 So I gave this talk originally at LA RubyConf that Kobe does, and I'm gonna plow through it again real quick. So I have this intro stuff about who I am, what I look like, how you find me on the internet. Cascadia Ruby is coming up in Seattle. FarmhouseConf happened in the past. Okay, so this talk, rather, is for all of you as well. It's not just me and my special conditions, because I'm not married, or I don't have kids, or I don't have a mortgage, whatever the thing is. Oh, Dean left his notifications on. How do I turn that off, Dean? Ah, whatever. Yeah. Okay, so this talk is also not about capitalism. That's another talk. And this talk is also not the idea of work with a capital W. That's another talk for another day as well. Somebody was talking about how our encode, our word is law. What if you're an anarchist and you don't like laws? So this is the question that keeps me up at night. And all of this talk, I'm not talking, not speaking metaphorically. I mean this literally. I lose sleep. If you were guaranteed not to fail, what would you do? Okay. I think about this a lot. I think it was some platitude and someone's email signature or something, but it sort of shook me to my core several times in my life. So if you're guaranteed not to fail and not just your job and life, love, regret, well, what's stopping you? If you wanna travel the world, like what's stopping you from traveling the world? Like you gotta get a passport, but that's not really stopping you. That's just a hurdle. What's really stopping you? And I don't know a lot of things about a lot of things, right? But I do know this. You are better than the job you're doing. I don't care who you are and what your job is, you're better than it. And I'm not, this is not an analogy. I want you to quit your job today. So there's a multitude of reasons why you should quit your job. Maybe you work with terrible people. Her words, not mine. Maybe you don't get paid well. Maybe you just wanna make more money, right? And however much you're making, I want you to hold that number in your brain right now. Let's say it's $10,000 a year, just so that I'm not overshooting anyone. Whatever your salary is, give yourself a raise right now, okay? How much do you think you're really worth? I guarantee you, you could get that job, making that much. And however much you just gave yourself a raise, add another 25%. It's the seller's market. Who here is looking for a job? Anyone? It's amazing, that guy. Who here is hiring, okay? Everyone meet that guy. So who here, that last question about more money, that last question about more money, who's not making as much as they think they're worth, or think they could be making, who would like to be making more? Okay, of all the people hiring, who's willing to pay overmarket to poach people, to poach good people? No, you're hiring wrong. But you know, group A meet group B. The ones who didn't raise your hand, I'm sorry, if you're not willing to pay more in a seller's market, I think you're hiring wrong. All right, so maybe you wanna quit your job because you work on whatever and it's not fun, right? Maybe you wanna build video games all day. Maybe you just wanna do something different. You've been working on the same, say like business search engine, that's a primary color for the last three years and you just wanna work on something different. Maybe you wanna quit because you wanna do nothing at all. Like this culture has this work ethic that's slowly killing us all. We bust our asses every day of our adult lives and several days of our pre-adult lives, making shit that no one needs, right? Like at the end of the day, like why do we work so hard? So maybe you quit and you do nothing. There's nothing wrong with doing fuck all. All right, maybe you quit because you've always had a master. You wanna be the master of your own domain. Maybe you quit because you've never quit and it's scary. And by facing down our fears, we could gain courage. Maybe you're not proud of the work you do on the product you make for the company that you work for. 2012 is the year we get wild, right? Hashtag. So maybe every day you go to work, you're quietly dying on the inside. You're pulled into the next iteration planning meeting for features from product managers. Who, you know, nothing wrong with product managers. I love product managers, but maybe it's just bullshit every day and you know it and you're slogging through it because you gotta pay the mortgage or whatever the thing is. Maybe you wanna do something of real impact. You wanna make the world a better place and online, social, dating, local, geo, mobile, cat websites aren't changing the world, right? So here's the thing. We all build software and software is in everything we do in our culture. Our culture is rearranging itself entirely around software. I mean, obviously every laptop is running software. Every phone, our timer, our TVs, this projector is probably running software. The banks, our stores, our cars, everything is running software. We hold in our hands this craft that is the most important thing to this era of this culture. There was a time when we arranged ourselves around farming. There was a time when we arranged ourselves around factories and service work. And maybe I'm crazy, but I think software is the now, the mass job of our epoch. So maybe you wanna do something because you wanna transform culture and that's what I'm gonna talk about. So this section of the talk is cut off at the top but it's a brief, very incomplete history of noteworthy achievements in the field of computing as research almost exclusively on Wikipedia. And it's a couple dozen awesome achievements in computer history I just wanna rattle through. Some of them are commercial products. Some of them are free and open source. Some of them are infrastructure. Some of them are consumer facing things. But all of them change the world. That's not hyperbolic to say these things change the world. The first sort of mechanical calculator. And then Ada Lovelace, everyone knows who Ada Lovelace is. Not only was she the first woman programmer? Hi, how'd it go? Not only was she the first female programmer but she was arguably the first programmer. She wrote an algorithm for a machine and that machine was never built in her life. And so she couldn't write tests. She couldn't test out her code. She just wrote this stuff and years later by other folks that machine was built and her code worked. And then we get Lambda Calculus back in the 30s and we get Cobol and she also invents the first compiler. We get Lith. And then we get the mouse and what do you do with a mouse if you don't have a GUI? So eventually we get around to a GUI and hypertext and hypermedia. Ideas that wouldn't fully be realized until the web. And so Douglas Engelbart, computer science history, does everyone know about him? He gave the mother of all demos, right? So this list of things are all impressive by themselves in 1968. Teleconferencing, live video chat across the network but he did all of them at once and then quietly sort of went into oblivion. Arpanet, which we all know would eventually turn into the internet, goes live. We get Unix by Ken and Dennis. Then Park, Xerox Park invents or reinvents everything. We had Arpanet for a few years without email. We could send each other messages or leave each other files on the same system but we couldn't send messages across systems. Basically we had Facebook before, we had email. And then so without getting permission and without telling anyone, Ray created email. So you could send messages to users on other systems. And then we get C from Ken and Dennis again and Woz comes along and invents the Apple One. And again, this is a commercial product and they sell it for $666 and just a hobbyist or whatever. And then we get Emacs and foot jokes and then we get the Apple Two and changed our lives. BSD, who uses Vim? So you could thank Bill Joy. And the BBS, I think the story on the BBS was he was like snowed in in like a blizzard in Chicago and over the week he created BBS or something. I might be mixing that with using it. I think this is the one, I'm sorry, they're snowed in over the weekends in Chicago, they create Usenet. Minitel just, so it was invented, went online in 1982, it just got retired 30 years ago. That's longer than a lot of people have been alive, this one network was running. And these Minitel machines were kind of what the IMAQ promised to be, this all in one. You would go buy it at the same store where you would buy a toaster and a washing machine. And on the Minitel was basically the invention of instant messaging. Okay, and then we get DNS, so we can type words into our URLs. Then we get the Mac and GCC and more foot jokes. In 1987, Larry Wall wrote the first Pearl Code and continued to write more code because you can't read old Pearl Code. Okay, so then we get IRC, we all use IRC all the time to talk to our nerd friends and exactly no one else. ARPANET was removed from the network basically and then we had the internet proper where it was truly entered. Imagine, okay, so you go to your 15 year high school reunion, oh Shane, what have you been up to? Mid-level manager, a regional box company, married and divorced, married again, a couple of kids. What about you, Tim? What have you done with your life? I invented the Hypertext Transport Protocol, an HTML and the web and the first server and the first browser and so he's doing all right and he didn't stop. Linus created the Linux's and then Maths gave us the Ruby and we get the wiki in 95, the idea of the wiki and then a few years later we get wikipedia and imagine our web life without wikipedia. DHH gives us all of the rails which was the thin line in the code or the graph and the blog screencast and then we're all here and then I think to myself, fuck have I done with my life? And overwhelmingly the answer is not much. So 2012 was supposed to be about some big projects and I've got a big list and I've knocked away at some of those and I'm still working on some of them but this is the other sort of quote that keeps me up at night. Be ashamed to die until you've won some victory for humanity. Horace Mann gave that at a commencement speech at a college and that's now their school motto. So that you're here is evidence that you're smarter than the average bear. I want you to do something meaningful with your lives and with your work and with this craft that we all hold that our culture is arranging itself around. That's it.