 So my talk is titled on the outside looking in and I am super, super nervous. This is going way back, but I grew up in junior high and high school and college even playing the trumpet and I was pretty good, played with the United States, went ensemble and traveled in Europe a bit playing and I played in front of big crowds and in front of a lot of people and this is totally different. Standing up here by myself instead of in a group and being someone that is not a programmer or doesn't code not in this field at all the only relation I have is that I get to come in and record a lot of your talks. So anyway, again, I'm really nervous and this is the first time I've ever spoken. So this is exactly why I love the Ruby community because of the support that you guys give people. It's this community is definitely different than any of the other communities I've been to or that I've seen as I've recorded conferences. So who am I? My name is Cindy Backman and my email address is Cindy at confreaks.com. I'm also on Twitter by atCenter and I'm also, okay, I'm also a wife. This is my husband James and he actually gets to work with me sometimes and go to different conferences and I'm really lucky to have the opportunity. I am also a mother. This is my little blended family. My kids are the two on the right William and Jessica and James's kids are on the left Jeremiah and Jordan and they actually live in Germany with their mom and stepmom. I'm also a biker and my husband and I belong to a writing club and they're an extended family. I love them to pieces and we have a lot of good times together. Writing is a big part of my husband and I's life. So much so that we made it a part of our wedding when we got married last September and our kids loved to ride. Our kids loved to ride as well with us. And then with work I'm the operations manager for Confreaks and I was the first full-time employee and I've been working with them now for two and a half years and I've been helping record conferences off and on since 2009. So first a lot of you probably know who this is. It's been Ornstein and I think he's a great speaker. I've learned a lot about presenting from watching him and as I edit different videos I learn a lot as well because I get to repeat a lot of talks or parts of talks so I learn things over and over. I'm gonna play a clip from Ben's presentation at RailsConf in 2013 for just a minute. It's possible. So here's how it sounds like if I sing when my soft palette is down I'll sing something like we write lots of code and if I instead open it up with my soft palette lifted it sounds like we write lots of code and I think you probably heard a difference right there and the way to get to that difference the way to access that soft palette lift is by thinking of yourself as a radio announcer. That's the difference between this voice and my normal speaking voice is amount of soft palette lift. I'm adding myself a resonator at the top of that. So would you sing with the lowest clap soft palette we write lots of code right there? Okay so from Ben and other speakers but I have learned that it's important to involve your audience so I would like everyone to stand up for just a moment. Now has anyone heard of tutting or tutting before? Awesome. Okay so tutting happens to be a type of dance that is done mimicking the positions that people were drawn in during the ancient Egyptian times so I'm gonna show you an example. Okay that looks hard it's really not that hard okay so Ben taught an audience and it was a huge audience because I was the recording it. He taught the audience how to sing better and Ben actually leads a 60 man choir on the side. So anyway instead of teaching you how to sing we're gonna learn this little routine. So I just want everyone you first start with your knees bending and kind of hunch your shoulders over. You guys are awesome. You can sit down. You're awesome. That's why I love the Ruby community. You're also willing to do anything. I love it. Okay so um before I started working for Confreaks I worked for DiscoverCard as a student loan collections agent and it sucked. I'm a really nice person and trying to get people to pay their student loans that are like hundreds of thousands of dollars once I didn't realize people spent that much money on school like hundreds of thousands of dollars was not the job for me and at times I had helped Confreaks record conferences and I was a single mom I had gotten a divorce in 2007 and my daughter was one and my son was seven years old so I did what I had to do and I was also going to school and had been accepted into a nursing program but there was a three year wait. So I worked at Discover and worked on the side with Confreaks and if you didn't already know the owner of Confreaks just happens to be my brother and I'm such an emotional person. I hate this. Anyway so my brother is Kobe Rangquist and I went with him to several conferences and recorded recorded them and it had got to the point where he decided he was either going to sell Confreaks or he needed to grow it and this it's not his main job you know this is kind of his side thing and so I decided that I would quit my job with Discover and work full-time for Confreaks and it's the best decision I've ever made because in January I could have gone into the nursing program but instead I'm up here so one of the things I enjoy about conferences is all the swag and I'm sure there's some cool stuff in there but when you go to 28-30 conferences a year you get a lot of stuff and I've got flash drives, beer glasses, I've listed a bunch of things like pens, flashlight, screwdrivers, mint tins, gum, bags, stress balls, water bottles, beanies, frisbees, screen cleaners, sunglasses and of course t-shirts and the t-shirts I've had so many of them from sponsors and different conferences I've given a lot away and I've also used them to wash my bike and clean my bike so some of them are really good rags they shine really well but I didn't think I'd ever be ever be giving a talk at a programming conference so I had gotten rid of some of them but I put together just a couple of little videos of some of the shirts so you can see some of them maybe oh yeah I didn't realize I've never used keynote before either because I've never done talks and it doesn't show the videos on my screen so I won't mention them but there are some really cool sponsor shirts out there and then conference t-shirts I wanted to put this year's RubyConf t-shirt on there but I just went and got it before my talk and decided not to try to hurry and take a picture and add it in so and of course stickers I love stickers who doesn't so I have some of our new concrete stickers if you want some afterwards come and talk to me so if any of you ever felt like you were on the outside the first six months that I was working full-time with Confreaks I traveled with Kobe to conferences and learned how to set up our equipment and we had a lot more equipment back then than we do now and just learning all of that and he always introduced me to his friends and colleagues and people that he knew with the conferences and so it was easy to feel like I was part of it because I was with my brother I mean not just my boss but my brother and it was really cool then I went and did my first conference all by myself and and that was Madison Ruby in 2012 and that was scary and I really felt like I was on the outside because all of a sudden I was in a room with people I didn't know and I had nothing in common with that I thought because I'm not a programmer and so it was hard but while I was there I had the opportunity to hear Leon Gersing not sure if I said his last name right but he gave a really good talk there and I have a small clip that I wanted to play from his talk well this quote from Dalai Lama says man because he sacrifices his health in order to make money then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health and then he's so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present the result being that he does not live in the present or the future he lives as if he's never going to die and then he dies having never really lived bless you I find this to be incredibly sad I have seen many people I've met many wonderful people over the years and they all have taught me something unique they've all allowed me to see the world in a completely different way even a five-minute conversation is enough to take your entire view and just move it a slight bit take the time that you want to be the person that you're going to be okay so take the time that you want to be the person that you're going to be at this conference the first one I did by myself I realized that I wanted to be a part of this great community and that's the Ruby community it's taken me a long time in my eyes anyway and it's not easy to go up to someone it's not easy for me to go up to someone and just talk to them especially in this environment so out of my league with things but I decided that I needed to make the effort and try to go up and meet people and so when you're at a conference you're there to be a part of something with people that are like-minded and have jobs and interests that are similar to yours so I really had to step out of my comfort zone to try and do this now after two and a half years of recording cop conference talks I have a better understanding of them but at first a lot of the things people said went right over my head and I mean way over my head because when you talk about unicorns this is what I see and I did not understand but I did during my talk try to Google some of this stuff and learn a little bit about what things were and I've learned as I've listened more to the conference talks but unicorn is rack HTTP server for fast clients and Unix and I read that and I still don't quite understand everything in it because all I see is racks and fast clients and we'll move to factory girls so this is what I think when I hear factory girls or factory girl and what I learned is that factory girl is a library for setting up Ruby objects as test data and Frappuccino who does not like Frappuccino I love Carmel is my favorite but I learned at Lone Star Ruby in 2013 from Steve Klamnick that Frappuccino actually was the most irresponsible code he had written around that time now we're gonna turn this around and you can look at the pictures and tell me what you think that might be in the programming or coding world if you think of something go ahead and shout it out same thing what is it what cheetah oh no kittens are cute and I know everybody likes cats right this one's my favorite but rest is part of the program and I don't know what part of the program rest is but in my daily program I definitely definitely need rest and with my musical background I just thought this was funny on the internet and Wikipedia says representation state transfer is an abstraction of the architecture of the world wide web blah blah blah blah so there's chef which I think of chopped or maybe iron chef and shoes women have lots of them or at least I do and crow is a bird java is coffee and it has some beautiful art I mean when I was like seriously look at all this stuff I loved it and I was really fascinated with these photos I thought you would be too oh that animation didn't show on my screen so I skipped it there we go okay does anyone see a doxin a little wiener dog face okay that's what my husband sees I'm glad I'm not the only one that doesn't see it so I just don't get it um a family guy I don't know his name but I thought that was pretty cool Steve stewie stewie okay and this is the cutest coffee cat I've ever seen he reminds me of Gorbachev puff puff thunder horse the third but he is not quite as grumpy for those of you that might not know who this cat is it's Aaron Patterson's cat if you don't know Aaron Patterson he is on the ruby core and the rails core teams and he's in here what would Sandy Mets do right now I'm so nervous so I keep I put this on my hand because she told me this morning I know what she'd do she keep telling herself it'll never be this bad again they'll never be this bad again so that's what I'm doing it'll never be this bad again I love this cat in the coffee and if you haven't guessed by now I'm kind of easily amused just cute little things so and this one so cute it's koi fish like Koichi Sasada he wrote ruby's new virtual machine yeah okay I don't know what that is but thank you Zach for telling me and thank you Zach he listened to most of my talk and he told me to put that in there so that's his gem I think of gems or this will date my age I think of gem and I can put her in her in here because I see my little pony slides all the time okay this is let me code um by lianna vana lay I think is how you say it rails comp 2014 Catherine woo um speaking on how to build a better junior developer at rails comp also this was at mountain west ruby or hack week last year no this year this year and that's Paul Reed speaking about devops and he brought his own pony and through my research for this talk I research ponies that's rainbow dash I know his name his name her name her I know her name so do you that's so cool all right and star star horn golden gate ruby this year how about Carrie Miller she's awesome she gives really good talks and I really enjoy her and this was at nickel city I was there last month in October and she had one two three actually I think she had more but those were the only ones I could find as I skimmed through the video again but I really like this one because it's how I feel right now I have no idea what I'm doing so this I'm going to play a video clip here and this is Mike Moore he actually is the organizer for mountain west ruby and this talk was given at ruby on elves in 2012 but I know the majority of you are like yeah it's fun for work but the best thing about the cloud is that's where rainbow dash lives right and of course rainbow dash is coolest out of all ponies am I right and how much cooler 20% cooler all right so show of hands are there any bronies in the audience one all right everybody else you might want to go get a beer because it's not going to get any better for you I get to see a lot of funny talks it's it's really cool and as I as I prepared for this at home with my family my husband and I were watching tv and we were watching storage wars on a and e and there was a couple this was last week and it's like current right now you know they bought a storage unit and it was full of my little ponies and they had to go find someone that could tell them how much that it was worth and that and when they went the lady on there she's like no I know the guys are bronies is that everybody and the guy was so excited to talk to him about ponies he's like no there's bronies and there's pegas sisters it's like pegas sisters that's so cool anyway okay so making connections um if you feel like you're out of your comfort zone or that you're a bit of an introvert or shy when you attend a conference a great talk to watch is how to make the most of a conference by Corey Haynes and this one is a clip from L.A. Ruby in 2013 but we don't have to be that way you don't have to be shy you don't have to take that introversion and move it over there you know tender love he just tells it straight up don't be shy there's other words in there but they're not as important and so I'm imploring you to take today and really push out of any feeling like you can't go to talk to people and here's just a picture of Zach and you look and it's just like is she shy everyone's indeterminate animal why isn't she playing with indeterminate animal that was just a gratuitous picture of Zach so I do have a challenge that I like to give to people at conferences when you come here is always to meet new people and I like to give a number I like to tell people you know what go meet 10 people go shake 10 people's hands it doesn't have to be everyone at the conference but go find 10 people that you can find something in common with even if it's just the fact that both your hands are kind of sweaty so I really want to encourage everyone I want to extend the same challenge that created you have a day and a half left or a little bit less than a day and a half take the time and meet 10 new people I I get really nervous but I have really made some good friends here and I love it and I don't have code to talk about so there's definitely things you can talk about and you can go up and meet people because I think everybody's in the same boat we just might be sitting in different places but we're all in the same boat so this is my slide I made just walk up to somebody and say hi use rainbow or friendship is magic so use the magic ponies and friend all the things so my connections I wanted to talk about them a little bit I have well throughout this whole talk I have a different perspective and I have noticed that a lot of people feel that speakers are like superheroes and that they're super super special and they are but we're all special and I it doesn't matter to me what they've done in a programming community because I don't understand it I don't know what it is you know what is important to me is how they treat others and one of my favorite things is how much support there is and what you guys do with open source to help each other out and it's not all about I want to say me I don't mean me but the attitude is not all about me it's about what you can do for others and helping others out so I just want to share some of the people I've gotten to know and my perspectives on them the first one is Coraline and key and I don't remember when I met Coraline but last year at no not last year this year at Big Ruby I had the chance to sit down and talk with Coraline and I've wanted to present not really do a talk but I wanted to do a proposal for one I didn't think I'd get to actually speak but I had a goal to do a proposal for one and I wasn't sure if it would go over very well and so I talked with Coraline about it one night during this conference and she was one that helped me finally decide that yeah it would be worth listening to and people people would find it funny probably some of the stuff I've seen in that so after my conversation with her I decided I would do it and I talked with my brother and he said Ruby comp would be a great one to submit it to because that's the majority of our conferences and I think a lot of you can relate to what I'm saying and it's because this is the community I love I've been to a lot of different conferences that aren't with aren't Ruby and there's just a different feel here than most of the other ones and I really enjoy it so Zachary my husband and I met him in Germany or Belgium at our camp last year and you know we're from America but we met him over there and then we saw him this summer in Singapore and it's pretty cool to be able to see people in different countries when you're both from America you don't get to do that very often just run into someone and Zach is really cool we don't know a lot about him but he's always fun and comes up and talks to us he helped me today with my talk a bit and I just appreciate that type of attitude and that type of person and he has an awesome cat named gender that I like to follow or hear about on Facebook that's he was shaved and he looks so cool then we have Sarah May she is so awesome she's a mother that works really hard and works long hours she speaks at numerous conferences she writes consults codes and helps run conferences and she's now one of the directors for Ruby Central she is passionate about what she does and she's always a friendly face for me to see at conferences and she helps me feel like I'm part of something and Ron Evans I don't know how many people know him but he has so much enthusiasm and he's just like a kid he's a great dad and he's very approachable and he loves to share his knowledge with people and I've had the chance to get to know Julian chill chill a little bit I'm not sure I say his last name but he is really funny if you've not seen his dancing with robot talks nickelcityonconfreaks.com and Rocky Mountain Ruby it is an awesome talk and he loves tweed loves to wear tweed even when it's above 70 degrees he'll wear tweed suits hey Jonan like Conan okay I asked permission or tried to get permission to make sure it was okay with everybody that I talk about him but to me he's a little bit crazy and I think I think you'll feel the same way if you haven't seen this talk I'm going to play a clip in a minute but the first time I heard him talk was at Ruby on Ells and he when he introduced himself showed a picture of Conan and said his name is pronounced just like Conan but with a J Jonan so don't ever forget it it's Jonan like Conan okay and this is his you because the sponge is so large the idea is to distribute the current to fuse the current over a large area so you don't want to use like pin points because it will burn your skin kind of a lot well I mean it's it's not a lot it's not going to cut a hole in your head or anything but it hurts right yeah yeah yeah you want to you want to diffuse the current as much as possible so you'll see a little about this I might have a little bit of a red sponge shaped mark on my skull so what I'm going to apply to my brain here is two milliamps of electrical current and it's got a voltage regulator on here to make sure that it's always pushing two milliamps through my brain so the voltage will go up and down to ensure that the current traveling through my brain no matter what the resistance of my brain is although some people's brains have higher resistance than others they're a little bit thicker so when I turn this on let's see where did I get my switches this is really carefully planned this whole thing nothing possibly could go wrong okay I just saw a flash of light come across can anyone see the green light on yeah so I saw a flash of light come across my field of vision it's like a free fireworks display right it's practically drugs without any negative health of benefits there are effects that we know about yeah that is an awesome talk if you haven't seen it you should go watch it I think he's nuts but he's he's funny as heck he's a good guy and Brandon Hayes he is someone that appreciates and knows what it's like to live in Utah and that's all I'm going to say about that because that's where I live so um he's a funny guy I'm really sad that he's competing against me right now in the other room so thank you all for coming to listen to me because I would have been over there listening to him so but I do we're recording it so I will get a see his talk and almost likely edit it so I'll see it several times so Sandy Metz what would she do I love her she is so awesome she's a biking enthusiast and she loves to cross country ski she writes books about code she speaks at a lot of conferences and in 2013 at Lone Star Ruby my son he was almost 13 years old got to come with me to record the conference which is another awesome thing working for family I get to take family with me and we my son and I did the rails bridge class before the conference and he was so excited about code and he's playing too many video games now but he still wants to learn to code but he still talks about Sandy and several other adults that spent almost at least 30 minutes with him talking to him during the conference and I just I appreciate people like that he'd they put an excitement in my son about something that can change him and give him a solid future and so thank you Sandy I appreciate that Jim Ramsey he's cool he loves to give hugs and I'm really sad I'm sad that I don't get to go to Madison Ruby anymore but Jim and his wife Jen they've run Madison Ruby and or it's now Madison plus and he is very big on community which is really important and I know that's in in this community too is your the Ruby community is the communities you live in helping them out and then of course my brother he's a father of six girls and there's two sets of twins in there and he's the owner of Confreaks he works for Heroku he organizes LA Ruby Ruby on L's would love to organize a bunch of other conferences and hopefully sometime we'll get to do those he has more things going on in his life at one time than any other person I know and I have been told many times at conferences people come up to me and tell me what a great boss Kobe is because a lot of people have worked for him and I believe them but he's the best boss for me and I also get a column brother and Aaron Patterson he's a really funny guy even when he's not trying to be he has really weird topics that he talks on in his talks but he is so entertaining and he loves his cats and gives them really long names but there's always time for cats I have a cat his name is Gorbachev puff puff Thunder Horse and I like him very much but I didn't realize like when I when I got a cat like I thought he would be my best friend and we'd go like bicycling stuff together and like go to the park and swimming and all that but instead he just sleeps all the time so whenever I take photos of him he's always just yawning like that's basically it all the time it's kind of disappointing but I love him anyway and you can follow him on Twitter his Twitter address is Gourby Gourby Puff I cut it off before you got to say it Gourby Puff Aaron's cool and I feel like I know him better than I actually do because I have seen so many of his talks and I feel that way about my family knows you too you know it's I feel like I know a lot of the speakers better than I do because I get I get a listen to their talks and sometimes I have to search for personal email addresses if we have technical problems because that happens and I need slides or something and it's amazing how hard it is to find someone's email address sometimes and I don't like to bug conference organizers if I can find it myself so I look on linked linked up linked in not linked up linked in and Facebook and Twitter and other things like that and then I get to read little bits and pieces about him you know so I know you but you don't know me so Aaron is also the starter of Friday hugs and every Ruby conference I go to if it's on a Friday they do the Friday hug and this was Ruby on El's this year 2014 and I was talking to my husband one night and because of my searching on the internet for people's email addresses and I do that with the marketing too to try to get new conferences I told him that I feel like a stalker in my eyes this is what I saw like sneaky and stealth like in my husband's eyes he thought of this and he said you know maybe you're not really a stalker but you're being a detective so now I think of myself as this and I feel I'd be missing a big part of the Ruby community if I didn't talk about Jim Wyrick for a moment I practiced this a bunch of times because I didn't want to cry Jim was one of the first people I met before I started working for Confreaks full time and from the very first time I met him he remembered my name and my kids names and what was going on every time I saw him at a conference he picked up where we had left off and it was something it was something special to me because it's been hard for me to do conferences on my own and this is super hard but I know a lot of people understand it in this field there's a lot of introvert type personalities and it's not an easy thing to do and Jim embodied the spirit of the Ruby community and this year when I was at big Ruby conference that's when Jim passed away and I remember the morning before the conference started when we got the news and as conference attendees started getting the news it was amazing to me to see the change in the whole atmosphere of the conference it just became sad and I took a little bit of time and googled Jim and found his last comment on GitHub and I couldn't believe how many comments were already on there of what an amazing person he was and there's just there's some comments I actually got these off of a video that was made and dedicated to him and you can find that on confreaks.com too but they're just comments about Jim and how I feel the Ruby community is and that we can all benefit from being more like Jim and I'm just gonna let everybody read these on their own and I did not know this but it's Jim's birthday today and I just thought it would be neat to all wish him a happy birthday so on the count of three if you'll wish Jim a happy birthday with me one two three happy birthday Jim so I really encourage everyone to go out and meet 10 new people and friend all the things with your magic ponies thank you um this is a song that uh I took an old old old tune and put some new words to it for why day last month why day is a celebration of all the things that uh why the lucky stiff gave us and I wrote some crazy code that day and at the end of day I had an hour or two extra so I wrote a code about how Rubyists love to take they love their language they love writing coding love to take their programs around and show other people they go around saying hey has anybody seen my code you want to see it so this is has anybody seen my code well try again you start playing I'll join in I'm the backup fan nice and small works for all Ruby is my all and all has anybody seen my code cleans and tax runs on max Ruby has what others lack has anybody seen my code in Java I got in my way but now I know that's for sure Ruby is my Java cure has anybody seen my code my Java cure has anybody