 Good evening scale. Are we are we are we ready? Let's do this. Okay, so our first speaker tonight is Sheamus Blatley. He's gonna talk about the independence of the importance of independence Sheamus needs no introduction to those of us that follow him on Twitter. He's he's lived more lifetimes than all of us can combined imagine He's he's worked on some game development some physics on games. He's worked on He's worked on some advanced math some baking. He said there would be bagels, but there aren't any some disappointed about that And I I also had him come here yesterday just to do a full-on dress rehearsal to an empty room I think he enjoyed that But anyway without further ado, Sheamus Blatley guys Everybody have enough drinks that the most important thing when you hear me talk is that you have enough drinks So, okay, everybody drink up Then you're not gonna enjoy this I'm sorry, but but try to get into an altered state anyway. I might end up putting you in an altered state called boredom today We are gonna talk about innovation and freedom freedom is something I think very important to this crowd and to free software Which is the thing that's been dear to my heart My entire career. I am Sheamus Blatley and today's date although Bala Told me otherwise is not 728 it is 729 yesterday when I came here this was my talk It was less stressful it was a perfect presentation We're gonna have less Perfect presentation today probably much worse about freedom Tinkering and innovation. These are I mean, this is the the the center of my life. So hopefully I'm bore you too bad. I Have some housekeeping to get out of the way first on this. I Fucking hate slides There are not gonna be slides for this presentation Here is the main slide for this presentation the subtle absence of slides All right, so listen Here's the deal almost everybody in this room including me is in the business of making something from nothing and Probably most of us our entire careers have been in a weird situation When you go out to an event or you meet your like sister's new boyfriend or your parents friends come over and they want to know what you do and They are never going to understand what you do. It's just not gonna happen. It doesn't matter if it's security So, you know, you know encryption whatever it is You're never gonna fucking understand and they made to ride you for it as well Which is awesome because you have some dude who like works in a bank and he's telling you you're an idiot and you're like Yeah, okay cool You know, I Have I have this thing called cryptocurrency. It might fuck your job up. Just pay attention. So anyway the thing about it is that what we have been doing this whole time is creating value from vacuum Some refer to this as pulling it out of your ass. It's similar and Yes, it's right. It's the spirit that matters and a lot of people can't understand this and it's Specifically strange because guys from my generation and you know old guys, you know, you know who you are We come from a world where everybody was a banker, but he was in real estate All the cool kids were making money in manufacturing and in those worlds You are playing a zero-sum game Some guy minds the minerals That the other people can't get to and he wins over them Somebody sells a property for Mormon and the other guy or sees some kind of tax benefit better than the other guy and he wins the other guy loses and The thing that these people do not understand About what it is that most of us in this room do is that we're not playing a zero-sum game. We're playing a game where there's nothing and Then you work really hard and if you can stay sane and pay for food after that there is something of value that gets sold to somebody and Your sister's boyfriend is super confused about why you have a nicer house than him. Okay Then to add incredible befuddlement to these people You start to talk at Thanksgiving about the fact That the software that you write You are giving away to other people for free And then they're really fucked up They really don't understand what you're talking about, but it's interesting because The free business model has been around for all of human civilization You know, I am sure the first drug dealer gave some free samples Kick-started his business that way, but we do most people do work for free all the time They just don't notice it And what I want to talk about tonight with respect to freedom and creativity innovation tinkering all these things is that it's that free part the part when you're playing around the part when nothing's on the line When you're not playing with a hundred million dollar investment or you're not like driving a super expensive truck It's that moment Where you're actually going to create something new because you're free and you're not worried about shit, right? You're not concerned about anything And by the way, I know plenty of programmers who just fucking psychopaths and they never worry about anything anyway And they're awesome because you know, it doesn't matter if they're doing but for most people That moment where you're free Is the moment where you achieve this maximum creativity? Okay, and that's the magic moment. That's the moment that the old world didn't understand and The trick is how do you get yourself into that space? often and aggressively How do you how do you? Manufacture a situation where the largest number of people at your company are in this creative space for instance Generating revenue from nothing a Giant anal extraction factory you have to do this to succeed and and the answer is you try to put them all into this place Where they're playing where they're just screwing around better better Even better where they're playing and showing off to their friends Okay, where you're showing off the stuff to do to your friends I've had some interesting experiences at places like Microsoft and other Unfortunate employers Where I've tried to explain to people that we need to give I Will quote the the anal class the class of people who make something from nothing you have to give this this group of people As much freedom as you possibly can if you want to make any money Okay, and money guys will immediately tell you that you need to constrict their freedom as much as you can They we must make a walled garden. I love that term because You know, I don't think the prison exercise ground is a walled garden They want to have a euphemism where you own everything that somebody makes but you still expect them to be really creative and able to show Off to their friends and never works It never works At Microsoft we had a real problem when we were starting this Xbox game console up and In case you don't know I am colloquially known as the father of the Xbox which is kind of fucked up because I Don't know if it'll ever want to move back in But if it does it's fucking paying rent But in fathering a plastic box filled with transistors I Had to figure out a way to get the most important people in that ecosystem to feel freely creative And that's the game developers are gonna make games for the box and they don't work for Microsoft They work for a thousand different companies. In fact the best ones are working for a company doesn't exist yet They have an idea nobody's thought of yet The idea better than the big game publisher is better than the other console manufacturers because he's working alone She's in her room at her mom's house Developing something that's coolest thing you've ever seen How do you get that to that person if you're Microsoft and you want to fucking own everything because they want to own it fucking everything How do you get it there? Well, you have to convince them about this model that I'm talking about you have to tell them that freedom Leads to creativity which leads to the creation of value from nothing Right. It's something that I think about all the time I was fortunate enough when I was young and stupid and recruiting people for a game company at MIT to meet Richard Stallman the fucking God walking the face of the earth and He explained to us something that stuck with me for a really long time about all this And that was this concept of showing off to your friends That if you didn't have and it was really obvious all of us then because you know, I'm an older guy We started programming in the late 70s in the early 80s and there was no github. There was no internet There was nowhere to get any kind of you know code that you could Copy or look up maybe in magazine and there's no way to distribute anything you did So the only joy you got out of writing code aside from kind of a masturbatory joy of seeing that you could do it which is I Don't want to discount that That's another talk entirely but You get the joy of showing your friends and hey, I could I did this amazing thing And then something magical happened which was totally new to me and I think very new to culture in general Which was automatically Your friend would be inspired by that and maybe do something even better And then maybe you do something even better than that so we were steeped in that culture and Guys from my generation, I'm very proud to say made so much of the infrastructure that we take for granted today Incidentally all running an open-source software, right? And the reason it's all running an open-source software is because that generation of people who wanted to show off to Their friends were encouraged to do things better and better and better more secure more real When everyone can look at your code You write good code When everyone can evaluate whether or not your shit works by looking at how it works and making their own tests you don't lie Okay, when some software is operating a nuclear power plant I'd like to think that more than one guy had looked at it and furthermore. I'd like to think that the guy who wrote it Was having a good time writing it That the person who wrote the controller for the cooling towers, right? She was really excited To show her friends how there was no scenario in every and any tests that could cause it to melt down Right that place of play and creativity. It doesn't matter how serious the job is its play and its creativity and There's a positive side to it which I've been talking about in game development for me Has been a tremendous source of a lot of this because the product of game development is fun and happiness And so you kind of want to make sure everybody's fun and happy making a game Tell electronic arts that but the separate talk also There's the dark side and there's a great story That I often tell but I probably shouldn't name names in here but it involves a large European passenger aircraft corporation and a Certain model that they had and the way that modern jetliners work Obviously involves a tremendous amount of software and automated control systems And we have moved past this idea that there's a physical connection between the thing the pilots hold and the control Surfaces of the airplane right and this was a big tenet of Boeing for a really long time They wanted to make sure that there was a control surface There are a couple of accidents unfortunately that showed that no matter how Enthusiastic a pilot was they couldn't apply You know 180 pounds of force on the stick for the hour it took to get back to the airport And so people abandon this idea and they said okay, maybe it's a good idea to have actuators They have software running this and of course, that's dangerous because programs crash a friend of mine At MIT worked on the f-22 fighter control system. He told me the f-22 could reboot at 22 Hertz I'm like, I don't know that that's an awesome thing to brag about but that's pretty amazing And so the way that people thought about this is is voting and most of you guys know this and a lot of systems do this They vote and there's a point to this story. I promise you so just stay with me Okay, so at this large European passenger aircraft manufacturing company They had the idea that they would have separate teams of people with no contact Make separate systems that operated with completely different control laws To decide what to do with the control surfaces when the pilot moved the stick and the throttle and that they would devote And you know, whichever got the most votes is what the control service would do, right? and they Isolated them for another so the feedback that they got was only to themselves worse Worse they told them they couldn't talk So all the fun was gone. Nobody's showing off to anybody else and they had a shared cafeteria It's not that funny because the first Paris Air Show debut of this airplane resulted in the airplane doing a flyby the airplane control systems deciding this must be a landing Extending the gear and everyone died There's a really dark side to this and it's a lesson I think it's something to also keep in mind when you talk about the many benefits Of free software when you talk about the evolution of Linux and why it's so important why it runs the world So understand that the openness and the playfulness the acquisitiveness That causes people to want to work on free software to work with free software to share software to work together on projects Where the value is the input of the ideas and not the control of a license is critical to make systems that matter okay, so you can go all the way from halo To crashing jetliners and find examples of why it's important to drive what you do with this playfulness and this inquisitiveness and Go a step past that and I think understand the point of this entire exercise And when I look at a conference like this the point of the conference is to learn more About how to engineer into the process of making things the spirit of openness and sharing So that baked into these systems Is a measure of this safety and a measure of this fun and it's also important for Ensuring that the world isn't just sort of a grim hellscape and and and part of the reason I say that is that interfaces Are miserable at the moment, you know if you fly on an aircraft and you're trying to use the in-flight entertainment system And if you're an asshole like me, you're like touching the screen and you're like, oh, that's three quarters of a second You touch you like that's almost a second. Yeah, fuck these guys like okay. What if I touch twice? You know I'm like spending half the flight trying to crash this fucking thing and I'm imagining The team that put this thing together and on different airlines if you become a connoisseur of terrible in-flight software as I have become You you'll imagine What the working environment of these software teams was like like what concrete basement were these poor motherfuckers in And how little time were they given to get this piece of shit done? You know and and you're like, okay Clearly these guys were given like the last generation of like video player that's somewhere and has a terrible response time and like, you know Is it's libraries are like in Fortran and they're like, okay What are we going to do like I have two weeks and twenty thousand dollars just ah And then they're good ones and um and you know, I just I've So much and worked on so many projects now being ancient That and maybe some of you will agree with me here and Tell me that I'm not totally insane But you can kind of feel this when you're using it and the airline entertainment system is a really good example because it's a completely Captive audience right you can touring test the shit out of this thing Uh, and you have hours and hours to do it and so I enjoy trying to figure out what's good and what's bad But the overarching feeling that I get work, you know trying to use these systems Again and again is the same thing. It's that The joy that the team of people felt making it Is the joy that it gives me And if the team of people making it had a shitty time and a bad boss and were miserable and didn't have enough resources I'm gonna have that experience I usually have that experience. Um Drinking helps a lot if you have a couple beers Yeah, the response time becomes less of an issue, but um the uh That's the trick is That even when you're trying to be entertaining you can be totally unentertaining If you haven't built the software and built the system in such a way that you have this play involved In in actually architecting the entire thing, okay And I think that you know in the early days in the unix days in the pre-unix days And when I started programming um It was completely extraordinary to find jokes In the manuals for software and for computer systems You know, I wasn't ready for that in the the late 70s in the 80s because the world was very serious and engineering was very serious And computers were NASA computers were on star track and they never told jokes and it was totally serious And then you'd be looking through the manual for something and there'd be like a unix joke And the I remember the iRex manual the silicon graphics manuals were fucking hilarious um Made jokes about like the the hostage crisis and I ran and stuff. I'm like what the fuck is going on here And I thought you know when you're in that culture you think this is really special because um You know, we you know, we're working in these computers and we're special people We don't have to follow the same rules as everybody else and we can have fun We can tell jokes and we can be different we dress how we want and we can have long hair And we can you know be whatever gender we want and there was really a true thing And it was a completely special time But the thing I didn't realize at the time that because I was too young was that the reason all those things were true Was because It was a group of people who were creating value from nothing in a way that the other business people couldn't figure out And they reacted to it By working together and having fun doing it and so the jokes and the joke names for everything And things like having a penguin logo for your operating system And all of the other stuff that we fucking love Came from that playful spirit and you think oh, that's just because we're underdeveloped kids We never grew up. We're not serious like the bankers and this is again back to your Sister's boyfriend who looks at you because you dress like this and you don't dress in a suit like he dresses To go to his fucking job as an investment banker. Okay, fine but Brother And I want you to know my my son is sitting like somewhere like right over there. He will confirm I am wearing pants for this That's a big deal But the playfulness it doesn't come because we are malformed human beings Or because being good at math or programming makes you somehow socially stupid I would say quite the opposite In fact, you know, I've argued this many times before but the level of social interaction at a dnd game is much higher than any fucking cocktail party I've been to and And I've been to a lot of high-end cocktail parties and those people be fucking dull I used to I used to work for Steven Spielberg and when I came to dreamworks and I you know I don't want to go over my career because everybody does that and it's really fucking boring, but Um, I like reported to Steven. They were like, oh, here's your job It's here's your boss at Steven Spielberg and I'm like the fuck. Okay But years later, um, when I was uh, when I was doing Interestingly entertainment finance, which is a totally separate story Um, I was talking to him one day and I had I had to give him some piece of information about our business And I called his attorney herald brown who's also a awesome fun loving guy Uh, the entertainment business has a little bit of this I called herald and he wasn't available All right, so I called my boss who ran this this big company that that worked for Steven I said, I didn't talk to Steven and he wasn't his boss wasn't available All right, so I called I called cathy kennedy because he was producing partner and has his old assistant She wasn't available. So I'm like, I fuck it. So I call Steven picks up first ring And I was like, hey I tried to call richard and herald and they didn't answer and he's like james You don't fucking get it. I had all those people so I can sit around and answer the phone Whatever I want like, okay. I get it very good story and I told him about this You know problem and I was saying, you know, it's kind of weird I do feel these financial people all day long and they're really concerned about like whose name is first on an email And who gets invited to lunch first and like who makes slightly more money And which model year of car they have and it's starting to really freak me out And he said something really wise he said, hey, you know when you're walking down the street And you're walking past a tree and their ants climbing up the tree you think to yourself like What are the do the ants see me? Am I terrifying to the ants? Like are they just talking to one another? Like are they living in the ground there? Did they come a long way? Do they all know they came a long way? Like what's it like to climb? What's up the tree? What are they thinking? It's not that bad a story. It's really it has a good punch line okay, so Yeah, anyway, so he said listen those guys In the other world they don't think that way They're not having that imagination They're not walking down the street Imagining a page of code or walking down the street imagining some way to use a piece of technology to do something magical They're walking down the street thinking Who else is going to the lunch i'm going to tomorrow And can I be in a better spot than them? And he said you should you should feel bad for those guys Just feel bad for them so A subtext of this is if anybody's ever made you feel bad about being in this world Fuck them because this world kicks a shit out of their world. Okay all right So i'm gonna i'll leave some room to ask questions And hopefully nobody asks questions and i'll get to finish early, which would be great and have a beer but The last thing that I wanted to go into is kind of the The corollary to all of this which is something that I figure you guys think about quite a lot and I know you come from a very diverse background of of Different industries and and experiences in life But you're all here at a free software conference And so you all have you know this this kind of experience in common and And I mean, you know, maybe it's something that that that nobody tells you enough And it might sound really cheesy, but you know The entire world basically operates right now Because of free software and how it started there's no part of our lives That isn't touched by the philosophy of stallman by You know by Linus It's nothing no part of your phone this presentation running on this apple laptop and what is the apple really running? You know, that's right Well a shitty version of yeah um But you know, I think that You know, we get all tied up in shit Around, you know, what's the newest thing? What's the newest trend? What's going on? What do we need to learn what's happening? Who am I talking to what's my project like, you know How do I find a you know a boyfriend who's not abusive all these things and You might forget the overall context of the fact that As much as we're in like a shitty hotel room here and as much as people don't take this as seriously as they should The shit that we do runs the whole world and they'd be super fucked If we didn't do it and it's just true Right, I mean What's the first thing that somebody who knows what they're doing does when they're given a new computer that has windows on it And it has to do something important That's exactly right And then what do you do for fun when you go home as you try to put that same operating system On a raspberry pi zero and freak out for like eight hours and then finally get the kernel up and it doesn't really work And but you still think it's victory But any computer that needs to do anything important that's in real time Any system that needs to do something that's important or connect to other systems any time important data needs to be transferred every stock trade every crypto trade Every contract the transmittance of every contract smart or not every flight schedule Every space mission every robot on another planet All of them depend on the continuation of free software and the spirit Of play and innovation that built it all And try to keep that in mind through the times that suck, okay All right, I'll take questions now. I have a slide for this Oh, shit people are raising their fucking hands. Okay. All right I yeah, I'll give you a copy of the slides For sure freely available What's my favorite open source software? I had to say my favorite open source software is the numerical libraries for python I think that the that numpy and And that uh, you know open cv are absolutely fucking changing the world, right? And and and making the world safer and better and my favorite video game is Yeah What's your favorite song? I don't fucking know like Um The the first functional build of halo is my favorite video game Okay, but I still have on an xbox dev kit and play and it runs for almost five minutes But it's a glorious five minutes. Yeah To new developers Uh, well, you know, it's boring. It's it's find a place where you can play like if you're doing something And you're not having fun doing it. You're gonna be fucked And it's not always fun Right, it's pain in the ass a lot of times But if there's no core of play at the heart of what you're doing I don't care what it is that you're writing you're fucked And I know that's like a like an old testament kind of a message like a thou shalt not kind of a thing But that's what it is Have fun or you're fucked I should put them in a gravestone Uh Every here your x window comment was Straight up. Oh next step. Oh even better. Yeah I have stories about next step I have not I'm sorry dude. I Sorry neil Is neil here? I might Oh, okay. Sorry neil Really sorry neil Is that it your other question is about the dead guy also Well, you get one question. It's okay. You made me feel bad. So Yeah, you know, I mean Well, just think about the amount of shit code don newt's on his life Right Right Do you know who donald newt is have you read donald newt? So the the truth is that the world pumps out shit at a prodigious and terrifying rate And software is no different than anything else than news or books or anything And the trick is I'll tell you as an older guy is just to keep learning So when you're when you're hitting a uh, you know, even if on a on a single project if you're hitting Something that's just really pissing you off or you're forced to work with somebody who's just writing garbage Like give it a break work on something else some other part of the system for a minute learn something else Um, I have in the past. I was taught a trick by a guy called dug church Who's one of the the he works at valve now? I think wherever he is But one of the first architects of real 3d in real time Doug would just switch languages He'd be like, okay I'm gonna do this in aida now And it would piss him off, but then he'd get back to it and it was okay. All right, you've had enough answer now Your neighbor. Oh, I would say mit Yeah, and but that's just That's just regional pride. That's so there's no Now, you know the thing is that um The standardization that of of open software license is one of the greatest gifts that we were ever given and so You know, I think that Yeah, I can't say enough good stuff about that. So yes, but it's mit for sure and this because I've used a lot Of force microsoft to use it too, which was a trick Conferences like this Obviously No, this is really cool. I was I was I was distracted my son What? I'm sorry. She said what's your favorite way or What's the best way for software developers to meet one another? Conferences like this. Okay, there you go Okay, sorry. That's a cheesy answer I was so I'm gonna hold my son again He's he's the only person you'll ever meet. He gets into like berkeley and mit and goes to art school Which is true. He's badass He was like, what are we going to it's a unix what and I explained to him what was going on He was like, this is really fucking cool. This is really really fucking cool and it is really fucking cool, you know somebody from Oh, man, I have a really demanding day job and I fuck it up so bad that I got to work on that for a while But thank you for your vote of confidence Trying to I've been trying to avoid like this guy all night All right, go ahead. What do you got? What do you got? So what do you what do you say to the entitled user that that that keeps unanswered for more and more shit? There's a great story about this and you can use this story. Okay There's this legend at microsoft and I met all these guys who did microsoft for a long time Who helped to get xbox approved because they're really senior, right? And they saw in the spirit of that project like kind of how microsoft was before You know antitrust and all that Because it was very exciting and cool place when they first started it out And they would tell the story of that guy And so the user you're talking about is that guy And one of the huge mistakes that was made on windows was servicing that guy And you can tell like in office and in windows It's like this weird thing where it's like mistaking Like options for value It's like you could do everything every way and that is not increasing the value in any way, right? And they basically fucked themselves on that So that guy became a curse, right? And then apple comes along and does very concise user interface stuff and windowing systems stolen from elsewhere and Is what it is And suddenly the world sees the value in actual value and so you know The rude way is to go to that user and say don't you have a fucking job to do Aren't you using this software for something? Why don't you do your what did you get your work done? And shut up. Okay Yeah, I should never be in pr Well, yeah, I do And I had to deal with a little of this you're never going to get them to make their software free and What you're going to do is you're going to go and mine for examples of places where Open software made other companies money and it's often not obvious A lot of companies have made a lot of money with free software and and open source software Because they have delighted their users and they've created economies Of developers who make the product stronger There are also cautionary tales that are really useful to use of companies that did not Like choose an open architecture that got crushed and became road pizza Okay, and you know, I can think of several graphics companies that have done this. I don't want to name names and be a dick Special effects software has a couple of examples of these So go to those and find the one that matches your company best and say here's the bad case And it's the good case is we can get a ton of people doing free work for us by just opening this up and a lot of it is just getting people over this fear and again You know, this is the divide culturally between the people in this room and the banker dudes is that we feel okay Betting on our future selves to make more value. In fact, we have to is where we're going to pay our rent next month And next year is that we keep on writing more code Right. So you trust yourself to do that. Those guys are playing a zero sum game They're always thinking about a zero sum game. So it's like what we own now is what we have to exploit it And so you're pushing them into a different mindset where they realize that the value of their company isn't the code base They have right now, but it's the team that made that code base that will continue to work on it And that's really the arguments you need to find a way to make All right, we have like maybe two more questions Did everybody hear the question? This is a question about the inner source and other types of Of open source theater that's going on right now in large companies And I think open source theater is exactly what it is. Okay And you know, and I think it's it's it's frustrating and as nerds It pisses us off because they're full of shit But it's a step because when cultural change needs to happen like I was telling this gentleman That these guys need to get over their fear that the code they have right now is the value And that and realize that the team writing the new code is the value, right? If they see that enough That the pr people are starting to do messaging about that That's a step All right, one more the guy in the back And if you yell I don't have to repeat the question, which is awesome Only well, where are you in mexico? That's really that's a question DFA, okay, I'll go to DFA until I'll say anything in DFA Just to get some proper DFA tortillas and or to get some proper DFA quesadillas por supuesto hombre sin dudas I would do this in spanish, pero no hay nada que se puede hacer. Okay. All right All right, I think that's all I'm going to do for now. So thank you very much I'll see you guys later Hello everyone. Oh, this is loud Thank you. Shamus so much one more round of applause for our opening keynotes We liked him so much. We gave him a two night gig So next up we're going to be transitioning into upscale, which is our lightning talk series. We've got some great content for you We're getting set up. So that'll be in a minute if you missed the first round of drink tickets My friend louise in the back has them if you haven't already gotten one He's about to get mauled um Please be nice to him and there are still lots of snacks So grab a snack Get your seat and we'll begin in a few seconds Can you see it? All right, everyone. We're ready for upscale. So please take a seat if you're still waiting in the bar Just wait quietly so we can have Our first speaker start All right, if you're in the back standing up, we'd love and appreciate your silent talking or slower talking Do we get slides up? Your slides disappeared All right, so without further ado, I'd love to introduce our first speaker This is salona. She's going to be talking about the unconscious gatekeeping in tools. So give it up No one told me I was going to be following shamus All right, so first of all what is gatekeeping? I love this word because it's accurate It is basically obstacles that you put up that keep people out And i'm mainly going to be talking about unintentional gatekeeping Not all the other types of gatekeeping that go on in fact, you know In regards to gatekeeping. Why does it exist? It's because of actually what shamus was just talking about this whole scarcity versus abundance On a lot of these different things, but we do still deal with scarcity Um and on this talk, I have scarcity in regards to the fact that i'm not going to cover accessibility There's a lot of stuff out there There's a lot of these are all open source tools It's y'all's responsibility to get out there and find that out So what I wanted to talk to be was more like things like role diversity We need more than just developers and open source We need all of these other roles out there and we need to be more inclusive towards them We also need to watch out on language We end up Excluding so many people when we don't allow the multi language Capabilities in regards to the tools that we create Please remember to bring those in and then also time zones Don't depend on everything being synchronous Think asynchronously try to introduce that in in some format Even if it's not always as friendly to your tool or gathering Also cultural do you want to explain to this woman why you call things master and slave? Maybe it might be okay if you insert a bdsm joke But you know for the most part we've got some cultural gatekeeping that we have to take care of and we need to look deeper at Also, meritocracy is a myth We do not all start out equal And so we have to make sure that in our tools we don't assume that Either because we end up blocking a lot of people from participating money It's another unintentional gatekeeper. Yay for scale being 90 dollars Oh my god That's some serious, you know, and even then I know that Elon lets people in for free Um also age, you know, we got the gray beards in here But we've also got the youngsters if you don't have training materials that are in video They're not going to participate. You have to go where they are and you have to bring those different things in And then lastly try well not lastly. I got some more tribal knowledge. I think this is the biggest one You know here. I've got the jargon thing going on also the acronyms thing Also, all of these other different assumptions that we make in regards to people's knowledge That keeps people out Also security theater. We really don't need all of those password rules. There's other ways of doing security There's other ways of doing things of that nature This isn't the way to go in regards to doing that and you do keep people out Especially like elderly and such Also, we have a lot of inertia. Why was qwerty invented? To slow things down because these things jammed We do so much of that in technology where it's always has been the way that it's been done And we keep people out. This hurts like for example disabled people Learning styles that lots of people learn in lots of different ways if you don't address those you lock people out There's a ton of people in trade school who could be coding right now If you actually took the time to make sure to bring things up on their levels Also privacy And encouraging spy versus spy behavior In your environments We don't need that kind of behavior. We don't need the 4chan world and we don't need the world Where people don't have privacy And you need to go out and get people Okay, you can't just sit back and wait for it If you fish in a goldfish bowl, you will only catch goldfish You've got to get out there. So I'm going to disagree with shameless on that one Not just your friends you got to get out there or you got to get some of your other friends involved And then I know I'm forgetting some things, you know, I came up with one Just a little bit ago in regards to idioms You know, there's all these other different ways that we unintentionally do it And so you have to like think for it So the next thing you have to look at is sit there and say how much of this in a weird way is intentional How much of this is accidentally driven by ego or selfishness or insular natures Get out there work with other people go and talk to the designers to prevent a lot of this Remember you need to have the spirit of mentorship You need to go to other people and outreach to them and bring them up to the top of the mountain You don't get to sit there being the guru. All right. That's not what we're doing here And then lastly fixing it You have to listen and you have to give them lots of different ways to give you feedback So that you can help them and if you don't do that Then you're never going to get to where you can actually fix it and fix it in a way that they Can work with you. Thanks. I'm slona bonwald find me on twitter Big thank you to slona for opening up up scale Upscale is surprisingly hard gig to talk at because it's five minutes Which seems like it should be really easy But you have to cram in as much time as possible and as much content And your slides auto advance every 15 seconds whether you want them to or not So if you're seeing some interesting timing, that's part of the fun And we want to keep cheering our speakers on even if their slides are a little bit off It's what keeps us a little bit entertained here tonight. All right. So with that, I'd like to introduce the next speakers I think this is actually the first duo we've had At least since I've been hosting up scale for five years. So Let's welcome our first speaker duo, which is dr. John and set And let's give him a big round of applause Thank you very much Our presentation is what the fuck is ebf and why should you care? Let's go into it Glad I explained this Just in case you're curious who is who dr. John I'm set we both come from a company called spider bat My background is all in cybersecurity john's all in cloud and containers And he's going to tell us a little bit about logging, which is our fun and most fun topic Yeah, so we've got a few types of logging. We've got kind of traditional logging, which is discretionary We don't have to do it and ultimately bad people are going to try and avoid that because they don't want to log their exploits We've got some mandatory logings of things like audit d which has been in the Linux system for a while Audit d tracks basic stuff by default. So system booting people logging in and out that kind of stuff se linux kind of escalations And with additional configuration we can log other stuff if you configure it the right way Here's what you get It's fun looking through this stuff So, you know typical audit d kind of message that tells you kind of who did what when at some level Here's another example and now we're trying to answer like, okay So somebody did a pseudo command. When did they do it? Who was it? What did they do before this? What did they do after this? How do I stitch all this stuff together, right? Audit d understands containers, right? No, so unfortunately, it's not container aware audit d. It's been in the again in the Linux subsystems for some time Won't tell you what's running in a container. What's running outside of a container? It was kind of designed before containers really on the scene And you're sad This is actually looks a lot like my a cat I used to have called mr. Pinky It looks like he's got a little bit of a booboo on his And his foot there. So he's sad So Seth tell us about ebpf All right, so now enters the hero of our story ebpf And we have got to go all the way back into the 90s When a couple of brilliant people from Lawrence Berkeley laboratory created a pseudo device in order to be able to capture packet data specific packet data They want to filter on they essentially created a virtual machine in the kernel space So we have a kernel with a privileged ability where we can now implement observability security and networking In in the 3.18 Linux kernel we extended that which allowed us to really Create ebpf for any trace point in the in the system What that allows us to do is create a bit program a bitcode program That passes through from user space into kernel space through a verifier where we can now compile ebpf Essentially filter on any system trace that we want now Here's an example because what most people will do is pass out through an interpreter like python So you get your library and now you're writing ebpf You'll notice it's a it's very much like a c-like program where I can now in this case I want exact ve in and then out where i'm getting Exact ve information Now if you're not familiar brendan greg has a ton of bcc tools that you can use freely available and get examples of things like How do I get exec snoop? How do I get open snoop? So you can go through his examples and we have links at the end of this presentation There's also bpf trace if so if you don't want a python interpreter You can use an ock-like interface to now write bpf so that you can pipe into Your programs information that you want to pull from ebpf Which is great because you can pull it into your own data model very differently from audit d So now Go ahead john tell us more about what we could use ebpf for now that we know how to get it So three use cases we'll talk through networking Observability and security ebf sounds cool. What can I use it for? first up networking so there's a another A subset of ebpf called express data path So basically we can intercept packets as they come into our interfaces We can manipulate them and particularly in the container space folks are using this for like traffic control network policy Firewalling and so forth observability. We can get a very granular visibility of what's happening on our systems our linux systems Our containers what they're talking to what processes are running what network activities happening Hell knows it's real difficult to understand what's happening in kubernetes This helps us try and understand it And then security so taking that observability Understanding, you know at a granular detail who's doing what when Who's executing what privileges? Who's moving laterally? Exportration we can get unparalleled visibility into what's happening How can you learn more ebpf.io is a great resource to to just go to tells you all about the ebpf project We've got a few other links here including a great webinar Just to explain the basics of ebpf and how ebpf and how you can use it Some things we're excited about so bpf lsm. So think se linux app armor, but now I can actually block specific System cores Service mesh. It's actually coming to windows believe it or not And there's open telemetry and finally. Hey, is this company called spider bat that can show you what ebpf is doing And really help you visualize it. Thank you Seth and john All right. Thank you so much to Seth and john The next speaker up is kim and I hear she's going to talk to us and teach us how to be nice So, uh, let's give it up for kim. We'll see are you are you filming this year? Are we filming this year? Sure. Well, wait, no I was gonna say well because I fucking hate slides too So I did not prepare slides, but you're gonna see a lot of cute dogs And we're going to ignore them while I do talk about community because we've had some um We had some stuff going on in this community lately that has hasn't been nice somebody does a tweet and everybody jumped And people just freak out and they attack and we just need to stop attacking So but I what I what I do want to say is this is my view. This is not this doesn't have to be yours This is definitely not my organization's view. This is mine And I'm going to share a little bit about what I've seen going on in the community lately and how we can all build a nicer community So, um, they did not give me any notes. So we're going to have to look here Hold on a second. Enjoy the enjoy the paris cat It is a paris cat. So, um Why we were here we love open source and that's why we're here. It's transparent. Yes. Thank you It is transparent. We like to collaborate wag our tails together. We like to be inclusive We um, we cooperate We learn from each other its openness and its engagement and its openness and sharing and not leaving the puppy out Is it but as I just mentioned some of the stuff? Hi, david is just not happening lately And I think it's time that we start um, instead of blaming we seek to learn and instead of Um, shaming we seek to understand and we try to do this without the screen of social media So you'll see a blank screen here in just a minute and that's my shaming of social media This is our seeking to understand and if you know me, you know, both of those Um, so why are we all here? First off? It's the technology. We come for the technology. We love it I'm from the cloud native side. We all have our favorite technologies But beyond that when we build community It's about bringing together our innovation and ideas and everybody kind of coming together And sharing these ideas we love to talk to each other and share What we're doing how we're doing things the most fun I have is when I go to his conference and um, oh this goes with, uh What is this one? Oh poor coal. He did not the jumping cholla, but um I don't remember what this one goes for but that was my puppy. He was six months old and was the jumping cholla, but um what we We come to these conferences and we talk and talk together on how to build community on on best practices And I will go I'll go to a cube con and I will be speaking with our competitors And we are competitors and we're talking on best way to build community because at the end of the day That's how we are raising all of us Raising this tide above This is technology. This is why we're here and um But when we get beyond that it's time for all of us to just look at our transparency Look at how we can work together Let's stop shaming Let's stop hiding behind social media and slamming people when they do a tweet And um, let's come to these conferences and get to know people and have a good time And that's all I get got You get to enjoy the puppies Thank you All right, can we give it up for kim and more importantly kim's puppy Look how cute Awesome All right, so cute puppies. We're gonna All right, so while we get a demo of some more puppies I would like to introduce our next speaker jeremy who's going to be talking to us about devops Yeah, so this alternate title for this is devops when I was an asshole because obviously i'm not one now All some of you can attest to that uh Yeah, so um when I was uh, we're gonna go like a time warp when I was uh, probably two years old at this point But about 30 years ago in 1995. I guess if we do the math correctly I was working on an internet provider And uh started out doing support. Uh, I was actually building all of those nice little cds you used as coasters Uh that included things like wsftp And uh windsock uh who who remembers the good old windsock days. That's right. Let's fuck it all So uh in that uh in that company We started to expand really really quickly and and uh grew three floors the cto You know vp of technology Decided that we should run the cabling uh and then have the contractors go ahead and connect everything at the At the wall and you know, they could handle it We could just do the cabling which really was not the greatest of ideas and he had a plethora of really bad ones over the years I was there And it didn't really make a whole lot of sense. Um, and then he came and said, you know We don't know where any of those cables go So you should grab a tone generator And go to all of those and figure out where they are and now mark them on the patch panel And really this was my thought like really and he really kind of said like, you know, we should really do this Which really meant me was gonna have to do this So I started figuring out, okay, we have we've now expanded about 80 new people three different floors I'm gonna have to take a tone generator all of these Uh, I didn't major in math. Um, but I figured that was gonna probably take me eight to 10 hours or a couple days Uh, and the 20 year old in me was was not amused Uh at all so I kind of stepped back and I I thought, you know This really sucks and I'm sitting back and I was in the data center I kind of look behind me and I look and I see all these patch panels And I thought, you know What if I unplug one And this is very similar to uh, uh the conversation uh complete with geo cities. You door mail Uh windstock pop, you know, all of that the popcorn server. We all remember the pop three And so I said, you know, let me let me see what what does it say there? What is the number? Kind of realized this was my opportunity to really do this really quickly Plugged it back in everything works. It was just pretentious enough The whole building over the next hour experienced intermittent network outages as Everybody went down for a short period of time until they called me. So I realized at this moment this was DevOps This is what we do We get everybody involved Whether they want to or not So I started to understand all these different principles of DevOps. So I encouraged teamwork Everybody in that fucking building got involved Together we solved those intermittent network outages all of us together teamwork I also reduced the silos within the technology Um, because all of a sudden everybody was together. We it was not marketing over here. It was not, you know Sales and you know, whatever the other teams do it was all Together also I live in Kansas. We didn't create any silos during that time. I think it was a win Also systems thinking it was everybody again together We included the systems that were there available to solve those network outages Systems thinking this was also a picture of me at Those days. I also learned from failure Understood that you know the failure of the asshole vp That we should have just done it ourselves and been able to Hook everything together and make note so that we wouldn't have to redo things over and over We did that we also communicated those of you don't remember the 90s Or weren't born then We also used phones for more than just tiktok dances. We actually talked on them Which is a really weird thing You know we'll talk about that later. Uh, I also accepted the feedback from every single person to call. They said this doesn't work And then I fixed it and their feedback un overwhelmingly was You're awesome So it was good. It was a good day We also iterated rapidly like I started with like one or two And the week like quickly Moved it up to five to ten to you know 12 at a time and really just kept things going. Um, it's kind of like when you're building a deck, which you don't want me to do Uh, then we automated and really that automation came down to like I just pulled whatever I could and just you know Continuously did that over and over and over. Uh, everybody got you know, again, everybody was involved It's really what you do with dev ops Now all of this is in jest because that is fucking not how you do dev ops But I hope that you go out and check out Emily Freeman's book It's a great way to get started and understand what dev ops is And with that I say thank you Jeremy can make my slide decks any day. I don't know about you Thank you so much. Jeremy. We've got two more speakers on deck for you Next up, please welcome Artie and she's going to be talking about where inequalities begin So please give her a round of applause welcome her Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you Oh, hey, what do you know another room where nobody else looks like me except You yay So I'm here to talk about mind the gap where inequities begin So who the hell am I? I am um an educator. I used to be a kindergarten teacher. I've taught special education All of that stuff and I've done DEI work But um as we begin this session, I'd like to start with three agreements Please stay engaged as a kindergarten teacher. I do not brook any nonsense. So know that you might let's make that you will Experience of dense comfort. So let's start with an experiment. Close your eyes if you'd like. I'm going to tell you a story You're on a plane and the pilot welcomes your board and then you attend a keynote talk by a silicon valley CEO And then you go to a restaurant where a couple is planning celebrating their dinner Who was the pilot open your eyes was the pilot a female Was the CEO black woman latinx asian Who are the couple were they two men two women were they trans? I'm gonna bet they weren't So race plus gender plus class cause um, they make interlocking power relations The systems that will press girls of color who are traversing what's called the pipeline And these affect women's abilities and likelihood to enter careers such as stem so tech has had a focus on Populating the pipeline with girls of color without actually taking the time to investigate Where's the leak? Where are the girls of color? Where are the women? So this is what has resulted in tech not being able to hire or retain So what is the case of the leaky pipeline? It begins in childhood and usually elementary school. It gets far worse in middle school in middle school 74 percent of girls want to go into STEM But by the time to go to college it's 0.4 percent So why is that because there's learned implicit bias in young children as a kindergarten teacher I can tell you that exists In the 1940s psychologists figured out that young black children as young as three four and five already had A clear preference were white dolls against black dolls. So what the fuck happened to the girls? The teachers had gender bias. They consistently underestimated the girls. They were placed in Ability groups. They got a watered-down curriculum. They didn't have equal opportunity to a high advanced curriculum Why and let's say they go to college. Let's say they get to college, but they are discouraged from STEM Why would you go into STEM? It's so masculine So what are the barriers for women and especially women of color implicit bias name bias race bias sex bias beauty bias Name it. They have it. So let's say they go to college and they can afford it. They drop out of STEM majors Cheryl Sandburg said there aren't more women in STEM because there aren't more women in STEM Women apply to roles where they mean a hundred percent of the qualifications when 60 percent women are 30 percent less likely to be called for an interview against men who have the same effing qualifications women face subtle but very pervasive doubts Nothing that has to do with their actual performance. They experience sexual harassment Isolation they are excluded from leadership opportunities And i'm going to leave this here because this is a room full of STEM people. I think you can read a graph just fine That graph has an effing move and also no one told me I could cuss Fine, let's say you've successfully eliminated all barriers. You've hired women. You've hired women of color. Yay You're done, right No, now you've got to retain them. How the fuck are you going to retain them? Let's find out Why do women leave tech the culture benefits males they perpetuate an exclusionary culture It makes it really uncomfortable for women and especially minority women. There's a wage gap It's about 52 to 84 cents to every dollar a man earns They have a 45 chance of being sexually harassed Second only to the military Women are more than twice as likely to leave STEM jobs because they're expected to raise a family Raised children and guess what the fucking pandemic made it worse In STEM do women experience more institutional culture barriers or stigmas more than men? That's about 98 And what do they what challenges do they face? I'll leave that up there. I don't have to read it to you These are the supports that women need to remain And thrive in STEM. It's one thing to hire them. It's a whole another Cup of tea to actually retain them. These are the things women need They need mental health help and all of those things Ultimately race and gender continue to matter in very complicated nuanced ways even today So we got women's suffrage in 1920, but we run the risk of Fucking up those gains if we don't diversify our workplace. This is me contact me if you have any questions. Thank you very much Thank you RT I guess next time I will tell everyone they're allowed to curse, but I love the forks Thank you so much. Everyone's going to work on mentorship programs and pipelines after that one. Yeah Yes, you did not warn me how emotional I was going to get after arty's talk You know, we've gotten a whole gambit of emotions tonight So how about some poetry? Anybody up for some poetry? All right to close out our talk for your whole roller coaster of emotions for your evening That's what we always promise for upscale highs lows lefts rights All those things. Let's welcome Fatima. Who's going to give us a little bit of poetry. Yeah, sounds good Hi everyone, my name is Fatima. I'm a developer evangelist at git lab You can find me on the internet as sugar overflow and this is a very special ode to technical debt that might get a little emotional Thanks to RT Our story begins once upon a time in a land far far away We're lightning bolt strike a legend now etched into this rhyme about a tool by which open sorcerers conquered the night automated build tools that old devops pipeline And so arrived our adventurer at hand to maintain and build upon the tooling mentioned and found there was a mountain of technical debt No documentation. No roadmap. No updated issues only dread Composer 2.0 was on its way which meant that build tools too needed an update So she gathered the council of open sorcerers in the land, but no one had the pieces of this mysterious roadmap And so to the king she went asking for support for resources for contractors or from budget from the court Be gone said the king and go do your magic You don't need a whole team Just you will manage Our adventurer crawled through the depths of the code Configured refactored tested and steered with some help from her peers. She persevered Features dependency updates and new releases. She built bridges to connect all of the dots and the pieces I definitely talked too fast for an ignite talk And then came a wave of users four thousand and more Issues were opened and reopened bugs were reported and there were edge cases in shore And the high council of sorcerers met each week and noted that it was too much for just one person to upkeep I'm sure we've all been there expected to do five jobs Our adventurer she tried to communicate the tech debt to request resources and express the growing impact When the storm of issues and merger requests came it was only her mentors and friends who kept her saying To friends she spoke of a competence and dying hopes of stress over this tool that the company didn't even officially support He reminded her that it didn't reflect on her competence Or self-worth and having carried that mountain alone was a measure of how much she'd grown Enough is enough. She realized one day and couldn't come up with enough reasons to stay Hello, she met a delightful tanuki come with me It said to a land far far away where will value your expertise and you'll want to stay And so from the crossroads of tech debt and burnout our adventure moved on And on to you I passed her legend and legacy that moving on was better than carrying a mountain of tech debt alone Thank you Who's ready to buy the children's book? Yeah, I I think part two is an order for a kid's book for uh growing technologists with diverse profiles You know we we could work on it. It'll be a scale exclusive All right, is louise still here by any chance? No worries, okay, that concludes our content for upscale tonight. Yes Seriously speaking at upscale is super difficult. It seems really easy But it's very hard for your slides to advance without you whether you like it or not So big congratulations to all seven of our speakers. Please thank them again. They did a great job If you want to brave Speaking at upscale next year, you can always let me know and I will put you on the nomination list Uh, we might have a few more drink tickets lingering around If so try to locate one and grab a drink on your way out and thank you so much for attending