 Thank you very kindly. Mostly I hack on things that don't exist. Sometimes I build things and sometimes they work and sometimes they don't. I haven't got my reading glasses so if I stop and stare at the thing that's because I'm old and terrible. I'm going to talk quite a lot about depression. So if that's going to be a bit painful for you then please look out for yourself. I'm quite happy to talk about bleak things because they happen to me and if that's a bit grim for you. These things happen. Also this clock hates me but... So anyway, a few years ago I was working in Bath and what I was, as Geoff Rowe doesn't say, all the technical team apart from two of us left pretty much in a two month period which was kind of terrifying. And I took to wandering around Bath just to get out of the office and so I could stop thinking about Zen or Redis or PHP or managers that I hated and wanted to die a slow and painful death. So one of the things that Bath has is parades of terrible shop selling terrible things and one of them was a toy shop and in that there were enameled signs for things that didn't exist and didn't have enameled signs and there were wooden toys that you'd give to children and they'd kind of stare at going, well where did the batteries go? And there were tin robots which children weren't allowed to play with because they had lead paint or they were just sharp objects because they were just terrible things and shouldn't have been in a toy shop in the first place. And I kind of wanted one. So I bought tin robot that looked like it was about to have a psychotic break and it was set about anybody or it's all with a welding torch. So allied to this we were doing devopsy things which generally means that you're supposed to have one of these to do your deploys with so that's fine. Yay lots of deploys, yay big red switch, hey! However our deploy rig would have needed this and this was awful but we were kind of working on it and there were only two of us out of a team of seven left and we were going to catch fire and die and in this state I thought the best thing in the world would be to build a robot that would beat around the office and discover who had broken the build and call on the bollocks because obviously public humiliation is a great thing to do for employee wellbeing and to make public humiliation make software better. Everybody knows this. That sarcasm by the way. Public humiliation was why my ex-employer's code was in a terrible state anyway. So A and B came together and I thought sweary bot here we go and I ordered a bunch of bits off the internet because that's what the internet's for and started hacking away and it kind of all went really well and it was great and I think so this is a test rig. Unfortunately there's no sound but what was it nearly mostly worked but it had a strange failure mode where this thing what you can't hear is that it's mumbling to itself in bad speech synthesiser and what it tended to do was just rock back and forth swearing quietly to itself and it would take you know it's beatling about my bathroom it's just attacking the first thing it can find which is my feet and it just won't take piss off an answer so it would just find a dark corner and just hide in it just go bollocks shit bollocks shit and it was at this point I realised I'd built a depressed robot that couldn't cope store that image away for later so the grim thing about this is that there is no happy ending I fell into a particularly nasty depression at this point and never finished it and what's worse is that the bloody computer stopped I posted about it on LJ and many of my friends were like yeah he's very robot brilliant idea that's completely you JHR and I'm like thank you and about 12 months later after I recovered a bit more no it's just not playing is it or rather it's playing but won't stop playing let's see what happens computers right so anyway it was awful I saw all these happy messages about the stuff I hadn't done and it was like awful and made everything worse and reading that sort of thing can really really make you hate yourself because you then were like yeah I can do a thing it's great and you now is like well I fucked that one up and you've let your friends down and you didn't finish the project I mean you never finish a project come on who are you kidding you never finish a damn thing your house is littered with dead projects and the computer works finally and you know you're full of wacky ideas and madcap schemes that never come to fruition if it was a sitcom it would be funny but it wouldn't be funny because sitcoms aren't funny and you let people down you're a loser you shouldn't be allowed to do this sort of thing you just shut up not bother your friends when you're exciting things because they never turn out right just stop don't bother your friends at all be quiet shut up do your work do nothing depression is a right fucking bastard do not listen to it so the good thing is I got better thank you so a few years I mean it was a couple of years ago now I'm trash at the bar having finished a volunteering at a science fiction convention and the best thing in the world slipped into my head which was a cuckoo clock that calls you a twap I mean who on earth wouldn't want one of those so eBay's amazing it turns out there are many cuckoo clocks they come in pink they also come as built I mean this is a German chap's art project and he made cuckoo clocks out of disturbing buildings from I think the ex of Berlin but anyway and about this time I discovered the joy of the SP8266 which is a microcontroller there are about nine punts and they've got something much more grunt than an Arduino but less IO but it was fine and that was just going to be fun but damn things come with Llewer which is horrible I did write a thing here about banging on about favourite toy languages because I can't be doing with Llewer because reasons Pearl drove me up the wall Pearl made me hate myself which is just I'm sure the designers of a language didn't envisage that but it does it was the only thing for a long time and anyway I discovered Ruby because that's all the configuration management stuff was written in and it was night and day and there's I think this notion that a language that fits your head better is less likely to gaslight you and is better for your mental health this is certainly my thoughts on it which are worth whatever you pay to get in nothing, yay but anyway where was that I built a cuckoo clock I built this cuckoo clock now this video will probably also break the same way as the other one but very eventually I'll stuff it we'll get that so while this thing isn't doing its thing there's finally don't worry about the next it doesn't work nail varnish was a wee gold by then so this thing breadboarded up sorry I don't know I'm gesturing at that it's over there everything worked it was great I had a cuckoo clock it called your bastard on the hour boxed it up Vero board soldering and it didn't work and it was just like well you know there's two black wires which are the hour trigger I've got them the wrong way up anybody could do it really turn it upside down it didn't work well getting on a bit I need magnifying hat to see small soldering now because old age it'll be my mangy soldering anybody can do it I'll just stare all the joints and it'll be fine and it didn't work so that demon that thing that tells me I'm rubbish came back and said many things repeatedly along the lines of look here you are again it doesn't work you're a muppet what are you even thinking why are you even trying nobody cares it's just a stupid idea don't just stop you can't you don't know what you're doing and we're here again so the weird thing is about depression that it comes along with imposter syndrome and anxiety and a bunch of other stuff which are rubbish and here's the thing if I put the clock in test mode this is a live demonstration the like of which blue Peter I've never seen if you're of an age to have ever watched blue Peter so an accurate representation of the inside of my head when I'm having a bad time and I can get the sodding USB connection the right way up because hey I forgot my reading glass is so you try and have a conversation with the rest of your head and there's a thing in the back of your head is just interrupting you the whole time you can't think straight you've just got this noise and you're trying to tell people things and it's your voice telling you you're an idiot all the time thank you and everybody likes swearing however where was I? just here so the way I visualise the inside of my head he owes a lot to Unix now okay this is a leak abstraction it's a rubbish idea don't do this at home but thank you one of the things that models I guess is an overloaded system and it's thrashing and half your cognitive function is running in swap and you can't do a damn thing because you're spending all your time trying to shut down out of control demons which are calling you a bastard and your brain is like treacle because you know your half your memory is just thrashing and everything is terrible and so the joke here is that my demons are demons which looks funnier written down as indeed does the ad lib I wrote down so it's not an ad lib but there we are where was I? oh it's over here that's nice so one of the things the demons and I would like to point out that this is nothing to do with schizophrenia symptoms or anything like that it's just I have this model of what's going on in my head and it's shouty eunuchs demons because I'm a spot and what they'll do is get really busy and remind me of some time when I was at a party in 1983 when I made a tat on myself just as I'm overtaking a bus on a windy a road and it's like no you're not killing me that way or they'll decide that a slideshow of my worst moments 1986 to 1995 would be the best thing in the world to show me at about 2am when I'm trying to drop off to sleep the little bastards so here we are imagine if you will a thing which insults you with your own voice exhibit B and at this point weirdly sitting in a cafe in north London eating a salad and drinking tea I have a mug staring out the window I became enlightened I kind of realise that actually what I've been doing is building automata that were external versions of the things that were in my head no, no men in white coats that's okay so this is actually a thing I was chatting to an actual artist I don't think she was wearing a beret and smoking a roll up but and I described this and she was like yeah why do you think you're special? well so I kindly just it all came collapsing on itself and I was like right so I build things to come to terms with the stuff that's going on okay let's store that one away too so I was in Glastonbury the other month you can just about see Glastonbury tour behind the Volvo with the reefer Volvo? yeah, no anyway Glastonbury is great it's filled with good yards X-Railway bits and some shops and a tour which is there and there and there and anyway anyway so the thing the brilliant thing about Glastonbury is that the shop on the high street it's opposite the shop that will sell you homemade faggots and chips for about three quid and it is filled with wooden toys and robot arms and squitty little skittery robots that light up and I wanted to buy one of everything and send it through a time machine to my past self and say it's alright just make all of it break it, paint it green I don't care just do it this is the best thing however time machine is are impossible and my past self would be really freaked out if that happened so I just sent a pile of stuff to my brother's kids and I kept them for myself obviously because who would not wish for a flying unicorn and I realised I bought another automata thing and now I know how this stuff works what is going to come out and I was driving back from Glastonbury up the Twidley Road to Bristol because I live in Bristol and driving to Bristol if I lived somewhere else would be stupid when I realised exactly what I was doing which was that now some none or all of you may have some notion of the significance of the colour scheme or not have I finished? so that happened and I'm not sure yay so if there's a point here it's that bugger depression find ways of explaining it to yourself that might help those are my ways of explaining it to myself and that about covers it I wouldn't actually ask me for any useful information other than if you're having problems with Kubernetes because I know about as much as that as I do about depression so and the question is if anybody's got any questions you're weird but far away I was going to formulate about oh right so we must call I was and this so software and hardware will gaslight the shit out of you and it is really bad for your mental health two examples one, Kubernetes itself the liveness probe if you read the documentation it says as long as your container returns anything between 200 and 399 everything's good Kubernetes loves you and will keep your kit running bullshit so the documentation for this is in a hold on 2015 three-year-old PR on GitHub at the bottom of a lock filing cabinet et cetera et cetera et cetera and I did not find this straight away and I wrote a thing and I stuck it on Ka and it didn't start and it was just complaining because the return code was wrong and it was look it's in the documentation you're supposed to work your fucking blasted thing and I struggled with this for days and I thought I was a complete idiot because I can't work simple containers and the instruction said they should work reality said it didn't well Google are never wrong so clearly I'm the idiot no Google can't write documentation to save their lives it turned out actually that a friend of a friend works for them and I complained mightily on faceache and he was like but Google are never wrong exhibit A exhibit B you sort yourselves out lads the other thing oh yeah we must D1 Pro a ledges to have 16 squillion bytes of memory which you can't use this is hidden at the bottom of a github pier from three years ago in a lockfiling cabinet Mark beware of the leopard and I have one of these and I was building a thing and it wouldn't work and I thought I'd blown it up because I'm an idiot and I can't work electronics and I got a different one and that worked because it was a slightly different version with less memory so anyway everything is terrible beware kit that tries to gaslight you or destroy your brain and that's not a useful behaviour pattern for things that people have made for other people but anyway questions apart from is the bar open and will you shut up is that working? yes thank you for the talk that's lovely the one about demons yes I'm quite old to be a parent and I have some small children and the question was so when can I show my eight year old alien now so monster stories for children I was feeling a bit guilty about this because I thought well I don't know but I met this woman from Mexico who's a good catholic and she said Peter look parenthood is just one long series of guilt trips don't worry right now it turns out it seems monsters in children's stories are a way of externalising things they can't understand now I think if somebody looked on Google which is never wrong they would figure out the citation for that but it's an interesting thought that the externalisation of things is an important step in growth I'd like to pass that comment I fully admit that I'm slow and have to work things out alone and for a lot of this brain stuff because being depressed for part of the time doesn't help because your brain works even slower and hates itself but yeah yeah can we go to the bar now so now you sort of see the process working a bit more does that mean that you can see the automata coming earlier maybe I don't know work in progress I shall find out the next thing I build I don't know what it will be I suspect now I understand what's going on I want to go back and build this way with a robot out of a sense of spite if nothing else because maybe one more question I think really quick one your flying unicorn yes does it do anything that it didn't when it started or does it just have a thematically appropriate colour scheme actually it's got a stepper motor in there which is why the winding handle doesn't work very well but if you use a stepper motor for longer than five minutes it tends to catch fire excellent it is a bonning wing flying unicorn yes it has worryingly enough I got the colours slightly wrong so it's got that vibe of as you say a ground attack strafing people you do not like but I love it to pieces because it's just like it's a complete thing and it worked and I had a whale of a time just because I knew what I was doing and what was in my head it was just like not exactly like that it would be weird I mean that's probably close to Stuart Lee somebody dragged me off stage I don't know can I stop now? yes thank you thank you Jchar