientific that's just love that's just having fun with the scripts you can write and the applications you can build so obviously you can do a lot more with Python than just scientific boring stuff Linux not a programming language but hear me out here I mean this is 2017 this year the Linux desktop right I have the year correct okay I wanted to make sure I may have given this talk before in different years and made the same joke but Linux is one of those things where people like on Linux will never be mainstream it's for neckbeards in their basement building scripts you know living with their parents hoping for enough money to pay for their cat food and cat litter you know it'll never be a mainstream thing that is one of the most preposterous things I've ever heard and I've literally had people say it's for neckbeards don't don't bother with Linux focus on you know Mac OS or that other thing with the windows don't worry about Linux it's never gonna happen but how many people have taken a flight where there's movies involved and then the movie thing went down and then you see this penguin guy because almost every major airline is running Linux at least for their entertainment section and for the please buckle your seatbelt because if you don't know how to do that by now I don't know why they need a video for that so Linux still a major player in every market Pearl Pearl is awesome how many people have done Pearl yeah wow that's a lot of hands so I added this slide cuz a little while ago I did a blog post called Ruby is dead because I had gone to 20 Ruby conferences in one year and almost everyone had a panel or a talk or an open discussion about Ruby is dead long live Ruby blah blah blah so I I did this and for some reason Aristotle picked it up and was like well is Pearl dead or is just more dead than Ruby and it's like no Pearl is not dead they just came out with a new version and it's amazing I haven't done anything major with it just played around with it but compared to Pearl you know even five years ago it's light years ahead and yes it took a long time to develop and but Larry gave us gifts he said I want to do this right and he did so far from being dead Pearl is still a major player Swift Swift is the future I'm done thank you have a good night when Swift came out it was of course the newest bestest thing that was gonna allow you to build mobile apps with the small caveat that it was an open source and you had to pay for it and people have this attitude that this is the end all be all we could solve all application problems with Swift and then I saw this tweet and and it's a bit dated but I love this tweet because it opened up so many questions in my mind objective C developers are now obsolete please treat them with respect so okay we're gonna put that statement aside for a second we're gonna ignore those brackets and focus on the other things that are apparently obsolete old people are obsolete what I'm pretty sure that's most of our goals is to get to the point where we have to ride the bus with a cane because that means we've succeeded in life to live that long but this is my favorite part pregnant women are obsolete what like this is the best you could come up with is a pregnant woman I'm I'm I'm not a biologist but I'm relatively sure that for the success of the species the human species we're gonna need more pregnant women until the science catches up and cloning and all that jazz they're not obsolete and you know to my mom wasn't absolute when she was either luckily Swift did open source stuff they got a little they calmed down a bit they opened things up they made it a little better so it's it's now a viable option and not complete utter bullshit anything with the JS how many people have coded anything with the JS every hand should go up if you've ever coded anything ever and this is great a couple years ago there's this like this burst of JS's you know we got things like doze JS which super useful I'm sure you all know what that's used for Kraken JS you know all of these kind of things that were just like okay and and I don't mean to make fun of the JavaScript community there's no it is fantastic it's amazing there's so many things you can do with it and you know angular is really cool and ember is really cool like these are really cool things have been thought out but for a little while there was just JS all over the place and you got stupid like does anyone know what Kraken JS does not a hand goes up because none of you work at PayPal because it was developed by PayPal it's a it's a JavaScript payment gateway there's no way you'd know that by the fact that it's called Kraken JS but there's so many more languages out there and this is the main point of this myth a lot of people think they need to focus on one thing become the master of one thing and make it great and it's not really about the tools that we use as developers we solve problems so if we're solving problems for our clients our customers they don't care what what we're typing into the command line what text editor we're using they don't care that your Vim versus Emacs they don't care about any of that shit they care that you solve their problem they care that you know they were able to order you know 800 Amazon echoes in 10 minutes for whatever reason that's what they care about problem solving it's not about being with it it's not about grabbing the coolest new thing and saying you know now I'm a go developer because that's cool it's about really focusing on what solves the problem it's also about evolution as a person there's more to you than being a developer but as a developer there's more to you than being a specific type of developer there's more to you than just DevOps or there's more to you than just being a sys admin there's more than you just being a designer you have to grow in that space so let's talk a little bit about my favorite thing communities so in a lot of ways like DevOps days is kind of a community unto itself and that's really cool I really appreciate that about not just DevOps days Rockies but all the DevOps days events but if you look at this diagram this was like the perfect demonstration of what I'm talking about so if you want the red the folks in red up in front that's the Ruby community and the folks in blue that's the PHP community and you have the Java community all the other communities and they're all kind of together linked by that line that is the technology but at the same time they're all separate and that's a problem part of that problem comes from the things people say their impressions I'm going to read these because these are literally things and then no attributions I will not say who said these things but these are things that people say that are absolutely preposterous to me designers aren't developers they shouldn't be at hardcore tech meetups I know about you I can code things backwards and forwards I can make things work they function they do what they're supposed to do and they're in Times New Roman with a white background in black text because they look like shit I can't design anything I can't design anything at all and then a designer comes along and makes magic and now everything's beautiful so to say that designers aren't hardcore or they're not techie enough preposterous one of my favorite sys admins can live without developers what do we need them for okay that's a very interesting concept there was a little bit of friction on that this was someone that I worked with and I just kind of leaned over and I said okay so let's say all the developers go away cool what are you assistant for what's going on the server it's gonna have a server sitting there that you're monitoring and taking care of preposterous this one a little bit weird business folks don't get developers business folks that make the effort effort absolutely do they should be a part of the tech community if they're selling tech or they're hiring for tech or they're running a tech company they have to be involved and if they're involved they will they will understand developers and in a little way as a developer it's our job to help them get there tech people are socially inept all of them I've been doing this for a while I consider myself fairly social person I may have played a little beer pong with giant oil barrels last night I think that's a pretty social activity talk to a bunch of people so that's just complete and utter bullshit it's about cross-pollination learning from other groups if you don't accept everyone then you're not going to get everyone's perspective and if you don't have everyone's perspective it's just like coding something without ever showing it to a user it's like building something without ever having someone use it that means you have no idea how it's going to be used and you don't really know what's going on so cross-pollinate this way we can make a better tech community we can make the tech community awesome so let's talk a little bit about open source in the enterprise apple and oranges right I did work for you at IBM as one of their teams as a advocate for open source at IBM it was an interesting experience they have a lot more loopholes to jump through but I learned a lot we'll go back to this the idea that one person's code is better than another person's code obviously the guy in the in the collared shirt and button down is is an enterprise developer and the other guy's a ruby guy so he works with open source and of course all open source people are dirty scumbags who live in their parents basement feeding cats you know I think I already covered the whole net neck beard issue and of course all business people are like haha business they work in dirty little gate gray cubicles to build software for other people who work in other little dirty gray cubicles that's not the case there's a lot we can learn here you know if we get along and we understand the open source developer can teach the enterprise developer a little bit about creativity a little bit about craft and how having the input to do things allows you to actually move and have some artistry within your code and the enterprise developer can teach open source developers a little bit about organization and how to have things you know running in a certain way so that you're better serving the people who are part of your community so there's something to learn what else there's this idea out there and I know if you've ever been on LinkedIn or any job board or anywhere on the internet ever that involves being hired there's this concept of the rock star wizard ninja how many of you are rock star wizard ninjas put your hands down if you're a rock star you would be up here there would be a band playing someone would be singing people would be going nuts it'd be amazing to be making a lot more money than you're making right now if you're a ninja maybe you are but you couldn't have raised your hands because I'm not able to see you and as much as I love harry potter wizards aren't real probably so this whole idea that you know we're special because we're developers or a special because we're a certain type of developer or we do some special function within the tech community it's a myth it's garbage and we need to stop feeding that so when you see the job article or you get that I saw your github profile and I wanted to send you an email you're a rock star is your ninja wizard if you see that just respond with no I'm not find some other doofus the idea is that if we're cool with each other if we're nice to each other we can build a better tech community that's really what it's about a better tech community means better code better applications better things built for our companies and ourselves and better people being better to each other that's really what it's all about you know open your arms give people hugs unless they're tactile defensive then don't give them a hug you get punched in the face thank you very much