 I've proudly considered myself to be a computer programmer and I've really had four different careers in the tech business. Now when I say tech, I mean software and when I say software, I mean the important part of the digital revolution. Any digital technology is just so much static art on the wall without software. Software makes it behave, sorry, I have to figure this out. Software makes it behave and makes it useful and that's the really interesting part. I first learned to code on IBM mainframes in COBOL using punched cards. My first career ended after just three years when I quit my corporate job and started my own company becoming one of the very first software entrepreneurs. Founding structured systems group was the beginning of my second career. For seven years I designed, coded, tested, documented, marketed, sold and supported what has been called the first serious business software for personal computers. I left that company to begin my third career as an independent software author. This was the era of boxed software and over the next eight years I invented, prototyped, coded and then sold to publishers for major software packages. Actually I was only able to sell three of them but included in those were the first online communications program for Windows, the first critical path project management program which I sold to computer associates and a visual programming tool that I sold to Bill Gates which eventually became Visual Basic which eventually became Visual Studio. When the publisher Mitchell Waite heard my story he gave me my one phrase resume of the father of Visual Basic although now the kids call me the grandfather of Visual Basic. By then I'd realized that writing feature-packed bug-free software didn't guarantee success. It needed to be easy to use too and I wanted to figure out how to make that happen. I quit programming altogether in 1990 to focus exclusively on the challenge of interaction design thus initiating my fourth career. I can't lay claim to being the first interaction designer but at the time the other one was working for an industrial design firm. In 1992 my wife Sue sitting in front row here and I started Cooper interaction design, the very first consulting firm to specialize in it today we just call it Cooper. In the late 90s I wrote two books about interaction design both of them are widely used have seen multiple editions and are still in print today. Many of today's best practices of interaction design are ones that I invented like focusing on goals and motivations instead of tasks and functions using possibility thinking instead of constraint thinking and personas and scenarios. Possibly my most significant innovation is pair design as practiced here by Cooper East as Renna Aliasani and Jim Dibble. My biggest accomplishment has been helping create careers for young people. There are now dozens of former Cooperistas leading design efforts in successful companies around the world. Sue and I are very proud of the work they're doing. Of course the current Cooperistas are the best we've ever had including the brilliant Charzade, Nate, Seth, Jason, Kendra and the rest of them. A few years ago a colleague called me a software alchemist. At first the rationalist in me rebelled against the unscientific name but then I realized how appropriate that title was. Alchemy is the art of transformation and software is a magical transforming agent. Everything it touches has changed utterly and completely. So now I proudly call myself a software alchemist. Everyone who designs, develops and deploys software is an alchemist too. That's really what I'm talking about today. You are all alchemists too. And you are the ones with the hands on the machinery of the world. You have the power to shape the way we live. And you are more powerful than you think. And with that power comes responsibility. Monkey Ranch is the current phase of my life. A decade ago Sue and I began to hand over management of Cooper to younger smarter people. Our two sons went off to college and we found ourselves with more spare time. As a kid at home my father taught me how to use tools. He loved to use his hands to make things and he passed that love on to me. Now that I had more time my interest in working with wood and metal was rekindled. I had a small workshop and I wanted a larger one. But the neighbors in our upscale Silicon Valley neighborhood said no. This prohibition on my land made me want to move somewhere where I could do what I wanted with my property. I told my wife I wanted to own a place big enough and remote enough that I could set off a stick of dynamite without pissing anybody off. We searched for and found the perfect place. And five years ago we became the proud owners of Monkey Ranch. It's a former dairy farm in the bucolic San Antonio Valley about an hour north of San Francisco in Marin County where I grew up. It's also the home of Star Wars, the Grateful Dead, Robin Williams, the Mountain Bike and the Tequila Sunrise. Moving to Monkey Ranch has been a life changing experience for me. Before this the closest I've ever been to ranching is owning a cat. That's Monkey the Cat. Where we had lived before had a country feel but it was just lots of trees and ornamental gardens. It was still just a suburban residential neighborhood. Now we were in the real country with old barns, creeks, a pond, and huge fields of grass. I call this part of it dynamite valley. I didn't have any illusions about putting on overalls and becoming a farmer. I just wanted a workshop. But owning 50 rolling acres that's about 20 hectares of fecund abundant soil comes with its own imperatives. We knew that we would grow something on our farm but we didn't know what, who, or how. We needed plenty of help but we would do the work and we would learn. My talk today is about some of the lessons I've learned on the ranch. There are remarkable similarities between agriculture and software development. When you industrialize either agriculture or software development you create a toxic environment that makes people sick and it harms our world. There is just as much money to be made by taking things slowly and caring for our future in both fields. You don't have to deplete to make a profit. Living in farm country with farm people is so radically different from living in the high tech bubble of Silicon Valley. I've met so many fascinating and intelligent people and learned so much from them. Just about everything I thought I knew about agriculture turned out to be wrong. More profoundly the farmers and ranchers out in the country have taught me something about responsibility. By the way that's brand. I came to the farm as an innocent, a suburban computer geek with a taste for design, books and woodworking. Our neighbors wanted to get a look at us, the new folks, and we soon met them. Our neighbors are real farmers with animals and pastures and bales of hay. Our nearest neighbor, Mark, is a third generation dairyman. When we first met, he told me that the attitude out here was that every person should be able to do what he wants with his own property. I thought, I found my people, they'll let me do what I want here. It was many months before the penny dropped and I realized that he wasn't talking about me. He was talking about himself and the other farmers nearby. He didn't want me, the new guy, the city boy, moving in and complaining to the authorities about the smell or the noise or the trucks or the long hours. He didn't want me stopping him from branding his cattle, shooting his guns, killing coyotes or hunting for deer or ducks. Sue and I took pains to never complain, to pitch in and help, and to try to be a part of the community. Word got out that the Coopers were okay. When Mark was a teen, his dad and his uncle ran the family dairy. They had 200 cows, which is about the most one family can handle. Their milk was sold locally and consumed in San Francisco. Cindy, Mark's wife, comes from a long line of successful cattle breeders. Their son and daughter are both very active in young farmer organizations. The whole family is well known in the valley for their civic contributions and their ranching prowess, but they don't milk cows anymore. Family dairy has been shut down for 20 years. Mark has a day job as a fireman, his wife teaches school, his uncle retired to Oregon, and his dad drives a farm supplies truck. Thirty years ago, there were 14 dairies in the San Antonio Valley, and today there are none. They've all been put out of business by industrialized dairy farms far away in the dry southern deserts of California. They call those facilities concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, and they each have 10,000 or more cows. Their cows are permanently packed onto feedlots so densely that no grass at all grows there. The amount of shit the cows produce is so great that it collects into toxic fecal lagoons. That's the technical term. These lakes of shit are so large that they decompose more slowly than they grow, and they are a prominent source of pollution in the area. Mark still keeps a few dozen beef cows on his land, but he doesn't make any money at it. Mostly they just crop the grass so that it isn't a fire hazard in the dry season. The real reason why he keeps animals on his property is because he has ranching in his blood. He values the land, the animals, the work, and the community. If he could still make a living milking cows, he'd reopen that family dairy in an instant. The bottom line here is that commercial interests with the ability to dodge taxes and unconstrained by meaningful regulation has completely taken over the dairy business. They pollute with impunity and they pay starvation wages. They are making billions in profit and giving none of it back to the community. The milk business is no longer a place for old dairymen like Mark. He cares too much about the quality of his milk, the health of his cows, the beauty of his land because he lives on it. It's a shame that Mark doesn't make food anymore. Industrial corporations are the ones making our food and they are not our friends. It's the same in the software business. When companies scale up and go for profitability, they usually abandon their core values. Instead of providing useful services to valued customers, they begin to treat people like an extractable resource to be harvested. For example, struggling to find a revenue stream, Twitter shut down its open APIs, wrecking a burgeoning industry and giving its users less choice and flexibility. When capitalism is unrestrained by some moral force, the drive for profit inevitably forces the company into exploitation and destruction. That moral restraint can only come from the humans inside the organization. I've owned my own business for 40 years and I serve many large companies as clients, so I'm not arguing against free enterprise or making money. I just want to add some care and not just because it's good business, but because it's the right thing to do. There are some things in the world that should serve people first and be a business only second. Food is one of those things. Software is another one. When you treat farming the way you would a factory, you subvert its values. Yes, there's more short-term profit, but at the high cost of having to eat unhealthy food while wrecking the environment. When you treat software development the way you would a factory, you subvert its values. Sure, you can make money in the short term, but at the high cost of an unresponsive, annoying product that invades our privacy and diminishes our rights. There are so many people who treat software like a factory business. They want to spend less money designing and coding it, hoping this will increase their profit. They learn the hard way that this doesn't work because it takes both time and money to craft delightful behavior, but a delightful product makes lots of money. People love your product for what it is and not for what it costs. An interesting characteristic of the digital age is that so many of the hard-earned lessons of the industrial age don't work with bits the way they did with atoms. If you look at the short history of software invention and ignore the corporate hype, you see an interesting pattern. Virtually every single substantive advance in tech, along with every single new innovative tech product, came from a tightly collaborative team, typically no more than two or three, but never more than a dozen. What's more, these tiny teams had virtually no conventional management function, no oversight, no fiscal controls, no product review, and no plans and estimates. This is true of all the operating systems and programming languages we use, of all the products that dominate our desktops from Photoshop to Google to Amazon, and all of the social media on our smartphones, from Facebook to Snapchat to Tinder. Sure, today, those giant products are maintained by huge teams, but they were created by tiny, unmanaged ones. Tightly managed teams rarely create great software. Of course, the same holds true on the farm. Instead of managing your crops, you have to create a rich, nurturing environment where your plants and animals will thrive. Then let them go with minimal intervention. Respecting plants and animals this way not only creates great food, but it's personally satisfying. If money has too much influence, the temptation to force growth and rush product is irresistible. We have let money get too concentrated in agriculture. We need to not let that happen with software. There are many good examples in the software world of doing things in an apparently un-business-like way that turns out to be good business. The agile notion of having two programmers do the work of one drives cost-conscious industrial managers crazy. And yet, pair programming is remarkably effective for creating better code in less time. My consulting company, Cooper, pioneered pair design, which also seems inefficient. But our two-person teams do their own user studies in the field. They create far superior solutions in less time than if we're done by separate design and research teams. Navy jet fighter pilots have a saying, slow is smooth and smooth is fast. Everything about this is counter-intuitive. Speed and combat makes the difference between life and death. Speed, but trying to go faster by brute force rarely works. Instead, by flying as smoothly as you can, your airplane induces less drag and flies faster through the undisturbed air. One of the young farmers out here told me an old saying. The best fertilizer is the farmer's footsteps. There's a lot of wisdom in this metaphor. Sometimes the most important thing you can do is just take the time to stop and look. What do you see? What does it mean? Often, the best design ideas are hiding in plain sight outside of your office. Get into the field, find your users, and spend some quality time listening to them tell you about their day. A day in the field might save you a month of unnecessary development work. Go slow, take it smooth. Since they were friends in school, Cathy has been Sue's best friend. Cathy's daughter, Katie, is the same age as our oldest son, Scott. So, Katie is like a niece to me. From the time she was a teenager, Katie was interested in being a farmer, a sustainable farmer. She wanted to grow and eat healthy food while living close to the soil. Since we needed someone to make our lush green acres productive, Katie was a natural choice. So we asked her to come and live on the ranch, grow whatever she wanted, and build her own business. Monkey Ranch was her opportunity. For three and a half years, Katie worked the land. She made compost, planted onions, and tomatoes, and a score of other vegetables. Katie's pace followed the rhythm of the seasons. Her specialty was lettuce. Katie's lettuce was the finest I've ever tasted. Katie didn't use chemicals, and the only fertilizer she added was manure from our sheep and chickens. She did very little plowing as that injures the soil and makes it lose valuable carbon and moisture. From nearby Tamali's Bay, she got crushed oyster shells to make our soil less acid. The local schools wanted to buy her produce, but their budgets were too tight. She tried selling her produce at local farmers markets. She established a subscription program. Finally, she was forced to abandon her efforts. Despite her degree in sustainable agriculture, her internships on local green farms, and her extensive experience on other branches in the area. And despite our contribution of the land, the water, the equipment, and even free rent, she could not make a living growing healthy food. I'm not saying it's impossible to make a living with sustainable farming, but I'm saying that there's some deep flaw in our economic and legal structures. Family agriculture is the only proven method of providing abundant, fresh, nutritious food to hungry citizens, and it was once the most widely practiced profession in America. It's wrong that family agriculture is no longer economically viable. The marketplace is dominated by food so heavily subsidized, so nutritionally bankrupt, and so ecologically profligate that healthy food is laughingly non-competitive. The simple reason why Katie struggled is because industrial food is subsidized by the government. The cost of a factory burger is far less than the cost of organic vegetables or pastured meat because significant portions of the fodder and fertilizer are paid for by the government, while significant bureaucratic obstacles lay a thwart the path of organic, humane, and local growers. The same thing is happening in the tech world, where bigger companies get subsidies and regulatory advantages while smaller, more innovative companies are taxed, sued, and constrained. The government likes big companies because big companies let them peek into our personal data, and they don't like little companies because little companies like to protect citizens' rights. The software that has lots of money behind it isn't so nice to users. It steals their data, binds them with one-sided licensing agreements, and abandons them if the wind changes. Agriculture is an important part of what makes us human. Every organization establishes a culture because culture is the glue that holds groups together. The Latin root of the word culture is coler, meaning cultivate. What this means is that culture comes from growing things in the soil. Culture comes from agriculture and not the other way around. What's more, civilization is just the culture of our larger group. Thus, civilization comes from agriculture too. Growing food is not only our source of nourishment, it's the source of our way of life. When we regard agriculture as a factory business and try to scale it up, we undermine the foundation of our very civilization. We accept toxic expediencies in exchange for profit, which in turn gives us inequality and injustice. Agribusiness uses the phrase feed the world as their excuse to treat our food ecosystem as an extractive industry, like pumping oil. They take huge profits and laying waste to our soil and atmosphere, but there's still widespread starvation in the world. They don't actually feed the world. They say people want cheap food, so they concentrate animals into feedlots and concentrate giant tracts of land into industrial farms, but they conceal from us the real cost of cheap food. Nobody wants the tastelessness, obesity, sickness, poverty, hunger, loss of identity and pride, horrible jobs, torturing animals, environmental destruction, despair, hate, and blame. As a good software alchemist, I've always called software the devouring fungus because it ingests the world and then transforms it. Mark Andreas and the inventor of the web browser makes the same analogy when he says software is eating the world. It takes over all other forms of communication and commerce. If you want a job or a vacation or a hammer or a lover, you find out about those things and you buy those things with software. Where agriculture feeds our bodies, more and more software is the mechanism that feeds our minds. Software is becoming nearly as vital as food because it's home to our stories, relationships, politics, reputations, privacy, commerce, work, play, prurient interests and our entire social graph. Just as self-destructive as it is to allow unrestrained commercial interests to hollow out our food chain for private profit, it's equally self-destructive to allow unrestrained commercial interests to hollow out our information systems for private profit. The other day I dropped in on a team of Cooper designers working on a challenging design problem. Shannon and Steve were in Southern California teaching a Cooper U class. They discovered a new automated toll road in Los Angeles that uses wireless transponders in each car instead of having toll booths. The problem is what to do when someone gets on the toll road without a transponder. Currently the driver's liable for a costly penalty unless he goes to a hard to use website and pays. The staff expected me to do some clever interaction designed to make that website easier to use. But I saw a different and more important design problem here. The real issue is that Los Angeles, like almost every other American city, lacks effective public transportation. Inexpensive, abundant transport would eliminate the need for so many cars, highways, and congestion. With fewer vehicles, toll collecting would become easier and more likely unnecessary. You might think that advocating for public transportation was not part of the problem and I should stick to just website design. I understand that concern and eventually we have to deliver to the client what they've asked for. But at another level, it's our responsibility as citizens to take a stance for what is correct in the larger civic arena. If we don't do it, who will? As software eats the world, more and more public policy and private behavior is dictated by software rather than the other way around. As tech practitioners, we've become responsible for a million different fields of endeavor. Software designers and developers are all alchemists and we have transformational power. We can spin lead into gold for our masters or we can take responsibility for the quality of our world and spin our lives into a better, healthier, and more sustainable place. Such choices are becoming commonplace in the tech world. Practitioners like us designed and wrote the software that let Volkswagen cheat on its emissions tests. What would you say if your boss offered you a big bonus to write voting machine software that cheated? I told our young designers that if we're not losing an occasional client due to our high-mindedness and moral purity, then we're not high-minded and morally pure enough. Aaron is our resident shepherd on Monkey Ranch. He's a skilled rancher, butcher, and dirt gardener. Aaron is quiet and unassuming, always busy, and he constantly amazes us with his breadth of experience and knowledge. He's studied in Italy for two years to learn how to make the best salami. He teaches classes in fermentation and butchery. His rabbit pate is the best around. It took me a while to figure it out, but all of Aaron's skill ultimately stem from his love of good food. Aaron lives in a one-room trailer on the ranch and has to take on extra jobs to make enough money to live. Like just about every other conscientious farmer, in terms of money, he skates just above the poverty line, but he counts his wealth and the quality of his life, his food, his friends, his happy livestock, and the beautiful landscape. Our sheep love and trust Aaron to a remarkable extent, and they're very happy and healthy animals. He gives our animals mineral supplements, like other farmers do, but instead of using harsh chemicals, he feeds them seaweed that he harvests from the Pacific shore and dries in the sun. Similarly, he feeds the sheep garlic that he grows in his yard to deworm them without chemicals. I've never met another rancher who took such pains. We raise our sheep for meat, and because of Aaron's ridiculously high standards, Monkey Ranch lamb is much sought after by several of the finer restaurants in San Francisco, but Aaron is really on a bigger mission than superb lamb chops. He's committed to regenerating the soil and grass of Monkey Ranch and of Marin County. Aaron is using a system called Intensive Rotational Grazing, which is based on imitating the way herds of elk, buffalo, and other indigenous ruminants behave before humans intervene. This new system, based on ancient behavior, is labor-intensive, but it builds the soil up rather than flushing it away like conventional grazing does. As we've experimented, the size of our flock of sheep has varied from a dozen to several hundred, but it now stays at about 50. When the lambs are born in the spring, we sell off those born last year, so the size of the flock remains constant. We could easily have 200 sheep on the ranch, and we could easily sell 200 lambs every year, but then we wouldn't be nurturing the health of the soil and the grasses that are an integral part of it. The vital lesson I've learned from Aaron is that when you think in terms of doing the amount of agriculture you can sell, you are thinking like an extractive, exploitative industrialist, beholden only to your shareholders. When you think in terms of doing the amount of agriculture that the land can sustain, you are thinking like a farmer, beholden to your stakeholders, your community, yourself, your children, and their children. You are being a good ancestor. When he began his program at Monkey Ranch, Aaron told us that we could expect to see results in 20 years. To our surprise, we began to see evidence within only two years, and after four years we're astonished at the vigor and diversity in our pastures. Whereas Katie and Aaron want to change the world, Mark just wants to milk cows for a living. It's easy to point to Katie and Aaron's insanely high ideals and dismiss their poverty as only to be expected, but the fact that Mark, a very conventional family farmer, can't make a living is an indication that the fundamental forces that hold Katie and Aaron back affect all segments of healthy agriculture. Don't imagine that there's no money in farming. Agriculture generates many billions every year. It's just that almost all of that wealth ends up in the hands of a few mega corporations like Cargill, Tyson, and Monsanto, while honest farmers barely scrape by. Our food chain is distorted and on a track towards destruction. Sadly, tech is on a similar path and I want to turn it around. When people ask me what I grow on Monkey Ranch, I tell them young people, Sue and I are enablers of the new agriculture and we hope to improve the entire food chain. Katie and Aaron are just two of the many who've spent time working and learning in our little slice of paradise. When I started my first company, my goal was to create great software. I expected to make a good living at it and if I got rich, well, that would be a bonus. Today, young entrepreneurs come to Silicon Valley expecting to get rich and if they make cool software, they consider that a bonus. Unfortunately for them, Silicon Valley is filled with investors only too happy to let them work long and hard for the mirage of wealth. The hopefuls imagine themselves to be the next Zuckerberg because the stories of hundreds of failed startups never get told. I'm not rich, but the tech world has treated me very well and living on Monkey Ranch makes me a fantastically lucky man. The most valuable thing I possess now is perspective, having played so many roles in the tech industry and here's what that perspective tells me. I want the world to think more like Aaron, the shepherd, than like the naive entrepreneurs and the greedy investors who are only interested in taking and not in giving. I'm not asking for people to be poor and to give up their ambitions. I'm just saying that if you make all goals subservient to the goal of making the most money, you set yourself, your family and your community on the path of self-destruction. I don't want anyone to be a monk or a saint, but if your company is just in it for the money, maybe you should look for a better company. There's a pitched battle being fought on farms across the world. Young farmers, college educated, raised with an ecological consciousness and with a sophisticated palette want good food, healthy, tasty food and they want to work with their hands in the sunshine to grow it. They want a community. They want to make a living, but they want to sustain our environment more. What incredibly generous, high-minded and civic motivations. Here are goals worthy of achieving. In 1997, Apple Computer was losing money, had less than 2% market share and Steve Jobs was reduced to asking Bill Gates his despised rival for investment money. Jobs was desperately casting around trying to develop a business model that worked. All during that time, however, he focused with laser-like intensity on his objective. He knew, without a shred of doubt, that users wanted a computer that would treat them with respect, be a pleasure to use and show a level of care and attention to detail that other tech companies couldn't even imagine. It's easy to tell Katie and Aaron how to grow their food more cheaply. The same way that people told Steve Jobs that he could make his computers and smartphones more cheaply, but Jobs knew the truth, that profit is a byproduct of quality. He focused on delivering quality and when he did, people paid what he asked. Katie and Aaron haven't found their business model yet, but like Jobs, they know how to deliver quality. When I look at the software industry, I see a similar pitched battle being fought between commercial forces and conscientious practitioners. The most innovative, productive, and profitable modern practices come not from those hell bent on profit but from the lowly practitioners who want to make the world a better place. I call this responsible craftsmanship, things like user experience, lean, agile, continuous deployment and balanced teams are all based on serving people rather than serving the bottom line. All right, you're probably wondering why I'm telling you all of this. It's not your fault that our food chain is a mess and it's not your fault that Silicon Valley is greedy. My first book about FACE was published in 1995. Much of it has changed over the last 21 years and four editions, but one of the axioms within it that has remained a constant is, it's not your fault, but it's your responsibility. That's the case here. You are among the most empowered citizens on the planet. You are tech practitioners. It may seem that you are simply replaceable workers in the great machine of software construction, but you are the most critical part of it. You are the ones with the necessary skills to create the digital magic that we all crave, the magic that powers the economic engine of today. You are the keystone of the arch. Without you, all of the management talent and the venture capital money in the world can do nothing. I want you to feel your power, feel your strength, feel your mastery over our future. I want you to take responsibility for creating software that we need, software that improves our lives and don't waste your time creating software that merely makes more money for someone who already has too much of it. This is your choice. Thank you.