 So does anyone have a minute while you talk? How's it going up? Very good. I wanted to say about Leia's that I just talked real quick. In a few years there will be a generation of community folks that came up with this idea. We were actually just talking about this the other day that there's this whole generation of kids who grew up skating with skate stoppers everywhere. The bumps on every handrail, the bumps on every curb. And all it did was make them better skaters. I think Steve Jobs said about we need to include a tutorial on how to touch-type with the first Mac. Some people don't know how to touch-type. Eventually all those people will be dead. Hey everyone, my name is Damon Evans. I'm a project manager at the hybrid group. The thing I want to talk about really quickly is we all understand that there's a huge amount of value in cross-functional teams and having as much back and forth as you can so that people can fill in the gaps, cover where other people are weak, give better perspectives and things like that. But one thing I want to talk about is better ways to encourage that. Everybody's time is valuable, especially when you're working in a consultancy. Everyone has a lot to do. There's too many projects. There's too few developers. There's never time to make this stuff happen. So one of the things I just wanted to say is that if you really want to try and get your team more cross-functional, you need to basically carve out at least a certain period of time where people are on the payroll, people are on the clock, and your job right now is to talk to each other and learn something you didn't know before. So basically what you want to talk about, yeah, that's basically the talk. carve out some time, pay people, force them into a box where there's nothing else to do, and by having at least even just a few hours of trying to show someone just a little bit of something they didn't know before, that little bit of information as you go over, as time goes by, it can lead into more ability to chip in when something is broken or fix a bug when someone else is not around and just make your team overall more cross-functional and work better. So, yeah, give people time and basically force them to play in the same sandwich. Yeah. Same 90 seconds. I just wanted to continue. You're good. Hello? I wanted to continue on the same topic, I guess, which is, so at Stroke, which is Stroke the company that I'm at right now, one of the things that we started doing a couple months ago is we do weekly quote-unquote stand-ups, which is really just a way for every single department to have someone every, a couple people every week coming up and showing what they're excited about that they're working on. So, Leia will often come in and say, we got a new user group last month. Here are some cool metrics. 500 new people downloaded, blah, blah, blah. Usually someone from engineering will come up and show stuff. We've had engineering people who are essentially like showing closure code to the rest of the company, which I think Leia probably doesn't know what's going on there, but I think the idea that everyone just gets up and says what they're excited about working on to the rest of the company every week and every department gets a sort of switch across to essentially whoever's the most excited that week about what they're doing has been really effective at doing the thing that you're saying. So, yeah, that's it. Come on, Evans. I'm going to do a quick one here while Ron comes up. Come on. So, I've tutored this a couple of times. I think I've maybe blogged about it, and the career part of my life has just gotten better and better in the past few years, and I never thought I was really on that path or cared about that path, but each job just gets dreamier and dreamier to the point where I'm firing jobs and I'm downsizing companies, and my most recent job, I've just been there for a couple of weeks, and the one before that I was only there for two months, and I went into it saying, this is the best thing ever. I get to do what I want for a big pile of money, and I get to drive this thing, and the product is cool, and then two months later, I went to someone else and said, this position doesn't exist. I want you to create it, and I want to do it, and they said, okay. So, my two-part plan for my two-point advice to everyone for their career is be friends with amazing people. Seriously, everything good that has come to me in my job life is because I have friends working at some place, and then the second part is make ridiculous demands, because no one will ever pay you ten bucks an hour if you don't ask for ten bucks an hour. When I was a kid, I thought ten bucks an hour was the most amazing thing ever, and no one will, like I said, this job didn't exist. I said, hey, Dr. Nick, this job should exist, and I want to do it, and called me back three days later and said, you're hired. So, be friends with amazing people and make ridiculous demands. It's incredible how well it works. So, we have a problem. It's kind of a good problem, right? Everybody here has a wonderful job, because so many people want to hire you to do these amazing things that you do, and it sounds really great, but it's a real problem because we are not creating a new supply of developers at the same rate that we are consuming it. Computer programming education in both the United States and the United Kingdom is dramatically down. Most of the budget that goes to any kind of computer literacy or computer aided instruction in other areas, it's not going to creating in the next generation of developers. So, we are all working on our interesting little cool projects, and we've all heard of these different versions of Ruby, like, you know, JRuby, but it's kind of old. You know, Rubinius, it's for old people. Literally, it's for adults. So, we propose and have created a project that's called KidsRuby, and KidsRuby is a project designed to make it very easy for kids to learn how to program. It's very much influenced by the HackityHack project, but was created by Wy the Lucky Stiff, who, before he disappeared back into the magic programming realm, left us in a wonderful legacy of amazingly interesting things like HackityHack. So, KidsRuby is the HackityHack, kind of like Sinatra is the camping. It takes it and makes it a lot easier for people to contribute. So, we've created a couple of things. One is we have the KidsRuby Editor, which is very much designed like the Commodore 64 or the Apple II. You just turn it on and start programming. We might call it a REPL loop in our development world, but it's really just being able to see what the code does right while you're developing code, which is kind of necessary when you're going to learn these things. So, KidsRuby.com, we have the source code available. We also have created the KidsRuby operating system, which is an Ubuntu remix so that, literally, they can take their operating system with them. We've been distributing this on a USB key, and we've done some classes, but there's an amazing new project called Raspberry Pi that's just come out, which is a $25 complete USB-based computer on a stick. So, we're going to be working with them, but I really encourage everybody, go to KidsRuby.com, get involved, help us develop it, help us give it to other kids, help us develop curriculum. Do your own KidsRuby training class. Some people have done amazing things in this space because think of the children. Thank you. I'm just really loud. Okay, so you don't need a kid to learn Ruby either. Leah should finish that. That book is great. It's by Chris Pine. It's a little bitty. But, you know, it's sort of disproportionately developer sort of world here, and the nerd said it is my peoples. But, I seriously don't know a single unemployed Ruby or Rails developer. In the worst job market we've had since the Great Depression, we were in this bubble inside of a bubble, and we're turning down jobs and creating new, you know, just picking new ones for you. So, if you're in a weird spot in your life, go pick up that book, and you'll have a job next month. Any other short ones? JR and then Obi. And then a few of the diaspora boys are here. Kind of want to get them up here towards the end of each other's story. JR. I drew something a little bit off topic, but the same talking about community and things like this. Something that I saw recently was a talk that Rex Ryan Gay. Rex is the head coach for the New York Jets. And he implemented something with his players that I thought was great. And I wanted to bring it up to you guys. You know, we've got this community going. We've got guys that I love to hang with. You know, Ron Evans, Shade Backer, Kobe Randquist. I mean, there's a lot of people here that this community runs around. And it's fantastic. And the point that Rex brought up was that he told all of his players, you guys are going to start to get camera time. You're going to start to get interviewed by Sports Illustrated and something else. And one of the things you really need to do is think beyond yourselves and include the other players when somebody asks you questions about your team. And that's my point is that think about that when you start to talk about this community. Start to think about how you can lift the people in this community to be spoken about and to not just in the media but amongst each other. Think about what these people do to this community and bring them up in that community. Bring them up to the new people who don't know about this community and within the community itself. So, that's it. Woo! This quick topic. Ron, you kind of inspired me to mention this, but I'm working with a really incredible designer now named Cody Sanflipo who none of you have heard of because he just turned 17 on Tuesday. Last Tuesday. It was really funny because I found him through Forest. I was just coming through examples of people's work and I contacted some people in New York. And I brought to a few of them and said, hey, I'm going to get a group of people together on Saturday to just figure out, you know, how I built my team. And he said, yeah, I love working on awesome projects. And then he wrote me back a day before he was supposed to come in and said, by the way, I'm 16. Hopefully it's not a big deal. And I was like, okay, sure, come in then anyway. And it turns out that he's been working with Photoshop and Illustrator since he was 11. So he's just this amazing talent and he was home school for the last year. So he was basically like, yeah, I can start full-time tomorrow. I don't know what the hell to do. So I started doing some research and I was like, you need some working papers and can I meet your parents? So it turned out all I needed to do was to just get them going and he's just been incredible. So anyway, given that it's such a tight labor market, given that we want to help encourage newer generations to come forward, I'd encourage you guys to take a look at the younger folks that are heavy participants in some of these communities like Dribble and Forrest, even read it to a certain degree. A lot of these kids have amazing talent, whether it's with Photoshop and Illustrator, a lot of them have amazing stuff that they're doing on After Effects. Another good way to find them is through YouTube. If you look at these tutorials for various things, including programming, young teenage kids working on these tutorials and you look at the dedication and the amazing amount of work that they put into them and you go, wow, I could totally benefit from that. You're fired! So I'm encouraging you to help raise your own children anyway. Yeah, exactly. So they're going to fit right in. So anyway, just thought I'd add that to that. Okay, so what do I do? What do you want? What do you want? Hello, I'm Giles and what I want to say is real quick, a couple of years ago I was going around and doing this conference presentation thing about a music thing that I built because I was very, very interested in music. And one of the things that I said at the time is that you can look at technology or programming for those of you who are programmers as not being a music. That's a good idea. It's not being a what but a how and this goes back to the stuff we were talking about earlier with self-sourcing, like designing your career. Right now, my clients are in the entertainment industry because I'm interested in that. And it's very competitive up there. You can see it. Kids these days. Yeah, so there's that thing of if there's this tremendous amount of opportunity where basically the whole industrial complex that used to exist is being destroyed by us and rebuilt into something completely new where you can pretty much decide what part of it you want to rebuild and think about where you want it to take you. It doesn't have to just be like this person is cracking the whip and now that person is cracking the whip or I go and create my startup, right? It can also just be like what is it you want to learn besides code and what else can you do with it because there's no reason not to learn all kinds of different stuff. That's about it. That's what I was going to say. So the diaspora bros I only see one. Should we all come up? Sure. You can do like you're seeing a, what's the three way to do what? Menage a song Menage a dream and you sort of huddle around it. We don't have to know that. We don't have to know that. Have you decided on these? So I guess We're just going to tell the story I guess. So yeah, we started a project called diaspora. It's kind of a good story I guess to tell. So I guess we met each other building like a 3D printer. So we're all computer science students from NYU. For some reason NYU decided that it was okay to give undergraduates an office in computer science buildings. That's kind of where we hung out and kind of like became friends just sort of causing trouble and doing dumb shit I guess in the computer science building as maybe some of you programmers used to do. We saw a talk by a guy named Edwin Mowlin who's called Freedom in the Cloud and depending on how you feel about your software he's either crazy awesome or just crazy. And he basically just he was basically a big talk about how all these big web services were infringing on because freedom and lots of things that you know maybe you agree or don't agree with the thing I think that ran true for me is if you don't like this as a technologist why don't you try to make something better. And so we kind of said you know this sounds pretty hard but kind of fun and we like to mess around so we kind of just started coding stuff and seeing what we could do and you know just kind of kind of caused as much trouble as possible I guess at some point we just started you know working on it Friday nights pizza whatever you know just hanging out at some point we were like hey this is kind of fun maybe we could try to do this for the summer maybe someone would be willing to kind of give us money to work hard for the summer we could go put it on github and go get a real job sorry I had to ask for pieces of software that distributed social networking so it means that people's information is on the internet but we still communicate the way that we come to expect from like Facebook to sort of centralize services at a very high level like via the Gmail account we have a Yahoo account I can like still send email. It would be kind of really stupid but that's not the case with us it was really just but it was this idea I think it was just a bit of a kind of curious fact so one of our professors a Kickstarter it's just a so a bunch of kids could get code for 24 hours we said maybe on Kickstarter people would give us like $10,000 or any amount of money so we could just work on it the summer instead of getting real jobs because it didn't sound like fun it sounds like we could learn more stuff and basically have a lot more fun if we could just go like a cat house and woods for four months and we did and so after basically Dan and I arguing really vehemently on like whether people would ever give us money at all let alone $10,000 we put up our project and like sent maybe like 10 emails to people and all of a sudden like people we didn't know they started tweeting about it and all of a sudden people started like writing blog posts that these kids from NYU are building an anti-Facebook thing and basically then EFF tweeted about us so it's just like a little nerd wind and it just all of a sudden all these people started picking up on it and then some guy from New York Times wrote an article about the fact that we were doing this project and we ended up raising over $200,000 for our like summer project where we were like maybe we want to try this out and see how it goes and in that like lots of other crazy things happen actually like Pivotal Labs kind of kind of like hey you guys sound like you guys sound pretty cool and you might need a little bit of just like help hanging out, that's a really fancy movie consultancy in San Francisco they're like hey well we'll give you two free desks and you can just come hang out and code like okay sounds pretty good so I guess that'll happen like a year ago and you know we've since become like the Pivotal Labs like fish tank like they're bringing new clients and we've heard about those diaspora kids basically there we feed them and like they ask us fresh dens but but I actually that's not the most compelling thing I've ever told the story but I think it is really kind of related to what I'm sort of hearing on here which is if you want to do something or you have a curiosity about something like you should try to do it and you should also another thing I would just like tell people that you're excited about something and that you want to do something because if a smart person you know is also excited that's a good indicator that people have a lot of fun and will probably be really successful because it's hard to like totally fail if you're doing something and having fun while you do it so I guess that's the most important thing I'm not scared so actually Max just remind me of something hello so the save the children hashtag that I heard through many of these lightning talks I feel there's two small points which can be reinforced hello and so the first is give kids space and the second is buy kids toys to play with because that's what happened to us twice the space part we had an office and then Pivotal Labs gave us a couple of desks and as far as the the toys we had the way we all met was making a maker buy a 3D printer which allows you to take bits and turn them into atoms and so that's just something that I think we should all keep in mind when we're raising the new generations of patents well I did want to what Max just said it's sort of like this kind of have to us because we just kind of got the feeling that it was a good idea to do it like right before we were raising money like a Microsoft interview so they shipped me out to Seattle and like kind of halfway through I was like what the hell is this like it's kind of playing sorry kind of playing sort of but um yeah it was like kind of a realization because like before I went on this interview I was like telling my parents about oh like we're kicking around this project and my parents were like that's cool sounds fun you should get a real job you should get something with like health insurance and all this crap and I was like yeah maybe I should so like go on this interview but it was kind of an eye opener it's like well I don't want to be doing this this big corporate thing and like maybe maybe this like crazy idea we have like could actually go somewhere like I don't know right I actually like ended up raising all this money and like I kind of attribute it like for like personally it's just like kind of going off of a win like might as well try it like um I mean especially where we were but I feel like it can like kind of pertain to anybody it's just like just like do it like like what Nike says right just like there's like who cares if you fail like if you fail then you okay you can work in Microsoft like okay maybe not Microsoft I don't want to offend anybody everybody here uses a Mac so I don't feel too bad but yeah just like try it we're seeing easier at Microsoft I like the idea of Microsoft as a city spirit in backpack Europe and if that doesn't work out I can't solve it with my camera what I kind of mentioned one of my favorite full footnotes in the Dias story is two of them just graduated NYU and two of them decided to like put it on hold drop out or whatever I support anyone in quick school we've got 10 alleged minutes till lunch I say we, unless someone else any other okay so Nathan I want to give this guy a good setup I was 13 years old I was smaller body about the same size head and I lived in Noblesville Indiana the suburbs for a couple years and didn't really have any friends just whoever was in my class that year so I didn't have anyone to talk to in the hallway before classes started freshman year of high school and this guy his family had just moved to Indiana like two days before so he had a legitimate excuse to not have any friends so we both went to our first period of class which was Jim and we sat next to each other and that was 16 years ago 7 31 minus 13 14 carried the one he was wearing a t-shirt that said Barton sucks and his backpack had all kinds of like they might be giants and like Green Day and White Out Marker and we're past friends so I have no idea what he's talking about it doesn't matter hey hello I know next to nothing I'll say nothing about programming I took a basic programming class when I was in 4th grade and that was it well it's a program on an Apple 2e it's true but I am very much a nerve as I assume y'all are I'm trying to make a board game I have 800 plus 8-bit Nintendo games I am compiling a comic book I made in 6th grade into a hardcover volume just for my own but this is just an interesting story I guess so I always heard that when you die your life flashes before your eyes but that is totally not what happened to me and my near-death experience so it's July of 2009 two weeks before I'm getting ready to be married and I'm in Portland, Oregon it's like 107 degrees and I have the flu and I'm just veteran and I feel awful and I haven't done anything all day except watch crappy shows on Netflix or whatever and I feel like I really have to go to the bathroom so I get up and I wander into the bathroom and I sit down and I'm sitting there and my hands are kind of tingly a little bit and then my face starts to feel kind of tingly and I'm taking deep breaths trying to calm myself down and then my hands start to feel like they're kind of crunching in a little bit and I'm like what the hell is going on and my fingers are getting stiff and I can't really move them very well and I'm like both my hands are like this and I'm trying to pry them apart and they kind of snap back like this my hands start curling in and I'm like oh my god I'm fucking dying and I'm like freaking out and oh by the way my fiance is in Wisconsin preparing for the wedding I'm home alone and so at this point I'm like I'm dying I have to get my phone and call 911 my phone's in the bedroom I was taking a dump and so I try to stand up but like my legs aren't really working very well and my body's like curling in and I'm like trying to walk but I'm trying to like pull up my pants because if I die I don't want anybody to make it so I'm like pulling my pants up and trying to like walk into the bedroom and I like flop down on the bed and at this point like my muscles are all really tensed up and it hurts really bad and I see my phone I try to have the shittiest phone I can so I have this like cracked flip phone and I'm trying to open it but my hands are all curled and like I can't open it so I kind of hold it against the bed and put my teeth in and crack it open and I can't dial and I'm just like jamming on the call button trying to just call whoever will answer the phone next so I push it a bunch of times and it starts ringing and luckily it was my fiance and so she answers the phone oh hey Nate what the fuck are you doing screaming what are you talking about hold on hold on just calm down and I'm like I'm screaming and I'm like I'm like a you know what a beetle dies and their legs all curling and I'm like writhing around on the bed and she grabs, she's like stay on the phone stay on the phone she runs and grabs another oh she's a nurse also she grabs another phone calls our friend who lives relatively close to the house now Nate's dying and so she's like asking me questions like can you see do you know who you are you know all these sort of making sure like okay it's not whatever it's not whatever it's not right friend shows up but doesn't realize that it's quite as emergency as it is and she's like knock on the door and just waiting for me to answer the door but she hears the screaming so she kind of busts in and like at this point they don't really know what's going on but it's starting to sort of reverse I could start to kind of move my hands a little bit and then but I'm just like totally exhausted I can't really move or talk or do much of anything my friend takes me to the hospital and turns out that I had had an advanced vasovagal episode which is basically like for various reasons your heart kind of your blood pressure drops drastically and so your brain is like oh we're dying let's not send any blood to any parts of the body except the brain and the heart and let's just keep living and so it was a combination of being really sick being extremely hot being very dehydrated and getting up too quickly and being lightheaded and then also sitting down bearing down to poop and so all those things together like made this crazy shit storm that I bet it's like so basically they just said drink some Gatorade and you'll be fine but I really thought I was dying like there was no question in my mind this is the end and so like while I'm wrapping around in pain I'm not thinking like oh this is in my life two thoughts one was my fiance is going to be very furious with me if I die like two weeks before and the other was it would be super embarrassing for me I'm very much an atheist that if I survived this if I somehow found God at the end it would be extremely embarrassing anyway that was about the time I almost died thanks