 Hi everybody, my name is Kayla Banks. I'm 15 years old and this is my crazy dad. Hi, I'm Philip Banks and I'm her dad, not the crazy part. So we're here to talk about kind of what Jim hit on is how to raise a family in tech. But it's so much more than that. It's about getting young people into the community and kind of what we're doing and kind of best practices and things I want you to get about what you can do to bring more young people in the community. Cause how diverse are you if you're not considering youth? It's, we have so many women's and ethnic diversity efforts, but not enough youth. And to add on to that, how diverse really is your community if you don't bring in youth? We like to think our communities are diverse because we include women and different people of color. And even at the women's open source lunch, we were talking about how, you know, who decides what's diverse? And the most overlooked group is youth. We're literally hacking into Linux kernels, hacking into Minecraft, making games. We're the most overlooked group. And in like a whole bunch of programs, like for one example, I use a popular program. I'm pretty sure most of you guys have heard of it. It's called Slack. And I use this to collaborate among teens around the world. And we were approaching Slack about what we're doing. We found out that we legally aren't even able to use Slack because we're underage. And there's a lot of platforms like this that put age restrictions. And we literally are stopping in the tech community from progressing because these age restrictions. So our talk has changed like 10 times, listened to a lot of the good talks at this conference. And we thought of that one because Guy Martin did a talk yesterday about Slack and community. And we had a story about Slack. And just for Slack's purposes, we could also say we've talked to them and they're trying to lower the age limits so that younger people can use it. So we wanted to start out talking a little bit about who we are and why we're here. But Jim hit on most of this stuff. But I'll introduce our tech family. Over to the right is my son Philip. He's the oldest, he's 28. And he's a sysad man and an IT guy at school. Then we got Hunter right next to him. He's a video game developer. And if you Google open source gaming, you'll see a lot of hunters post. Over to the left we have my son David. He wants to be a surgeon, but somehow we're gonna tech that up. I don't know, we're building cyborgs or something. I tell this boy we're gonna work with Brainsons Connections. And then we got at the bottom my daughter Kayla and I think you've met her. But tell us a little bit more about you Kayla. Well, like Jim was saying, I've been speaking at conferences since I was 11 years old. And this was my biggest one at O'Reilly's Oskon, which I did the keynote. And that one was a group of about 5,000, 4,000 people in the room, but really it reached a bigger audience because that talk kind of went viral. And I also had the pleasure of visiting the White House under President Obama. And... Notice the... It's a lot different there now. I was also featured at the Melissa Harris Parry Show and we also got to go to the mayor of Los Angeles and that's also the CTO. Yeah, Chief Technology Officer. Chief Technology Officer, my best friend. City of LA. School. There's another picture, a chief for diversity. The Chief Technology Officer for the United States of America is a woman for a woman who want to know that. So it was a great role model for my daughter just meeting her and talking about being in her position. So the first thing we want to talk about is how we do things. How, what's our method? So Kayla, how do we engage? How do we use engagement? Well, as I mentioned earlier, I'm 15, so I still go to school. And every ride to school we usually have a discussion whether it's a debate or just a regular conversation about a whole different bunch of different topics. And usually we try to relate it around tech. And I feel that like having these talks on the way to school, on the way home, it makes us engage. Like the reason why kids like the stuff is because it pertains to us. We're not just going to, you know, write a whole bunch of code just for the purpose of it. It has to relate to us. And I think engagement is a crucial part in involving youth in the tech community. See, we believe in a lot of reverse engineering. And I think that gets a lot of youth involved in something. And it's whatever thing that they like to do. So at Southern California Linux Expo, where I'm one of the chairs there and my kids have been involved since the beginning, what, 16 years ago, we get, we've started to implement more youth programs and we're starting to get more high schools to come. And you'll find that you ask them to reverse engineer stuff and just think, how does that work? How do we get that there? How do we get that there? And then it gets them started on a path that will get them to every community. We have even some kids that are kernel developers and, I mean, one who just like idolizes line of storyables and so he was like, you gotta talk to them when you get there. So you get that engagement and then you get them started and then sky's the limit. Next is goals. What do we do with goals? Well, goals are a huge part of our year. And when I say goals, I'm not just talking about new year's revolutions that everyone said to forgets about during the year. The goals that we set, we try to tend to set 10 goals, eight goals that we make for ourselves and two goals that our dad sets. And most of the time they're tech goals. Each year I try to learn a new language. And, but although they're not always tech, they're always, they're also like personal and physical and emotional goals. And these goals make me strive to be a better person. Like last year, my goal was to learn JavaScript more and teach more kids and I was able to do that. Yeah, a lot of times we'll feel like, man, we're slacking, but when you start looking at those goals and we do like every three or four months, we do review of your pace on your goals. And I tell the kids, you know, me and my wife set two of their goals. They can set eight goals for the year, but we'll set two because, you know, you kind of want to guide their course. So if you're mentoring or you're working with youth or these nephews, then having them have some investment in their own goals is the key thing because, you know, then they think, stop bossing me around, I'm kind of doing this myself. So we, the thing with getting youth into our communities is the barriers. Youth feel fear in doing something with adults. And, you know, and a lot of people I always ask Kayla, like, are you not terrified being in front of a lot of people that are adults, you know, are the kids audiences, you know, easy, and she's always done adult audiences. Tell us about embracing the fear, KB. Well, one particular story is when I was 12 years old, my first big audience was at Picon in Montreal and it was a lightning talk. And what my dad told me was, you can get up on the stage, you can completely fall, just trip over this whole stage. And one thing to remember to do is just laugh at yourself. And I guess that advice worked out because I'm here speaking in front of all of you guys today. So if we trip or anything on the stage, we are gonna laugh at ourselves. If we blow up any lines, believe it's gonna happen. Yeah, so that one, it'd be pretty much said, like the fear of doing stuff, a lot of the young developers, they are afraid of even submitting code or entering in a lot of these things because one of the kids that was a kernel developer, he said his code getting rejected was the biggest thing to him. And yet I was like, go back, go there again, keep doing that. And once they get over that, then they can do everything. And so that's why I tell them, every project isn't your first one, your best one. Some things go wrong. And interviewing a lot of programmers before they spoke at our conferences, the conferences we've been at, one of the main things I asked them is like, how did you get started? And a lot of them said, I wanted to make a video game. Somewhere along the line, that didn't work. And I remembered, that was my first thing. When I was 10, I wanted to make a video game. So I learned that didn't work, but it led me into so many other places. Comparing yourself to no one. Kayla, tell me about that. And another thing that ties into this is imposter syndrome. I'm a victim of imposter syndrome and I know a lot of people in the tech community are victims of it too. On the way here, it was an 11 hour flight. And I'm sitting here thinking on my mind like, why am I being able to fly all the way to Prague? I'm not as smart as most of the people in this room. And literally when I was sitting in Don Foster's talk yesterday, like, five people raised their hand and said that they contributed to the Linux kernel. Like, we're literally contributing to the Linux kernel. And I'm pretty sure a lot of people are capable or have already done stuff like this. So I have to constantly remind myself to compare myself to no one. And instead motivate myself and inspire by other people. Like Ruben, for example, who had a great talk on Monday. Yeah, that was a great talk. If you missed Ruben's talk, seeing a young kid 11 years old, if I'm correct, still 11, right? Yeah, and him getting up on stage and saying all the stuff that he's doing. If he's not in your community, if you're looking at him like, oh, that was nothing, then your community is not as diverse as you need it to be. The biggest thing about this one for me, and I don't know if you have some more on this one too, Kayla, is that adults, the one thing, we work with a lot of students now. We've started programs around LA and hopefully around the world soon. Well, we're dealing with a lot of young people that are versed to tech from the start. And to get them from ground zero to where they wanna be is a hard thing because I know with my own kids, I had to stop monitoring them and micromanaging them and thinking, they have to take the same path as me. They take, everybody takes a whole different path to where they wanna be. So if you do it your way, they're different than you. And so we're, that's our big thing with schools. Did we learn anything like that with some of the students at some of the schools so far? Did you get? Yes, and like my dad mentioned, we've been working with schools and most of the time we realized that a lot of these kids tend to just need a bit of motivation and from on there, you have your own self-motivation. And I think that's crucial. And even going to conferences like this, I tend to get triggered and have a whole bunch of self-motivation. Even going to some of the booths like Red Hat and all the other ones. I go home and with all these paper and everything, like what am I gonna learn next? Like what am I going to program? Yeah, and a lot of the people at the booths, the clouds of the booths on, our new thing is Kubernetes. So we're just like, what is that? So we probably stopped by a ton of your booths and then grabbed you a gang of times about that because I went to high school kids that started learning that kind of thing. So from there, we start taking it to the next level. So where do we wanna go from there? Kayla, they're probably asking themselves, okay, you told us a lot about what you're doing. A lot of things that we could do. What's next, what's our, what are we doing? Well, we're not mostly focusing on ourselves now. Now we're starting to focus on other kids, getting other kids involved. And so as you can see right now, we're teaching at schools and we're starting our own company called Banks Family Tech, which is gonna be on Facebook soon. And during the summer of LA, we taught at Parent Middle School and Tom Bradley Middle School. And as you can see, these are some of our kids and teaching basically is the next generation. Like we said, youth, they're the overlooked group. And so directly reaching out to this group, teaching them, you know, you've got to be the part of, you've got to be the new generation of the tech community. And this is part of our teaching at schools. Yeah, you've done this. Some of these are, even young, this is a class of fifth graders. And I don't like to put down any languages in particular because everything serves its purpose, but we do programs where they're actually learning real code because that is a lot of STEM programs, science, technology, engineering, and math programs in the United States are focused on just saying, we're teaching some coding and we're not big fans of that. You know, like one of the things I really loved about Ruben's talk is he was doing some Python, writing his, and young kids can learn this now. A lot of times we use things like scratch as a language that it's like scratching a chalkboard for me to hear because they're not really learning life applicable languages. So we're teaching at schools and what do we want to do from there? We want you to, our next thing was like, how do you get involved? We want so many tech minds in this room that can give back to the communities. There's, if everyone in here multiplied that knowledge in one school, just going to one group of kids and getting one kid involved, imagine how many kids around this world would be. Because I only, I tell them, this is just a tool. You can do whatever you want in life. There's some people that were graphic design and that's what my son Hunter, it's my son Hunter teaching us these two schools, that's my son David down there helping with this. Hunter was more graphic design applied to video game design. So how are we gonna, that's how you can get involved and help us. So now, Kayla made this, so tell us about this one, Kayla. So this slide is dedicated to our community. As we mentioned earlier, we live in Los Angeles, but even all the way on the other side of the world, we literally have so many familiar faces like, Nithya and that's our friend Guy and Adrian and all these people. And so being in tech really enables a community and that's what we're trying to portray. And yeah, these are all of our friends there. Shout out to Nithya. A lot of the people we've seen here today, so like I was saying, we've changed the side so many times, seeing so many new faces, you know, Nithya talks and Kayla and the women's in tech talk came out with a couple of new friends and then I was like different people, we didn't even know we're here, you know, John O you see, we see him in every city or I don't know what that guy ever stops at the house. And of course our new friend Angela is here running this conference and so community. So having my kids in this community all this time, there's so many people, we can, I mean, even when we went to the White House, there was people across the room who were like, hey, there's so-and-so and they're in the tech community and then they offer their advice or anything if they know them. But imagine if more kids are involved and get these contacts and everything like some of our young programmers like Ruben, get these contacts and then they help them and they help develop them as programmers and as developers, as designers and engineers. So now with all that, what are they gonna do? Are they gonna reach out to us? Yeah, are you guys gonna reach out to us? Are you guys gonna contact us on Facebook? And so there's our Facebook. That's my primary source of contact. And you can also, since we have to leave right after I have to get back to school, you guys can shoot us to the email. And lastly, you guys can for sure tweet us because our Twitter game is about to be A1. Yeah, we're not as big on our Twitter, but we're gonna be all over social media and this is the thing we wanted to get everybody else involved and just like, you know, we want you to reach out to your community, reach back out to us if you want to start an effort or anything and wherever in the world. This world's a small place as we've shown. It's a small place and you know, we're here and there, we talk to people all over the world all the time and get some of your input, some of the things that work for you and if you need our help, the same thing. So on behalf of myself and- And the banks family. Representing the rest of the banks family from all over Los Angeles, California, we'd like to say thanks. Thanks for coming out. Nice, hold on one second. So I want to make, hold on one second. So, and this is unscripted so, but I want to make a deal with you. So many of you know, is Clyde Seeperson in the audience somewhere around here? Have you met Clyde yet from our organization? So Clyde runs all of our training and development at the Linux Foundation and we have certification tests for Linux sysadmins or Kubernetes for a whole bunch of different technology. We have self-paced training, online training. We would love to offer for your classes in Los Angeles access to that, you know, free testing, free certification. So as you're building out that program, hopefully you can take us up with that. Adrian was on one of our slides. So yeah, he said you guys would love to help. Awesome. We love it. Let's do it. We love it. All right, thank you. Thank you.