 You have an issue with just about my mind second everybody stand up. It's done this yet today. So I get to be the guy right um, so Sit down if this is your first girl. That's about Right, if you're sitting down Yeah, the high five someone standing up. I'm gonna normally I would just stop there and make you all sit down I'm liking this So sit down if it's your second Third is of Garuko micro. It's a cheap trade. You guys So invariably the beginning of a conference talk like this you've got questions and the main one is is who is this guy? I often have this question too. So I'm gonna help you out Hey Siri, who is Andy crawl? I have no idea who this fine gentleman is But I would not let him anywhere near a microphone Um, so I decided to do the one thing you should never do which is Google yourself So apparently Andy crawl Mike is a he's a recruiter in Portland Andy crawler is actually Anthony crawler. Who's a world champion boxer? Andy Colton Morgan is a history professor at the University of South Wales So my nearest rival, but if you write my name into Google and click I feel lucky you get my side I am the Andy crawl from the internet So so that's me on the right in 1982 with hair I'm no one special. I'm a working developer just like most of you. I call myself a consultant because it helps keep the day right up The only difference is that this year's organizers have ignored the good advice of the third best voice assistant in the world And give me a use the microphone for the next half an hour I do run a little opinionated newsletter once every fortnight. I like I like this from my work It's like when I'm reviewing a full request and I go I basically I turn into a less annoying version and then I shift as a user I also lied about the only difference being the microphone. I'm also shit-hot at keynote Personal talk this one. There's not much code So I apologize to the people who are gonna review me falling more not removed We are gonna be getting some serious life stuff. I hope you'll indulge me This is Karl. I'm in him. I live in Singapore. He's starting the pivotal lamps office out there He's now running the Seattle eyes. He's a huge part of me being able to do the work that I do today He influenced my professional thinking It gave me the opportunity to work with them and his team and he helped get my first conference on the ground He also pointed out before you can see So This is the number of hours in the average human life about 10 years ago He worked out it's also roughly the number of pixels on a fabulously old-school monitor I have a more modern comparison than this There are roughly as many pixels on a standard-sized iPhone as there are hours in your life So what does that look like? So here's a phone screen of ours So that's sleep straight away This top it is appearing that is going to be going to talk walk and what your own bomb I've got no system localize the talk when I said bomb You should hear the word ass or but or in my case booty Sorry to the organizers of the last ever group. Oh, I'm sure this is not not how you expected to go out Why a British man saying words for bottom on the on the stage Anyway, um That's cool That's the university if you go I Am roughly here this red spot you can probably see even the back It's this fine conference He's like I agree This This red spot Is the week of no sleep? I have all four of us from the UK when my twins He you can see my poor quality for takeover world day three These four dots are these of Ryan Ruby the conference I run on the south coast of the UK It's in three weeks time. I really shouldn't be messing around in New York Um This block is the 20 workdays. It took me to upgrade a particularly gnarly rails app from version 3 to 4 We are definitely in the era of there being plenty of legacy rails apps around that sentence is enough to make me feel And this little sliver is all 40 hours and 39 minutes of the Marvel Cinematic Universe So I've given this talk before and the version of the slide I had here had 25% less hours on it when I first gave this talk At this rate, it's going to eclipse the week. I spent in the hospital with my kids And it's not like there isn't another two hours coming next month or another two hours after that The idea that like the short is not a new idea 2000 years ago, Seneca our over-philosopher wrote people are frugal in guarding their personal property But as soon as it comes to squandering time, they are most wasteful of the one thing that is right to be stingy So you're probably a little bit freaked out right now Particularly if you've seen any of the Marvel films more than once as I have It's not going to get any better for it. I'm sorry Anyone recognize this show hands Interesting So this is the log-in screen for an Amiga 500 I'm dating myself fairly specifically When Commodore a British competing company Drop the price of this machine and bundled it with a brutally difficult Batman game Now as much as we can agree that Michael Keaton is the definitive on-screen Batman That wasn't what grabbed my attention How does this mean to you? Slightly less, but you are my people the same though Lucasfilm games was an offshoot of industrial line magic. They were the special effects house that was created when they made It became a lucasol and they had these populist like pointing click adventure games Made by really small teams and the personalities of the creative people Waiting those games really shine through I spent days playing this because this is before the internet So I couldn't just go Google for how I get past this puzzle. I have to sit there and like click on one of the things You can even buy remastered versions of these on like on your phones or your PC They really hold up. They're actually genuinely still worth buying This one was my favorite. This is the secret of one young It came with four floppy disks Have physical copy protection and like spin wheel to get the pirate head with the same and the special key You have a real colorful box that as I recall was about the size of a human chest So what do you do with this enthusiasm for this marvelous game? Do you beat me at all? If you are a 15 year old know Let us take a trip back in time to a teenager's bedroom. Well This is my first birthday I Managed to dig back into a CD-ROM In a couple of days in my house I have taking tags. It's got image holders. I couple the images out myself. It does look a bit strange Because it's best to you they have a by 600 and I fall I'll just reload it That is much better. It amazingly loads in modern Safari This is the effort of quite a lonely 50 year old boy. How can you tell it's the late 90s? Web ring web ring So web rings and what we did before social media It's like when Reddit used to run on steam There's also some new gifts, which is a feature that I feel like we've lost a little bit from our current website Sadly this work of unlawed genius burned too brightly for the internet to hold So Years pass I get a degree I get a blue chip corporate job, which I then lose I get a girlfriend which I managed to keep and marry despite the Montrealer fan site I move to Singapore. I'm Carl. I change careers from being corporate to the websites. I love building as a teenager Working with small teams of great people learning how to do engineering properly Then came to start up era. I was ripped into a travel startup by a good friend in Singapore I do raise a bit of money It's pretty easy to raise seed money at that point in Singapore. We even have a real business plan Which is somewhat unusual for stuff So reading like flash sales for luxury hotels the tech was awesome The team was lovely and hilarious. I've got text files. We look like funny stuff. We said We solved interesting problems like we're one of the first companies to embrace responsive email We have an iphone out. We have like a cool admin interface so the family could like run the whole business without me having to like manage database tables and stuff We even have a few profitable months But travel is brutal If you can't make certain good marketing work, you are basically completely unlocked and we cannot make that work And that is also not When my wife and I returned to the UK after six years in Singapore impulse fire was winding up And I decided I'd do some contracting for a bit. I thought I'd learn a few things I didn't want to be employed. I definitely didn't fancy the VC thing We've just been through when I was sick the death of travel websites Which is how I ended up working full-time house trip a VC funded travel star I think it's clear by this point. I do not know what I am doing It was a massively dysfunctional product environment. I joined a team of four people Rebuilding Mailchimp along just using Mailchimp They were terrified of a legacy code They managed to build up into four years of like high growth and Like mad push for features. There's a man sitting in the front row who now works at Times Square Also used to work at house trip and it's quite funny to see him here He will if you wanted to To be the color if you want to find out who's really like he was there before I was and during the really mad years The business tried to raise more cash For throwing money on the Google bonfire to accelerate growth But they're not right now effectively So six months into my employment now there were like lots of It was a shitty full time traffic More than half of engineering 80% of the product managers 80% of designers Like this is 40 people all gone from this company After that That's what the unfortunate event Something strange happened like the remaining product team started to jump There was lots of pairing lots of teaching Some of the matter elements of the leadership had also left We worked sensible hours The product alone I really like the the you know the shit work of refactoring a legacy app to make it perform and fast and make it work I like changing the wheels on a moving car Provided like the people driving the car are nice people We even keep like a legacy slack around because everybody needs another slack Um, I sort of described this period of house trip as like crashing the plane into the runway So like it's not like we completely missed the airport But we didn't land the plane either We sort of we all want to go down the slide Which is sort of nice Given that like house flights have a better survival rate than my career That's the thing that nobody else here has ever ridden a website that's gone away We're like so I'm not alone basically is what I'm saying nearly all of my code by road is gone I'm hardly the first person to have made a disappearing website for us These are years of people's lives We should pour one out for Google reader There's even marvelous tumbler from a guy in the uk It republishes the cheery shutdown notices of failed companies as the remnants are acquired by Facebook or Google The sites are abandoned. The user's data is gone. The service that they love is gone Um, well, you know, I don't think I'm gonna still get acquired by Facebook Um, it's not all bad things that this is it. So Tamagotchi, they're gone T-shirts that show how sweaty your underarms are also gone Those Budweiser adverts finally stopped being laid So What have we learned here like you can't force Like adding money doesn't guarantee longevity like having to be designed and engineering doesn't even help It's not even the things that we turn off or shut down Like we're constantly refreshing and re-architecting and redesigning Um, you know, we put things the server into services and then we take the services and put them back in the monolith Like our very work is often the destruction of earlier work that we've done my links rock code decays and entropy wins So if it's not about the end result given like the shifting sands like perhaps it's about the journey Like should we set out to learn from our industry about success? So I did I've done a detailed analysis of every recruited email I've ever received And I would like to share with you the scientifically derived average job in the tech industry It's not even just the rank and file Steve Jobs famously wanted to put a dent in the universe. It sounds good. Eric making history Marissa mayer of former CEO of Yahoo former CEO of former company Yahoo Like being there on the weekend is a huge indicator of success Mostly because these start these companies don't just happen. They happen because of really hard work. So work all the analysts, right? Jeff Bezos founder of Amazon A glorious magazine This is Travis until last year the CEO of Uber starts up, which can be best described as the Uber of sexual harassment In the nicest possible way wildly foolish Like sacrifice your health while working on something as a point of virtue Like when I come for you have jay morales You know treat people poorly in the suits on the nebulous success. Like it doesn't stop I've been guilty of this in the past like go big or go home, you know leave your mark on the world working credibly long hours Like advice from successful people is survivorship bias Like the human brain is a story machine It likes to add narrative where often there isn't any People look like they know where they're going But they don't If they do think they know where they're going, they might be actively dangerous I'm a guest in this country So I'm just going to leave it to you to see if you're going to think of anybody Who is completely certain of their own genius And the potential catastrophic liability I can't think of anybody Or remand prince Seneca again It is inevitable that life will not be Just very short but very miserable for those who acquire my great top toil What they must keep fighting with great toil New preoccupations take place at the old Ambition excites only more ambition They do not look for an end to their misery that simply changed the reason for it So Seneca is not the only philosopher i'm going to introduce you to today This is Al Watts. He's a British philosopher who reinterpreted a lot of eastern wisdom for the western world in the late 60s and 70s And because that's when he was a philosopher there's loads of recordings of him This is what he had to say about the journey Because music as an art form Is essentially playful. We say you play the piano You don't work the piano Why? Music differs from say travel When you travel you are trying to get somewhere In music though One doesn't make the end of a composition The point of the composition of the composition If that were so the best conductors would be those who played fastest And there would be composers who wrote only finales People go to concerts just to hear one crashing chord because that's the end Say we're dancing. You don't aim at a particular spot in the room That's where you should arrive. The whole point of the dancing is the dance So this slide. What if this is all you've got left? This is a photo from December 2016 18 months ago You might produce a Particular family resemblance from the profile This is another photo of me and my dad It's the last photo of us together. He died two weeks after this thing He was 64 He worked hard his whole life Long Multi-hour commuters in London Late nights He recently remarried and was looking forward to his well-earned climb up He was 64 In his eulogy, which he wrote because he was always organized He admitted that at lots of points in his life He got his balance of working life wrong At his funeral People told me they admired his kindness And the way they required me to talk to everybody They didn't mention the word at all I'm not trying to panic you I'm trying to give it perspective If you do want to leave a legacy, don't expect it to be the audience I guess my point here is the finale is the same for all of us And it's not the journey we should focus on There is one destination That's why a Laval and Marxist metaphor for the dance Like your work, the code is not going to be remembered This should be freeing in all sorts of ways The only truly profoundly extraordinary things that most of us experience Will be things that we can't always experience Death Love Birth Friendship If there's no certainty and there isn't You can still enjoy the movement A psychologist might call this self-actualization Like I dive into the flow state of programming I love taking apart software and putting it together again Like improving things little by little That's what flips my switch Like I love to lose myself in the problem solving I love the dance of code This is why I love Ruby It's the feel of it It fits me Another famous philosopher said For me the purpose of life is partly to have joy Programmers often feel joy when they can concentrate On the creative side of programming So Ruby is designed to make programmers happy Ruby is specifically designed to get things about the life of flow state We can dance through that joy in the movement You know momentum perhaps can lead into all sorts of like dangerous behaviors in the tech industry Like my current gig is with a fabulous team of seven in my hometown And well the team of seven in Brighton there's one living here in Manhattan And we also have two office dogs So we are really good at coding One of the best habits we have as a team Is regularist plot work full team retro It takes a couple of hours every couple of weeks Every time the meeting comes around I think well yeah, again We just had this meeting And then every time we have the meeting We surface problems, solve issues And not understand each other better There's a variety of behaviors that allow this to happen in our company There's an openness You know a respect for each other But for me it's the process of deliberate self-reflection That really shines through It helps get my head out of the weeds at least And I think Sarah is right about the looms of things Whilst our code may not last forever And no one is going to build the statue of you Life is too short to be born useless The point of this reflection is to work out the movement you enjoy This is Kevin Bacon The happiest people I know Found a way to maximize their day to day joy I don't hustle yourself to death in such a success Or romanticize over exertion Coffee is not a food group We have to avoid blurring the lines between commitment And your nature Thinking of things in terms of a journey Means you're cleaning to a destination Or trying to get there as fast as possible But you don't even know what it's going to be like when you get there And you don't even know how to feel like it The coverage group like our smallness and profitability Means that we've gone to like a four day week Which is awesome That's what we've chosen to do with the success of your hub Like getting a day back from work Which we do something else with Hang out with our kids Ride a bike Learn new programming But like whatever you want to do That's a good use of success I have one final piece of thought for you from the 1980s Yep I said it before and I'll say it again Life moves pretty fast You don't stop and look around once in a while You could miss it I know everyone's disappointed at it Oh yeah Chorus Green was right Like take care of your mental health So you can take care of others Step away from your email Go for a walk It's not news to take care of yourself Like I'm probably the first person to go But this is your periodic reminder This shouldn't be no surprise to those of you who've been Paying attention to the human friend that's What would you be taught Dancing on your own would be fun Ask my kitchen Dancing with others is a basic human joy Like all of the things I remember from my career are people I don't remember the code I wrote I don't remember great database migrations of the past That's why I'm here in this room giving this talk Ruby is its people The core team Like all of the open source contributors Like the organisers of events like this That everyone who suffered through an afternoon pairing with me The writers of broad posts and non-snoky Stack over for once All of these people indulging in a shared passion For what is a frankly pretty abstract notion The only dents in the universe Are in those people Let them be good dents Like these are the marvellous people I've worked with over the years Like I'm close to some of them still Some of them I'm not stuck with But they make up a huge proportion of what they're often And basically taught me all the things I think I know That company has made my life better And I hope that's true in the interview Is a quote from my surrounder I cannot stress this sentiment enough And it's true if you're not on that job as well This is my all-encompassing theory of humanity I told you about it We are all scared and clueless And at the mercy of our lizard brains Foon, stuff Your choice of text editor How much you are in control of your inner stroppy toddler Is how much of a pain you are to be around On any particular day And if you need help trying to control that inner toddler Just remember that everyone else is a toddler too The same way you might humor a four-year-old You can apply to your co-workers Easy You cannot peer into people's minds You can ask how they're feeling They may tell you They may not You cannot tell what people What shit people have got going on in their lives Unless they choose to believe it to you Half the time I don't know how I feel Or even why I feel like it What are the people supposed to know? We create new certainty but nobody has it There is a dangerous trend in our industry To demand fealty to a dream Or loyalty to a company You know, from shitty salary In exchange for options Which are nothing more difficult To like rare opportunity job descriptions Like a group of people Don't know what they're doing Any more than one person does I've been on both sides of redundancies Like the ones I talked about earlier The people involved behave as best they can But the company doesn't care The company just wants to survive So don't be loyal to the company Be loyal to the people inside them This is Sarah She works at the New York Times now And gave an awesome talk to her quite a bit A few years ago We've begun to talk a lot About empathy as a community Which is great And when confronted with something Obviously audible I like to think we all help But it does take more than that This is Derek Silver as a friend of mine Who's in the museum He made the point that it's not The image He made the point that it's what you do That counts Not what you say you want to Kindness is underrated But has outsized impact Kind people are more fun to work with There's no such thing as right There's only doing right by other people I'm feeling good about it It's very easy to take out Your shitty mood on the people around you It's easy to think the other person is an idiot It's very easy to communicate for you There is a constant battle To be the best version of you And one more thing There is no need to be a dick on the internet And if you're a dick on the internet Please learn to apologize properly That's all I have to say about that This is Kylie She was trying to know About the representation as well I take this opportunity Before I give up the stage To ask what are you doing With your privilege Are you helping? It doesn't need to be Starting an apprenticeship But if you want to That's your thing to do It doesn't need to be a big gesture It can be as simple as Just trying to improve the culture where you work Or it can be as difficult Just trying to improve the culture where you work I'm a work in progress I've only got my experiences for you And the smart things that work for you I don't have all the answers But all of those are crazy I've shipped a lot of software And not much of it is still running But I've laughed hard And I've been called on by marvelous people And I've tried to pull a lot of others along with me What we often think is the work Is not the work at all Looking for the certainty in your code The software you write Or the things that you build In the strategy From the enjoyment of the dance And in the midst of all the technology And the code and the bustle of the everyday Don't lose sight of your own happiness And the real legacy of these The legacy of the people that you work with And with that I'll leave you It's like I've got a bunch of pics in my eyes With life and I'm doing that Thank you very much