 I'm super excited to be here today. It's RubyConf, it's my birthday and I'm gonna be talking today about Ruby in 79 AD and specifically how I'm open sourcing my role as Indiana Jones. But before I get going, I'm Sean Marcia. I work at George Mason University. Specifically I work for the College of Humanities and Social Sciences and that's me on the Twitters. So I'm gonna, let's talk, I'm gonna give you a little bit of a history lesson. Like I said, I work at a university and if I went back and I didn't teach you guys, if I don't teach you guys something, I'll get yelled at by all the academics I work with. I'm gonna talk a little bit about higher education, how to get involved open source, open source and higher education and then some other random details sprinkled in and don't worry everything's gonna come together at the end, so don't worry. So I know we just had lunch and so if you're really full and you wanna just close your eyes and just imagine everything, I'm mostly gonna be telling a story for this first part, so feel free to put your heads down and you can even pretend you're back at school and it's 8 a.m. on a Monday. So let's imagine it's the year 79 A.D. and this was a really amazing time to be alive. There was both like a cultural and intellectual renaissance going on and I guess I should point out that I understand that A.D. is an anachronism and C.E. is the accepted term now, but I'm gonna be using A.D. and B.C. in this talk just because that's more recognizable and to really understand why there was this cultural and intellectual renaissance going on, we actually have to have a little bit more history to explain the history. So back in 44 B.C. there was this guy named Julius Caesar and if you've ever taken 10th grade English, you probably read a Shakespeare poem about him. He was this badass Roman general who came, declared himself dictator and as dictators do, he started eroding all the power structures in Rome and consolidating all power with himself. But Rome was a republic and the Senate thought, hey this is a bad idea that this guy's taking all the power for himself, so they invited Caesar to the Senate and all these senators took turns shanking him and health care then not isn't what it is today, so Caesar died. But he was an extremely popular fellow like both because when he died he left all his money to the, or a lot of his money to the Roman people, which engenders a lot of goodwill, but he also, you know, he was also really popular for just being such a badass general. And so this led to, you know, an uprising and like those senators were, you know, were taking care of and there was news sort of like there's a triumvirate of people in charge. There was Caesar's nephew who was Gaius Octavius who took Caesar's name, Augustus Caesar and actually interestingly enough every Roman emperor after Augustus took the name Caesar and even into the Middle Ages when there's the Holy Roman Empire and the name Caesar even kind of entered like the language zeitgeist, like the German word Kaiser comes from Caesar and the Russian word czar comes from Caesar, just kind of interesting. But so these three gentlemen were sharing power, you know, Antony, Mark Antony, Augustus and this other guy Lepidus, but Lepidus he disappeared like even faster than Jim Webb and he disappeared even faster than Webb and left the two guys, there was a civil war, Antony, he committed suicide, him and Cleopatra left Augustus in charge. But the really smart thing that Augustus Caesar did at this point is, you know, he never declared himself emperor, he never declared himself dictator, only ever called himself the first citizen of Rome and you know the first citizen among equals. But you know, there's no question he was the emperor, you know, in any sense he was the emperor and actually this was his beginning of his reign marks the demarcation point from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire. But so he did something that a lot of people thought would have been impossible, but because he had so much power he switched the entire economy of Rome from one of constant warfare and bringing back slaves to one of peace. And because of this he was, you know, we had this period that lasted about 200 years that's called Pax Romana, basically Roman peace. But if you have this, you know, this massive infrastructure of people that aren't, you know, beating on your neighbors all the time, you can do a lot of really amazing things. And like, and this is why like they had this, this, this renaissance going on, like, like, like the legions during this time they built 55,000 miles of roads, like a paved roads, like that's not even including the 130,000 miles of unpaved roads they built. And again, like having good safe roads, that's good for transportation, for trade, for the exchange of ideas, they built like amazing works of architecture, like this is the Alcantara Bridge in Spain. And if you, if you go to this bridge there's an inscription on it by the architect that says, I've built a bridge that will last till the end of time. And it was built 2000 years ago and it's still used every day, which is amazing. And like we tend to think that all our philosophy and our laws and our literature is all based in ancient Greece. And while that's true, it was really during this, this Roman renaissance that all these ideas were really taken forward and really, like, developed to a new extent. And they were doing things that even by today's standard that we would just consider like completely revolutionary. Like, they opened the Roman Senate up to non-Romans. And so they had their first, first senator who was non-Roman, then they had their first emperor who wasn't Roman. Like, think about that. Like, imagine if we had a president here in America who wasn't American. Like, imagine if we even had a president that people thought was from another country, like Kenya or something. Like, imagine how crazy people would go. Like, like they were doing like intricate glasswork and like glass in the windows and buildings. And like an interesting side note, like a professor I worked with, she was the one who through like residual residue tests found that during this time the Romans were drinking beer, not just wine. And that's something near my heart. So that's kind of cool. Concrete. Yes, concrete. It was the Romans who developed concrete. And when the Roman Empire fell, the world forgot how to make concrete for, you know, over a thousand years until the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. And they didn't, they didn't learn how to make the same concrete the Romans did. Like, Roman concrete, we only rediscovered that in 2013. And it's amazing. Like, they have Roman and sea concrete things that were built over 2,000 years ago that are still used today. And like our modern concrete, the Portland cement is called, it wouldn't last the 10th of that time in ocean. And so just like knowing that there was this cultural renaissance going on, it would be amazing if there was some way we could like take a section of like the ancient Roman world and like, you know, bury it away and save it in time for us to like just rediscover now and like really understand what was happening. Like just for like humanities knowledge, I guess that's not possible. So let's talk about Pompeii, you know, and still in this Paxima amount of time. And let's imagine its date. The date is 24th of August, 79 AD. Pompeii is a pretty great place to live. You know, it's even though it's fairly close to Rome, it's actually geographically fairly isolated. You can only really get to it by by sea. And so so the people are very laid back there. It's just a pretty happy place to live. But you know, being the 24th of August, things have been a little disturbing recently, like the ground's been shaking, Vesuvius, the mountain nearby has has been smoking. But like, no one's, no one's worried about Vesuvius erupting. Just because like yesterday on August 23rd was Vulcanalia, which is the giant festival to the Roman god of fire and volcanoes. And we know the gods aren't capricious. And so, you know, we're not, we're not worried. So it turns out gods are capricious. And over the course of about six hours, Pompeii is buried in about 20 to 25 meters of ash and rock and all sorts of crazy things. And I have a kind of a nerdy sound file here that I want to play that highlights it, or highlights what happened next. Can you hear that? And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend. Legend became myth. And for one and a half thousand years, the location of Pompeii passed out of all knowledge. Oops. Everyone get the reference? Okay. So I'm so sorry if anyone saw this movie. It is not accurate done at all. There was no volcano. There are there was no lava and fireballs from the sky. It was nothing like that. What happened was it was a Pliny interruption, kind of like what happened at Mount St. Helens in 1980, where there's a lot of ash, a lot of like smoke and and pyroclastic things. And I know you guys, you hear the word Pliny or Pliny and and maybe you're thinking something like this. And if you are, find me later tonight at the bar. And I would love to talk about this with you. Many times. But interestingly enough, like these two gentlemen, Pliny the Elder and Pliny the Younger, they're the reasons it's called a Pliny interruption like they're, they're, this beer is named after real people. And they're actually the reason we know so much about Pompeii. Pliny the Elder was like Rome's naval commander, stationed near Naples. And when the eruption happened, he set off with some ships to try and rescue people. Fortunately, he didn't make it. So it's his nephew, Pliny the Younger, all his notes that, that are why we know so much today. But I guess if we were more accurate, it's probably because some academics and some academic, you know, read these notes, translated them, kind of put them in context and correlated them with other data to really make things make sense. And, you know, like I said, I work at a university. And I feel it's my duty to dispel like a myth, a common misconception about universities, about how universities tuition is going crazy. And I'm sure we've all seen a chart like this about how the cost of the university tuition has gone up like monumentally over time. Like in the last 30 years, tuition is up about 500%. But the cost of living is up about 100%. And, and, and universities are just making so much money. And if that were true, I would encourage you all to talk to my manager who's right there and tell him to give me a raise. But it's not. The sad thing is, is universities are state institutions. And so they're governed by state government. And state governments, as we all know, are not always the best with their money. And when it comes time to cut money, higher education is often an easy target, because unfortunately, the people who go to university don't vote. They're of the age. So there's no political repercussions to taking money away from universities. And so, and so my university, for example, in the state of Virginia, back when that graph began, about 70% of its budget was from the state. And now in 2015, it's about 20% of the budget. So that's a pretty, pretty large difference. And costs at universities have gone up a lot in the last 30 years. You know, like there's computer labs, like they're ubiquitous at a school, and computers have software, and software licenses, and all these other costs that didn't exist 30 years ago. My university has two MRI machines, and those are cheap things. And it's led to this idea of university incorporated. And I'm not talking like I went to grad school at the University of Oregon, and at the University of Oregon, we had the Knight Library, the Knight Law School, the Knight Basketball Arena, like all named after Philip Knight, one of the founders of Nike, who gives him a lot of money. And that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about this idea that universities are starting to value projects and programs that can can foster partnerships with corporations, wealthy individuals, government agencies, more than programs that don't produce those those partnerships. And so if I can just like maybe get a show of hands from everyone, who doesn't have a traditional computer science degree? Like who has a degree in the humanities and social sciences? Okay, awesome. So, and if we look at like the funding into the humanities and humanities research, like it's like the tiny one over there that has next to none. And but the really scary thing is we're starting to see results like this, like what just happened in Japan, how the Japanese Minister of Education announced that they're going to either close or scale back the humanities and social sciences at their major universities. And they're 60 major universities. And in fact, at 26 of them, they're closing it completely to better serve the needs of their their population. And this this is really sad to me and really terrible because like the humanities like this is our cultural soul like, like our art, our literature, like this is what makes us like unique in the universe. And like, and it's kind of sad. And like, there's so many benefits to the humanities, like it teaches us how to think. And like, it's because there are no black and whites in the humanities, like, you know, you have to research, you have to communicate and like all these really, really valuable skills that teaches. And they've also done research that people who study the humanities, whether in university or not, they lead fuller, fuller, better informed lives. And I don't know how they, what metrics they study those by, but it's just really interesting. But like, there is some hope on the horizon. And that hope is coming from like the last place I would suspect ever, Silicon Valley. And I'm not sure if you know this gentleman. This is Stuart. And he, and I'm not just using him as an example, because he's Canadian as well. Stuart is the founder and CEO of Slack. And he, he has degrees, undergraduate degrees in philosophy and a master's degree in philosophy. And a story Stuart likes to tell is one of his employees, a 38 year old lady with, with a fine arts degree in theater is responsible for most of Slackbot's functionality. And he, he credits Slackbot for a great, for most of the reason for Slack success, like, because people seem to just go crazy over how awesome Slackbot is. And he credits that to her and, and hence his company's success. But I don't want to talk anymore about the sort of depressing state of academia. Let's talk about something awesome. Ruby. I love Ruby. I love Matz. He really got things right when he said he built Ruby for developer happiness. And that little Matz, my Ruby group makes Matz stickers. And if you want one, come find me after. But if there's one thing that's not awesome about Ruby, and Chris Mark could probably tell you, it's finding a Ruby job sometimes. Because when you go to look for a Ruby job, we've all probably heard something along the lines of, you know, GitHub is your resume, and you have to contribute to open source if you want to, to get a, a Ruby job. And like, can I understand this from a hiring manager's point of view? Because if you look at someone's code, you can ask them, you can ask them intelligent questions, why they made certain design decisions, you know, why they chose this gem, what kind of problems they encountered while they were building their code, and rather than, you know, when do you use map, when do you select inject, or code me the Fibonacci sequence. And you know, we're all told, well, if I want to do open source, how should I do it? Like, what's the, what's the path for me? And, you know, we're all probably told these same, same three things. I'll commit documentation to projects or replicate errors or, you know, submit pull requests. But like, I don't think that's necessarily the best path for everyone. Like, I know, like personally, like when I was getting started, it was a little hard to share your code because, you know, like I have imposter syndrome. And it's, you know, like, it's not, not easy because, you know, someone can really tear your part. And like, it's still not easy, even, you know, I've been doing this for a number of years. And, you know, to paraphrase this guy, like, you know, the path of the many outweighs the path of the few or the one, maybe into open source. But, you know, I would instead say, you know, like, even though it outweighs it, it doesn't have to be the same path. And like, for me, I ended up on a different path into an open source project. And like, it started one day, I was at the university out, out for lunch, and I saw a professor that I worked with and so I'm chatting with her. And turns out she's an archaeologist that goes to Pompeii every year. And, you know, she's telling me about this. And I'm like kind of getting really excited, because I know you guys are looking at me right now and you think, oh, look at that guy, you know, he probably spends his off time modeling and hanging out with supermodels. But like, that's not true. I'm actually just a giant nerd and I love board games and D&D and all that kind of fun stuff. And, but like in hearing this is just really, you know, giving me like a nerd excitement. And, but then at one point, like something perked up my developer ears. And she said, yeah, we're having a problem with our database. I'm like, oh, databases, that's something I can help with. And, and so I, you know, I got her to, you know, explain, explain what's going on. And it turns out that they, you know, they all go there. They use this thing called FileMaker Pro. They enter in their data, then they come back and they reconcile their data. And then they mail, like they mail, they don't email, they mail a thumb drive to one person who reconciles all the data and then males, again, not emails, back a thumb drive of, you know, of a complete database for everyone. And, you know, I guess developer, I'm hearing this and, you know, like, you know what I'm thinking and feeling. And so I asked her, well, can I see what you're using? Like, what do you have? And, you know, they're using this FileMaker and they're, they had a really old version, you know, FileMaker Pro, if you're familiar, I'm sorry if you are. I see one head nodding. And if, if you are familiar, it was horrible. And it would only run on Windows XP or older. And so, yeah. And I tried to get a screenshot of it, but even though I work at a university, I couldn't find a Windows XP computer. But so it looks something like this, but this was much nicer because I guess it's a newer version. And so I'm like, well, I'm going to research into your database issue and I'll get back to you in a couple of days and let's chat about this. So in those two days, I furiously worked. And sorry to Louisa if you saw her talk about design. I did use Twitter Bootstrap. But, you know, I put them together, something they could use and I guess since FileMaker would export to a CSV, I could import all their data and they were good to go. And I heard a story later, she was talking over Skype with one of the other professors in England who's on the project and they were just like blown away. Like she must have said it six times how amazed they were that she could update something and he could see the result immediately. And so it was pretty cool. But like, you know, I was pretty satisfied with myself, pretty happy, you know, give myself Pat's on the back, like how great I was. And but then like three or four days later, I got a call from this lady named Betty Jo. And Betty Jo is like, hey, Sean, I saw what you did. That's awesome. Do you want to come to Pompey with us? But I'm doing it for you. Maybe I was a little more excited. And so what the really cool thing was is I got archaeologist credentials. And you know, for reference, this is Sean, the archaeologist in Pompey. I wanted to have Indiana Jones's head come across the screen and replace mine. But I couldn't figure out how to do that with Twitter Bootstrap. So you have to just imagine. But so if you're ever exploring 2000 year old runes, it's really, really cool. But it's even cooler if you're doing with archaeologist credentials. Like if you've been to Pompey, you probably recognize like this open square here. And it's usually full of tourists. But when you're, you know, when you're an archaeologist, you get in there when there's no people. So it's kind of it's really, well, it's really quiet. It's actually kind of creepy and eerie. But it's really cool. Get into buildings that they're just excavating. And you can see like the scaffolding that's happening and and like the building they're excavating here. You can see that that's my beautiful wife. And you can see things that they're digging out of the ground. Like you can see pots there. And I don't know if that's like a horse or a donkey or a giant dog or something. But just really cool stuff. And so but the big takeaway that like from this is like this really isn't a project they could have done on their own. Like one, I don't think they knew that this was possible. And they also didn't have like the financial resources to do something like this. But like in doing a little research around and talking to other researchers, you know, I found out that like their problems aren't unique problems like like the things they need like being able to enter an update data, review that data, then lock it down, provide login functionality, upload information. Like if you can do these four things, you can do 95% of the projects that researchers need. And, you know, the amazing thing about our community is these are all problems we've solved in our community. Like we have like just plug four gems into your gem file and you can do these things. And and it's amazing. And like the next question is, well, why should I do it this way rather than, you know, commit to RSpec or Minitest or or some other like really worthwhile project? And like my answer would be is that it's it's more accessible or I feel it's more accessible. You you like I remember my very first open source project I was going to commit to. I went and on GitHub, they had a phenomenal like committing committing directions. But like I just switched from Python to Ruby and I'm reading this and and it's like, well, we're testing with bacon and copy borough and like bacon is a real testing framework. I encourage you to look it up and copy bar and I'm like, bacon, what copy bar a rat and like they're saying all these things that just don't really aren't jiving with me as a new developer. And and but you know, like I think it's a lot easier if maybe a professor were to say to you, hey, I need a way to enter in data about red pandas, upload pictures of those red pandas and then I'll let other people log in review that data comment, you know, download the pictures and whatnot. Like that's a lot more, I think, accessible. So since I do have a captive audience here, I do want to make a quick pitch for something called Ruby for Good. It's an it's an event. I I help run and created. It's it's in the DC area. We get together for a long weekend and we build applications for like nonprofits, civically good organizations. Like this past year, we help the place that helps street kids, a food bank, even the Humane Society. And you know, the cool thing about the Humane Society is, you know, we got to work with the things that programmers have most, you know, that being kittens. We had kittens at our event and you know, how many revents do you get to go to that have kittens? And this is our amazing Humane Society team. They are all awesome and having fun. And so next year, it's going to be June 16th and 19th and it's going to be at the Smithsonian Mason Research Institute. And that's super cool for two reasons. Like one, it's right next to Shenandoah National Park. And if you've never been to Shenandoah National Park, it's probably one of the prettiest places in the entire country. And the other reason is, we have some awesome, awesome neighbors there. For example, since that's where the Smithsonian Zoo does the research, some of our neighbors include Red Pandas. They include clouded leopards. I don't know what these things are, but they're there too. And there's cheetahs and wolves and bison and everything else. And it's going to be a lot of fun. But most importantly, we're going to do a lot of really good projects, help a lot of really good organizations. And even if you can't come and you or your family or friends volunteer somewhere, like could you help from us? Please get in touch. And like I said, that Red Panda project, that's a real project that we're going to be working on next year. So yeah, so just keep us in mind when you're planning your conferences. Like maybe you're thinking, oh, should I go to this one? Like actually earlier yesterday, someone approached me and was like, hey, are you going to Ruby on Ales? There's beer there. And I just asked, well, are there also Red Pandas? And they said no. And so, well, maybe we're going to have to wait a little less. And I encourage you to do the same. But sort of like in summation now, like I do encourage you all to stop by your local university and get involved. And if that's intimidating to you, please get in touch with me. I would love to put you in touch with people you can help. You know, I can't promise you're going to get a trip to Italy every year like I do. But I can really, I can promise that you're going to get to learn really, really, really interesting things. And so if anyone has any questions now, I would love to answer them. Thank you so much. So the question is like, what happens with the projects? How are they maintained and going forward? And that's a fantastic question. So like the Pompeii one, I guess if I was ever hit by a bus, they would be in really bad situation because it's just me. You know, for Ruby for good, we do our best to foster relationships between the teams and the organizations. Like that's why we send the actual team out to the Humane Society. They meet with them. So there's these personal connections. So if they do send an email like to the team and they all get notified, you know, they sort of feel obligated then to help or to fix because you know, they know them as people. And more. Awesome. Thank you.