 Hey everyone, welcome to Bing-BingCon. We are so glad you're here. Wow, there are a lot of you here. I'm not sure if everyone knows this, but we have twice as many people this year as we did the last two years. So this is extremely exciting. I'd like to introduce us, the organizers to you. We are five of the six organizers. So I'm Lindsay Cooper. This is Danielle Sucher, Erdi Seidol, Leo Franchi, and Nabil Hussain. And not yet here is Alex Clemer, who last we heard is on a flight from India, and last we heard he had made it all the way to the UK. In a typical Alex fashion, he will probably be here perhaps later today. So we look forward to him joining us. I'm going to do some quick opening remarks, and then I'm going to welcome our keynote speaker, our first keynote speaker. First of all, I'd like to thank our sponsors, whose logos are up here. So going from the top down, we have managed by Q, Dev Bootcamp, Stride, Meetup, Stripe, Betterment, and SoundCloud. And all of these sponsors donated thousands of dollars to make this possible. So if you are from any of those companies, I'd like to ask you to just stand up for a moment and wave or shout so that people know that you're here. Fantastic. And some of them are hiring, so you should talk to them. We also have several individual sponsors whose names are on our website who came through pretty much at the last moment to make it possible for us to have breakfast today. So thanks to all of them. All right, next I want to point out the location of the bathrooms. They are back this way to your left. There's one door that you have to go through. After you go through that door, there are two bathrooms and they're both all gender. They're both bathrooms. Finally, I'd like to talk a little bit about our code of conduct and the social rules. So we have a code of conduct. It is on our website. I'm not going to read the whole thing because everybody who's here checked a box saying that they read it. So I'm trusting that you did. But it is on our website and you can read it if you want to. However, there is one component of the code of conduct that you might not be familiar with and that is the social rules, which we borrowed from the Recurs Center, which all of us organizers are somehow affiliated with. So I would like to invite a very special person, Julia Evans, up to the stage to introduce the social rules. Let's welcome Julia. Hey everyone. So I went to the Recurs Center a few years ago and I learned a ton about programming while I was there. And one of the reasons that the Recurs Center is such an amazing place to be is because they make it easy to just focus on programming and learning. And sometimes when I'm talking to people about programming, you'll end up in these weird situations where you have some weird power dynamic where someone is like, I know about more of a BIM than you, right? And so one thing the Recurs Center has to make it more pleasant for everyone to learn is if you like explicit social rules, which I find super helpful, and a lot of them are things that I have done myself. So the first one, is it no fainting surprise? So what this means is if someone, let's say someone is like, I don't know what C is. The goal is to not be like, you don't know what C is? How could that be? And one of the things that surprised me actually when the no fainting surprise rules explained to me is that even if you're actually surprised, it is better to not act surprised, right? So if you're very surprised that the person does not know C, you can just be like, oh, well, you know, it's a programming language, right? Like, and you can not act surprised because the only thing that happens, like the person feels worse, right? And like everyone is sad. And then people can say like, I don't know X and like not, and then everyone learns. The second thing is no well actuallys, which means that if someone is like, hey, this thing works on like, I don't know, max and on Linux, you're not like, well, actually, it only works on like OS 10 and not OS nine or whatever. Like, like where you make like some like very small, like clarifying a mark, which does not actually like necessarily help. Especially when the correction doesn't have like any bearing on the actual conversation that you're having, which is something that I think a lot of us have done by accident, right? The next one is no backseat driving, which means that like, if people are like talking about a problem, you shouldn't like, kind of just like lob advice across the room where you're like, I know what to do and it's this. And this is just more about like engaging in conversations with people, right? And like if you're part of the conversation, like be part of the conversation. Yeah, and not just like drop wisdom from above, and then like run away. The next one is no subtle isms. So it's about subtle racism, subtle sexism, homophobia, transformia and other kinds of bias. And this one is a little different, right? Because the other three are like a very specific pattern where you're like, well, actually, and this is kind of like a whole class of behaviors. So an example of this is saying something like, oh, this is so easy, my grandmother could do it, right? And you're like, my grandmother's a programmer, right? Or something. And so there are a couple of parts of this rule. So if someone says like, hey, I think that that was maybe kind of like sexist, the right way to respond to that is like, oh, sorry. And not like, no, it definitely wasn't. And similarly, it's also good to not like pile on to someone to make, who made a mistake, right? So if someone says something that you think was inappropriate and you're like, oh, that wasn't the best. And they're like, oh, sorry, you're not like, like not to like keep telling them about it at length, which makes it kind of like easier for people to like apologize and move on, which I find to be like really constructive. And the last thing that we ask, which is I think kind of an unusual rule is that one thing I really liked about the recurse center was that it was about programming. And I think like there are a lot of like discussions of bias in tech in the world. And I think it's really important to have those discussions. But it's also sometimes nice to have a place to like escape from talking about it all the time. So here we'd like to like talk, like spend most of our time talking about like programming. And yeah, those are the social rules. And the goal of these is for them is for them to be like lightweight, right? We're like, we've all done things that like we shouldn't do, where we try not to do them when we do them. We try to apologize to each other and then move on. And like a lot of these happened because someone was like, oh no, I do this all the time. I should stop. So that's the social rules. Thank you. All right, I'm almost ready to introduce our first keynote speaker, Kat Small. But before I do, there's just something I want to ask really quickly. So can we have a show of hands or applause? How many people are at BingBangCon for the first time? A lot. All right, that's fantastic. How many people are at their second BingBangCon? All right, quite a few. And who are the few, the proud who have been to all three BingBangCons? All right, that's amazing. We have a few. Cool, so we have some old timers here as well as a lot of newcomers and that makes me very happy.