 more important identity. I work at the Irish Group in Los Angeles for one of the sponsors of the conference. Check out our new freemium product, Kanban Pad, service announcement over. But I'm not here to talk about that today. I'm here to talk about his language that we all understand because it's a world all into itself. At least that's what Stevie Wonder said in one of his most famous songs. And that lyric has always stuck with me. It's like he was talking about software development at the same time that he was talking about music. And music really is a symbolic language, isn't it? We have pauses and the presence of frequency which are either rests or notes. We combine those things together to create chords or if we play them in a sequence they create a scale. We combine those elements together and we can have measures and rests and so even the most complex music ever written can be represented using this symbolic language. So now we know everything we need to know to make music. That's it. It's a very short session, right? Well, wait a second. That's kind of bogus, isn't it? Because music is not just about the theory of music, it's also about the practice of music. Actually doing it. You can't learn to play music, simply by reading a book about it, any more than you can learn to do software development by reading a book about programs. And so if you want to play in a band, you need to practice together in a band. If you want to develop software in a group, you need to do some group software development. So let's talk about the structure of a song and let's see if we can compare this to some of the things that we need to do with developing software. First of all, if you're going to jam together with your band, you need to have a set list, which is a list of all the different songs that you're going to play. One of the important rules is you can't jam together unless at least two people in the band know the same song. Because nobody knows what they're talking about. It's also critical to choose the correct key of music. Because the relationships in music are relative, two people can be playing the exact same song in different keys and it just does not synchronize. So you need to decide before you're going to start playing the song what key you're going to play that song in. Then the drummer is going to start counting it off. The drummer is responsible for setting the tempo, not the rhythm. So here's your friendly drummer, he counts off and boom, we get going. We got the bass player. He's going to lay down the foundation. The bass player creates the groove. The bass player is not responsible for anything else other than this. People typically think it's the drummer. So we get going. The singer comes in. It's really important to have not just a melody but also lyrics. That's what makes one song different from another because many songs have exactly the same chord changes, right? The same way that many software applications have a similar intended purpose but they're totally different. Then the soloists start coming in. Once we've created this foundation, once we've created the basis then we can start adding things on top to make it unique and different. And everybody's jamming along. The song is going great. Now what do we do? It's time to end it. It's time to finish up. We need to make eye contact. We need to use body language because music is not simply something that you do by listening. It's something that's a product of all of your senses. It's time to see the parallels. So time to end the song. We look at each other. Sometimes that's not enough. You need to do something a lot more dramatic. And then you can really, hey, guys, over here. We're going to end the song. That's it, right? So we're coming to the end of the song. The most important thing is to look to a leader of the band. And it doesn't have to be the singer of the band. And it's not necessarily the person in charge of the band, but it's simply somebody who is the person that everyone else looks to to the side. This is the synchronization point. This is the person who is going to tell us when we reach the point where we need to be. So let's talk about style. We played the song. That was really cool. Well, music starts out in a very formalized way. There's a special class of people who play music. It's not something that's generally available to the public in general. Most of the music from the early days of music are songs that have been entirely forgotten because they weren't considered important enough to document. So a parallel to this might be IBM 370 assembler code, right? You see that it's both combination of highly structured as well as sort of the seemingly superfluous things that are in there that if you don't know what it means, you simply can't do it. So the music continues to evolve. It goes away from simply being a product of a special class of unique wealthy individuals and it becomes more popularized. But at the same time, it's highly formalized in structure. The music of a marching band like that of John Philip Sousa had to have a certain kind of structure. We might see a parallel in a language like COBOL, where there's enormous structure. Without this structure, you simply cannot do anything. So music continues to evolve. When we enter the jazz era, suddenly now individual accomplishment becomes equally important as group cohesiveness. And a great example of a programming language that implements this might be ALBOL. Where you see the simplicity is starting to form. You start to see a structure coming which strips out a lot of the other elements, which may be Baroque or ornamentative, and you start seeing the purpose of the code coming out. So now we come to the rock era. Anybody know who this band is? This is a group, The Grateful Dead. Now The Grateful Dead are an incredibly important band in the annals of music but more importantly this band, this is Algeria Garcia, is probably the greatest marketing genius in the history of music. They actually created the freeman business model. They would do performances and they would let anybody record the music and you could sell the bootleg tapes or trade them. They didn't care. They made all their money off Victoria. When more famous bands like The Rolling Stone were deeply indebted to record companies, aka VCs, The Grateful Dead were able to control their own destinies. They owned the rights to all their own material. Furthermore, an entire economic ecosystem was created around them. People who followed the band, the parking lot, people selling different things to each other, a participatory experience. They had literally created a whole microeconomy right around their freeman model that they had created. An example might be Lisp, the hippie language. You see, again, you're starting to see structure forming. You're starting to see a simplicity but at the same time the intent is coming through. It's being more accurately communicated. So then we come to the modern era. So nowadays music is not simply one style. It's typical to mash up different styles. To combine different elements. And we see that the music industry itself is transformed from something that's very top-down and hierarchical to where independent artists are able to create their own information product and sell it directly to interested consumers bypassing the traditional distribution mechanisms. You starting to see the parallel, folks? And Ruby is emblematic of this new era. We see that it's literally stripped it down to its most pure and core elements. The intent is right here. We have not added anything extra. We've gotten rid of all our limitations. We've gotten right down to the music. So let's talk about instrumentation and how that might apply. Solo artists. Very, very rare that we see successful software products come from solo artists. For every desktop tower defense there are millions of micro products which really never see the light of day and don't have any significant economic benefit to their creator. It is possible to do this just like it's possible to be a prince and record your entire album yourself playing all the instruments. It's more common though to find duos. The duet is a beautiful form of music and the duo is an amazing form to create companies. The two speeds. Larry and Sergey. We've seen a lot of monumental successes. Really remarkable in the interplay between two people. But what about trios? Those are pretty fun too. There have been some successful trios. Jason Fried with a blog post I believe it was last year where he posited that the ideal and most optimum organization for a startup company would be three people. The business guy, the developer and the designer. And that by complimenting each other's strengths you could create something that was significantly more powerful than individually. Now we get into combos. You might see the combo as something akin to a consultancy or a boutique from. You've got a variety of different instruments or different techniques of different players and each of them interplays combining their elements to create something that is more complex than anything that could be created by individuals or trios or duets. And then we have orchestras. The more complex, the more difficult, the more regimented, the more hierarchical. Right? Or wrong. There might be other examples of larger groups which are able to participate together which take a non-hierarchal distributed format. An example of this might be Linux itself. There is a single director with Linus but there are thousands of contributors who are all working together in their own different ways but they all have simple point of synchronization. You guys remember this band? Extra action marching band. They were mentioned in the keynote earlier from David's own. So let's talk about a few musical anti-patterns and how those might apply to software development. Well, musicians are often faking. They're doing things that they do not know what they are doing. But they sound great. How do they pull this off? It's because musicians have design patterns that they refer to. This is called a Facebook and it's literally sometimes it's literally over a thousand songs, some of which are blues and E. Very, very simple. But this is how musicians will get together and will be able to play songs that they seem to know every single song. How do these guys do it? They're faking it because they know design patterns. But doing it all by yourself, trying to be the source of all knowledge, you can appear a little ridiculous, right? There's just no way you could pull it off. You can't do it all at the same time with just one person. You need to know when to ask for help. And when something's not working, stop. Please. Recognize that there's some fundamental incompatibilities and call it a day. Because some groups are entirely unique. What they're doing is completely indescribable. No one else could possibly join. Some companies are clicks that if you don't understand their culture, some teams, you can't get in because what they're doing is free-form jazz, obviously, and E. If you don't understand that, you're just not in the band. And remember, leave some space for other people. It's not all just about you. Don't hog all the oxygen in the room. Come on, you need to share. You need to spread the love. Because otherwise, you're going to find yourself with your massive ego all by yourself, frankly, doing something that people are losing interest in by the day. So now that we've gotten a basis of theory, we've now entered the practice session. We're not going to do some practice, so I'm going to ask you all to have a little experiment with me. Please put your laptops away. Please put your cell phones down. And everybody who's in the back, please come up to the front. Come on, don't be scared. I won't bite. Come on, you guys have to come. We have to make a consolidated group of people for this to actually work. I saw this amazing thing last year in Canada from the extraordinary National Obermann. And it was so impressive that it stuck with me. And I tried it in Mexico last month. It was really great. So if you guys are willing to give up your disbelief for a brief moment, let's all get together. You could all just be together. We sit there. There's no sitting. The next thing is everybody stand up. There's no sitting. Come on. This is great. All right, we are going to have this experiment. We're going to start by learning a musical vocabulary. Okay, we're going to use a sonic language. And we're going to learn this all collectively. And then we're going to start doing some things with it. So the first sound is going to be a vocal sound. Sorry, a vowel sound. So it could be ah, could be o, could be o. It could change. We're going to do it together in a minute. But it could be like, ah. Anything like that. You can let your own individual creativity come up. We're all going to do it together at the same time. All right, on the four. One, two, the seventh symbol in our musical vocabulary is going to be a very light kind of hand clapping, like golf clapping. Now you can do it in rhythms. You can have a little clapping. You know, you can do it constantly. You can kind of move it around. Couple your hands. You can experiment with anything you want. The trick is to make sure it's not too loud. So not full clapping. Okay, you guys ready? On the count of four. One, two, there's going to be a cibulant sound. It could be a sh, or it could be a s, or it could be going in between, kind of a sh, rave and that sort of thing. Right, so let's all do this together on the count of four. One, two, right, excellent. Now we have learned our basic musical vocabulary. All right, so now we're going to play a little game that I first learned with spatula. But we're going to do with flags today. So let's see, we'll start with you, Tom. You're going to be in charge of the vowel sound. Yes. All right, and let's go back over here. The pirate flag is going to be the clapping sound. And then the cibulant for the saints. But we'll start that one by the blue. But not go that way. Let's start that one. I warned you about this. It's going to be more centralized. You sir, you good sir. Excellent. Thank you. All right, so this is what we're going to do. Each of you have your individual flags. You know you're starting musical simple. If you are directly around the person, everybody hold your flag up. All right, if you are directly around that person, you're going to make the same sound as them. All right. If you are not directly around the person, make no sound. If you are holding a flag past the flag after about maybe 20 seconds maximum to the next person, the idea is to keep it moving around. All right, so you guys follow this. If you're near that sound, make the sound. If you're not near any sound, make no sound. Just direct proximity all the time. The person he's in charge of the vowel sound starting the pirate flag is the clapping sound and the saints flag is the cibulant. All right, we're going to start this on the count of four. One, two, except no flags. All right, so clapping. You were clapping. You're still clapping. You were the cibulant. You're still a cibulant. I know you weren't born a cibulant that you are now. And where's the vowel? The vowel's in the back. There you go. So exact same thing by using musical vocabulary right here, right now, using our human bio-computers to get it collectively formed into a single multiprocessing unit. Are we ready? All right, commonplace game of life in case you've forgotten that when if two people next to you, sorry, if two people next to the person, if you're next to these two people, let's say you got it, Tom and you. I'm sorry, I forgot to. Okay, you guys are going to do the vowel. All right, let's start the same as, or who was it? Where were you guys doing last? You were clapping. You were clapping. Let's keep clapping. All right, so you two are going to start. The vowel got lost. Okay, well then let's pick a person. Okay, so people, let's see, a random person is, uh, we can, uh, how about you two right here are going to be in a new vowel? Our cibulant. Where was our cibulant? Okay, you guys are, you two are going to be the cibulants. All right, this is great. So now, back to the rules of our game. If you two people next to that are, if you're next to two people doing it, whatever the sound is, start doing it. If you're surrounded by people doing the same sound, stop. All right, if nobody next to you is making any sound, don't do anything. Wait for it to come to you. I think you two sounds at the same time. You will have to, as a cellular automaton, decide exactly which one of these you're going to gravitate towards. I trust you. All right, are we ready for Conway's game of life done entirely using sound? Yes. That wasn't loud enough. Your cellular automaton's, you guys should be able to just do this. All right, are we ready on the count of four? One, two, three, four. That's why many spiritual organizations and corporates have an important part of their rituals. And the reason for this is because of this little guy. It's a peptide that's known as oxytocin. In oxytocin, they call it the log chemical because it's produced by your brain in response to things like physical contact. In fact, this is one of the reasons why in athletics it's well known that coaches who put their hands on the shoulder of an athlete will perform significantly better than if there is no physical contact. Part of it is because of the brain production of this lovely little chemical right here. And what it can be associated with is something called a state of flow. State of flow is a state of consciousness first identified by the University of Chicago psychologist, let me butcher his name. I believe it's Mique Chitsemihaide. And you can look up his book. It's called Flow, the State of Aqua Consciousness. And the thing that he studied was that whenever you really enjoy what you're doing, it seems like time just flows right by. You lose all track of time. Furthermore, your performance of whatever that activity is can become significantly improved. And so what we just did is we did some programming and meta-programming of our human bio-computers, together collectively, because we learned in order to create this state of flow not just individually but collectively. Because we indeed are bio-computers and this is the hardware and software with which we must operate. So we've all just programmed ourselves a kind of inception who knows what we're going to do with it. We'll find out. So how do we improve? Well, study theory, right? Design patterns, learn about other languages, and practice together. Study together, read code together, learn in code together, collaborate with other people on code. Practice yourself. You can't just go in and jam with a band if you haven't done individual practice. There's no way you can go in and jam in code if you haven't really worked on your own individual program shops. And then you have to bring the band together. And it doesn't matter the kind of music you're playing. It doesn't have to be a professional setting or a professional gig. What matters is that you're coming together collectively to share these ideas and something amazing might come out of it, like Tom said during his talk. Because improvised music is where some of the greatest music in history has come from. Likewise, improvised code has created some of the most amazing services that we all use, something that was created, you know, one night at a bar or maybe over a weekend at a start-up camp. Because it's really about creating the scenario whereby this improvisation can occur, creating the conditions, creating that state of flow, both individually and collectively. Thank you very much. Go out there and do it.