 to be back this year you know it's kind of interesting you think about it I mean some of us here have been using rails for like four or five years even maybe it seems like forever I mean and then on the other hand it seems like how does that much time gone by it's flown by in some other some way so I think it's interesting to think back last year when I came here I just sort of asked for a show of hands for people who who was doing rails or who is trying to transition from rails to go from sort of dabbling in it to going full time so this year I thought it kind of be interesting obviously some of you might not have been here last year but but who's doing rails full time is there a full time job right now who's doing it as sort of a hobby or a part-time thing see that those numbers were almost reversed even just a year ago and I think that's pretty interesting most of the people here raised their hands when I asked who was doing it full time I think that's pretty cool I think we've come a long way even in just a year when I was talking to Rob about speaking here today I said what's the sort of the overall emphasis or what's what's the kind of the the main message that you're trying to get across and he said you know it's about being more productive and more efficient with with rails doing your job and delivering work for your customers and your clients and and at work using rails and how do you become more effective so I started to think well if I'm gonna keynote this thing especially if it's the end of the day these people have had two really majorly intensive days of talking and you know how do you how do you put a kind of a point on that well obviously you know you want to talk about being more efficient you want to talk about being more productive but at the same time I think we kind of get caught up in in that so I almost wanted to end on a note that hopefully will make you think a little bit more about the whole aspect of what it means to be productive and where that kind of efficiency and productivity comes from does it come from the tools we use or does it come from the way that we think in the way that that that we work and the things that that we build inside our own set our own head so anyway the talk is a sort of informally titled distraction attention and simplicity and those are some of the things that I plan to try to talk to tonight so we'll see how it goes let's let's start out by by saying something that I think a lot of us maybe know unconsciously we're all victims and we're all distracted you guys are distracted and we're all distracted most of you it seems have your laptops on and a lot of you are looking at the screen sometimes you look up sometimes you you stay looking down up into conferences I do the same thing sometimes within that world of your computer you know you've got SMS you've got Twitter alerts you might be in campfire you know you might be an IRC you're seeing little growl alerts pop up when somebody commits code to your project I mean all of these things are happening and it sort of becomes this big stream of multitasking that you're engaged in for 810 hours a day and even here at this conference where I'm up here talking to you guys a lot of you are looking at your screens like I said I don't expect you to look up and I know better I'm a geek I'm not offended by it but at the same time there's a part of your brain that you're hearing what I'm saying but it's it's different from actually listening it's different from being engaged and if you and I were at lunch right now you probably wouldn't be looking at your computer but in this setting it's okay to do that but how would you feel if obviously there's always an internet connection issue whenever you're one of these things but how would you feel if that computer you didn't have the choice to look at it if it was taken away it really isn't be resentful I was talking to somebody earlier today and they were saying the longest 30 or 40 minutes of their life is the time from when you get on the airplane until the time when you're at the cruising altitude and you can you can bring out your laptop or your noise cancelling headphones or whatever it is and I've been there too I think these are normal things but in in your day-to-day life you know I think it's it's it's interesting to see how those distractions actually come into play I'm not going to try and say well you know you spend three hours a day on Twitter and I am and that takes away from your productivity I'm not talking about that but you know it it's interesting to think about the way that these distractions actually affect you and affect you at a very subtle level this is a you know I'm going to be showing some sharing some quotes this is just one of my own quotes the most successful objects devices and applications have simple and obvious functionality so I have some props today I'm not really a prop guy this is a Polaroid camera a real old-fashioned Polaroid and there are eight pictures left this little flashing light if you can see it tells me that the thing is warming up now it's warmed up when I say that there are eight pictures left that actually means something because they don't make these Polaroid cartridges anymore say cheese seven but there's some there's some cool things I mean this this is a Polaroid camera it's called a 1,600 100 millimeter focus range I got this camera when I after Dan Cedarham and I had built court there was a magazine called imbibe that wanted to do a feature on us and they had this this idea where they would send these Polaroid cameras out and you were supposed to take a picture of yourself or have someone take it of you and you'd send the picture in and they would have these little Polaroids and I probably should have a picture of what the the ad thing came out but you know we took these pictures and we sent them in but they said well you could just keep the camera I think there were probably you know maybe 20 pictures on the camera I don't I don't even know how many and we took a few and and I found the city of my closet not that long ago and I thought you know it's so interesting because I've got a I've got a really nice digital SLR camera that's big and bulky and you know then I also carry around my iPhone and I take most of my pictures when I'm running around with the iPhone the idea that and there's a strap on this like with this thing and take pictures with this thing like that doesn't seem like something any of us would do anymore if I'm carrying something this big it better be a digital SLR camera with you know a 7200 lens on it or something but what's interesting about that even though it's sort of antiquated it has this sort of simple obvious functionality on the on the back I don't know if you can see it there's just a simple little button there's one button to take the picture and there's a little light that lets you know when it's ready and that's it and for decades that was the only way that you could get an immediate picture that was the only way you could get that immediate result and most of us are in this kind of world of wanting immediate results I mean if you look at something I think a big part of the success of Twitter and people in here who might follow me on Twitter know it it it's fun I like to I'd like to use Twitter's like everybody else but and part of the thing I think I like about it is that it gives you immediate results you get that instant the right word is satisfaction but you get that instant sense that you've said something you know I read a lot of blog posts and sometimes it can take 20 minutes to write one five minutes but usually it takes some time you can you can have that conversation that sense of immediacy on on a social network or something like Twitter with without having to spend too much time doing it you get those results instantly and that actually is a negative side effect because you start to want to get that result or get that effect in the rest of your life too and I think it's it's there could be a negative to that in in the way that it affects the way that we think and the way that we eventually try to solve problems still talking about this this philosophy that I have and you know I'm gonna talk about Apple eventually but my grandfather was a metallurgist and he worked for the US government for many years and this was his slide rule I'm not gonna pass this around or anything because it's sort of fragile now but you really sure how to use a slide rule but this this thing slides out and I mean the people that can use them the people that know how to use them they can do amazing things that we would do on a calculator or on our phones they can do them just as fast just as efficiently with something like this the interesting thing to point out is that this was made in December 22nd 08 1908 and this thing is still around this thing is still working just as well and just as elegantly as it ever did the fact that I don't know how to use it aside this is the kind of thing that was built last and there are so few things now that are that are still built to last in the same way now here's something else that I brought like I said I'm not really a prop guy so what is this anyone okay what's what's something you can do with this okay I was expecting some smart alec answers but yes it is a can opener I don't know how long I've had this particular can opener probably five or so years maybe longer we go with the manual can openers at my house because the electrical ones inevitably have some kind of a problem or the lid gets stuck and they get gross and they're hard to clean this is a pretty simple device and they haven't really changed very much in I don't know the last hundred years they're they're simple they're easy to use and if you you know if you spend you know a few dollars you can get something that we take for granted I mean the whole sort of knowledge that it takes to make things that go into cans the kinds of technology that's involved in distributing them and getting them out those are all things that we take for granted our interface with that can is the can opener and that's all we ever think about how do we get the stuff out of the can you just crank the thing and pops it that's it what I think we should think about when we build things obviously we're most of us are building software we're not building traditional tools we're not building something that you can physically touch and hold in your hand but there's no reason why we can't build things that last build things that are simple and that are elegant I can't really think of it of a better way to open up a can than this you know it's powered you do it yourself yeah maybe you could make it smaller lighter stronger but it's the same it's the same design I think what what we need to think about when we're building something is it how can we how can we go the opposite direction how can we reduce the number of features how can we reduce what it does and focus more on building something that can last this is another quote this is my own quote we'll get to some other people's quotes soon but if you have to explain how something you build in this case software if you have to explain how it works then in my opinion then it's felt things should be more intuitive than that now it's fine to explain a concept it's fine to but but if you have to sit down and really tell somebody this is how you use it then a big component of the usability is is gone so this is the flip ultra a lot of people probably have flip altars I have an ultra and I have the even smaller HD one but to me this is this is a modern-day can opener it does one thing it takes videos and I don't have a picture the back of it but on the back of it there's a big red button and a screen you can hand this thing to probably anybody is three years or older all the way up to a hundred years old and say you can take video with this they they get how it works if they've ever seen a camera if they've ever been exposed even a little bit to Western culture they're going to know what a camera is you point it you press the big red button and that's it and that's all the flip does now some people criticize it you know all my camera can do that sure but these things sell like crazy and it's because they're so simple to use and so easy to use you know I have a 14 month old son and it was something that I can hand him now he doesn't know how to use it but I'm okay handing it to him I'm okay if he runs around with it maybe even you know drops it on the ground because it's something that I know it's gonna it's gonna withstand that but it's a really elegant simple simply designed piece of equipment one of the things that it does really well is it the functionality and that you can do a little bit more you can delete you can watch the video on it but I think that that devices that that are successful they embed more complicated functionality and they shield the users who aren't interested in it from actually using it so this is my last prop for the day this is my metal zone MT2 guitar pedal I've had this pedal for I would say probably about 15 or 20 years somewhere in that time period this will give you kind of a real sort of chunky metallic ask distortion sound and if you really fine tune it you can kind of get into a classic rock pseudo Hendrix he kind of a sound from it the reason that I brought this is this this is a good example of an object that I think does a really good job of giving you basic functionality that has embedded more complicated or refined functionality if you just want to put your guitar into this thing you can stop on it and it'll give you good distortion and you can control the distortion in the volume by turning this knob that's it you need one knob if you want to refine it maybe you want a little you know old-school black Sabbath you can do that by turning these knobs and these knobs actually have two rings around them and this thing I will pass around if you guys are interested you can fine tune it by turn turning these little knobs if you don't do that you still get a pretty cool sound and it's it's good in and of itself but if you take the time to actually turn those knobs you're gonna get I don't have a guitar to hand around with it so you can experiment but I like devices like this because they embed that more complicated sense of the technology they don't require you to spend too much time mastering something that's a simple device but but you get the idea the dials give you more functionality this was the first pedal I ever saw to do that in the past it had to have two pedals or three pedals to get the kind of sounds out of it that you can get with that one so here's a quote from from our friend Steve Jobs and I will I will read this innovation comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don't get on the wrong track or try to do too much we're always thinking about new markets we could enter but it's only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important and so often as a software developer myself and and when I work with other people who are building software or creating products even outside of the software space thinking back to that flip thinking back to that can opener they're always adding functionality a lot of the time it's it's saying no it's deciding what you don't want to build so when you're starting to build something start by focusing on what you will not build say no when you're sitting down to create something if you think oh we could do these 50 things we have to do these 50 things because our competitors do these 50 things we need to do those and we need to do 10 more than they do because otherwise we won't come we'll never compete that's that's not true you will compete if you do even 10 things but you do those 10 things so well and so elegantly that it doesn't matter that they do 50 things because the 10 things that you do so well so what if those if those other cameras the pocket camera that you already have can do video that doesn't matter you're still gonna buy a flip why because it does that one thing it does it so well another thing and most of you in here know this is it features are addictive once you start doing one yeah well you know we could make it do this so we could make it do that we could add this this function we could add that fine and eventually what some people would call this scope creep but it's actually worse than that it's addictive especially in this community because there are so many gems and plugins and cool things that people are building and putting out on github and forking that it's like you can't build a simple application anymore if you don't have a lot in your apple forget I don't even want to look at it well I actually think that's a good idea maybe it's a bad example but there is now the prerequisite is like of course everything has to support x y and c you have to have a million features or nobody's even gonna gonna pay attention it's become quantity over quality and what happened to quality I don't know if anybody here has read a book called Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Persick great book which talks about quality the concept of quality the deeper sense of quality in just the way that we think there is a really interesting chapter in that book the book is more or less it's it's it's if you've ever heard the term Chautauqua it's it's almost like a spiritual journey of one man with his son riding a motorcycle I think it takes place in the 60s they're driving across the country the other details aren't important for for right now but the author the narrator is telling a story about how his friend at one point he and his friend were riding their motorcycles and his friends motorcycle if I remember the story right it's been probably 15 years since I read it his friends motorcycle had a problem and I think it was a BMW motorcycle and whatever the problem was it could be fixed by getting a small piece of aluminum kind of curved kind of cylindrical and putting that over whatever was whether it was a gasket or a tube or something well it turns out that the perfect way to fix this thing they're broken down they're on the side of the road they're going to have to stay at a cheap motel if they don't pick up their time the way to fix this is to take a tin can aluminum can and use that that'll fix it at least until you get to a place where you can get the bike fixed proper the guy wouldn't have anything to do with he said no this is a BMW I'm not putting it cast aside beer can off the side of the road I'm not using that to fix my my nice bike you know the quality gets in the way but it's interesting to think about how we view quality when it when our lives are so filled with trying to add features trying to be competitive trying to produce trying to be so effective those things can actually get in the way you know I talked about the the can opener and building something to last even though we think well you know I'll just come back to this in a month or on the next sprint and I'll fix that or I'll add those features there are so very few things that are built today to last the way that my grandfather slide rule was built to last I was talking to my friend John Gruber just the other day and he said we're talking about iPhone apps and he said that he almost thinks that iPhone apps are a lot are more like albums more like songs than they are like traditional applications that you develop I think it's interesting because he's right you build this iPhone app and once it's done you know you may do a bug fix but you're not gonna like continue to really refine and build it you move on to the next one oh I did that app now I'm building the next app and I think we have we can be guilty that too I think a lot of the time we're so interested in building that next thing that we're not focusing enough time on the refinement and the quality I mean things like the slide rule of that can opener those things people spend years to create those things and I think the difference is is in that I still have this slide rule 100 years later I still have this can opener 10 years later those things are meant to last because they're physical but when we're building applications we know in the back of our mind well this thing isn't going to be you know version two is going to be out and version three is going to be out so it's easier for us to dismiss and disassociate ourselves from that and be distracted by the request for features this is a I don't remember where I heard this I think I heard it from a friend of mine but it's been so long that I it's just something I think about all the time a poor man can afford only the very best well what does that mean you go out you go to Home Depot and you need to buy a shovel there's a shovel for $15 and there's a shovel for $30 most of us especially if it's our first house we're gonna buy the $15 shovel and this is the one with you know maybe the wooden handle and the two screws that hold the head of the shovel on and after you use it for a while those screws will eventually become loose so you can tighten them up and spend a little time doing that and eventually the threads will wear out and the screws won't work anymore so then you can go buy bigger screws or you can get some kind of a you know epoxy glue or something I've tried this and inevitably the head of the umbrella just the head of the shovel won't won't won't stay on anymore so you wind up having to go and then you say well I'm not buying a cheap shovel ever again I'm buying a good shovel now you've spent $45 but if you had bought that nicer shovel to begin with you would have saved $15 but that's not the mentality that a lot of us have a lot of us say well we'll just get it out the door right now we'll just build it right now we'll just get this thing out there and we'll make it good later we'll fix it later we'll we'll make it work right later and a lot of this I know comes from customers comes from clients comes from bosses who are saying well we needed Friday it's our responsibility to say no it's our responsibility to be that person who communicates to them that we need to build something that we feel is quality I can't tell you how many times I've talked to people who would like admit to me privately that their application sucks and that the code is a mess well that's horrible that's you out there you're putting yourself out there if that's what you do all day if you're spending eight hours a day building something and you're not proud of it you know what what does that say you've got to be proud of what you do you know this this this goes back to another philosophy I have which is to do as little as possible what's the minimum amount that you need to do to have something that is successful to make something that's great what is the least that you need to do what can you say no to and it's not no in being negative and so no that's stupid it's saying no is in no let's let's start more simply than that you know I think anything anytime you come into a situation where you think that's something has to be a certain way it's your responsibility to say to yourself what if the opposite was true what if that thing that I take for granted or that I assume or that I that I believe to be true what if the exact opposite were true maybe that it won't make sense but a lot of the time that's enough to flip the way you're thinking upside down and and let you see something from a different perspective what they call in in the school of Zen which I don't admittedly don't know a lot about but in the school of Zen they call that beginner's mind what if you could approach a problem as if you had never encountered it before never solved it before never heard about somebody solving it before what if it was entirely new device that was entirely new was the iPod and there were so many people who are saying the iPod won't sell it's too expensive there isn't enough storage space it doesn't have an FM tuner you know the iPhone won't sell either doesn't have any GPS it doesn't have a video camera it's not 3G who wants that you know now they're projecting that there's going to be 45 million iPod iPhone sold by the end of 2009 that's a projection that's not an actual number but it looks like it's going to happen even with the economy the way it is that's according to the Piper Jeffrey analyst Gene Munster love that name function should define and insist on form again we go back to the slide rule we go back to the to the camera we go back to the can opener what does it do that can be your starting point to determine how it should work what does it need to do what does it need to accomplish I still so often see and it's weird to me because I've been building applications for so long now and it still seems to be this way it's almost like we wanted to look like this we think it should work like this well what does it need to do what is what you're building what's what you're building actually need to do let that determine how it does it if that makes any sense you know I think a lot these days about starting points we spend a lot of time every day working on projects that have been hanging around or we inherit somebody else's code or we inherit a project from all of these other consultants came in and and built this thing and now they're gone and now the CEO of the company is freaked out and he's hired us and we have to come in and fix it you know this is something that I think about how do you find that starting point there's something called Occam's razor which I'm sure everybody's heard of you know I don't know if that holds up for us a lot of the time the simplest solution is always the best solution you know I think the simplest solution isn't always the best answer but it's a starting point if you can simplify something down no that doesn't mean the simple thing is always right but it's a great place to start what's the bare minimum that you need to do what's the absolute entry point and start from there this will be more interesting maybe this is Bender if any of you how many here have seen future ama okay good I love future ama it was a TV show that ran on the Fox Network from 1999 to 2003 and has subsequently come out with a couple of directed DVD movies Bender is a you know he drinks heavily he smokes cigars he's a kleptomaniacal misanthropic kind of a guy and in one episode the episode is called Godfellas in case you've seen it he for one reason or another winds up going to sleep in a torpedo tube and gets launched into space from the planet Express ship and is sort of floating in outer space for a while and in the course of this a small civilization of peep they're almost people they're kind of like people they're about that big I think maybe smaller they sort of colonize his body and live on different parts of his body and in doing so they revere him as God and inevitably as always happens with Bender and it shows like this he treats them so badly that they certain ones become atheists and attack the ones that believe in Bender and they annihilate each other with nuclear weapons so that's that's just the background story for for this next part in this clip that I'm about to show you he's been floating in space for a time and he he encounters an entity which offers him some advice so tell me if it's a if it's too loud they lose hope you have to use a light touch like a safe cracker God says to Bender is if you do things right no one will be sure you've done anything at all I love that quote doesn't doesn't God sound a bit like an overwork developer his tickets that he's got what was actually interesting about that is the philosophy and I've referenced that quote in in another talk that I gave but I really wanted to show the whole clip not only because it's funny but because as developers as designers as people who are creating things that other people use we have a lot of responsibility maybe not quite that much responsibility but we have a lot we're gonna define how users interact with the software that we build we're defining their user experience even if you have the user experience person on your team even if you have a designer on your team and even if your boss or your customer your client is telling you well it's gotta work like this because that's what we wanted to work like you still have a responsibility I think to to do things right and as a developer one of my personal goals is to be invisible to get out of the way if something works well you don't need to explain how it works you don't need to think how it works you've got a simple Polaroid camera you've got a flip camera you've got a can opener these are things that they just work and if you can get out of the way you can get your technology out of the way you can get the complexity out of the way like we did with that guitar pedal then you're in a situation where you're providing that simple interface you're not overburdening the users before you start something stop you know we talked before about how you want everything right away everybody is telling you hurry launch just I used to say just just just go and build it just put it out there you know we've got and I actually think things like well there was that video that came out not long ago that we were watching out in the in the hall a little bit earlier that sort of cool visualization thing that showed all of the contribution of code to Rails from when it first started all the way until recently when it when it was added to you know converted from subversion to get and then all of these new forks and codes and contributions came in came to play it's a cool video and I think what it shows is the immediacy of you know as we come out with these new tools like get like Twitter like all of these different social networks that make it easier to communicate easier to share that's good I mean that's what we want but it also changes the concept of the immediacy with which we come to expect things we are becoming more and more impatient every day because these things that happen make us think that it's it's the only way to do something is for it to happen immediately I'm now telling you to stop I'm now telling you to take a step back and to think all of us have something that that you know one way to call it a chattering mind background chatter you know even without the distractions that we talked about even without Twitter and without I am in campfire our minds are still chattering there's that little narrator or the little stream of consciousness in the back of your mind that's always going a lot of the time we don't even realize that it's there it's normal most and most if not everybody has that it's a normal thing but it's hard enough to focus without all of these other distractions when your mind is so busy I want to talk for a minute about that about that chattering mind and one of the things that I think about a lot when you talk about simplifying simplifying your life simplifying the things that you build reducing chatter I I meditate every morning for about 45 minutes the kind of meditation that I do and all of them I'll talk about a little bit more it's it's it's called mindfulness meditation and it involves bringing your awareness into the present moment and you're trying to create a non-reactive focused awareness that's absent of judgment or clinging this kind of meditation is called vipassana that's the poly word for it it's 2600 years old it was something that really first started I think safe to say back in in India at the time of the Buddha and that kind of meditation has nothing to do with Buddhism it has nothing to do with any religion and no religion owns your mind and owns the ability to focus and it's something that's really interesting because as you develop this as you sit in meditation and focus on a simple object like your breathing you start to develop an awareness of how your mind works and if you do it long enough if you do it regularly enough you start to actually see that chatter that's going on in your mind you get to see that from a different perspective and it eventually starts to quiet down you don't have to be some monk up in a you know in a mountain in a cave somewhere to be able to get benefits from this kind of meditation it's used in the treatment of depression they use it for substance abuse they use it for people who have chronic pain they use it for people who have you know tons of you know anxiety disorders anything like that this is the kind of thing that if you if you had chronic back pain they might have a chronic pain clinic that you'd go to that would teach you this kind of meditation a lot of the time when I hear people talking about meditation they think that it involves going and thinking about something or they think that it means going and clearing your mind of something this type of meditation is neither of those things it just simply means picking an object like you're breathing and focusing on it for a period of time and over time as you do that you begin to get calm so my question and I had I had thought about doing maybe a quick one or two minutes of this here today and I'm not sure you know some people have been like yeah let's do what I would love to try it other people like I don't think that has any place in the technology conference so what I thought was that maybe we could try 30 seconds of this and for those of you who aren't interested check your email you'll be demonstrating my point can try this and it's a simple exercise and what I'd like for you to do for about 30 seconds all-time it close your eyes and without consciously trying to control or regulate your breathing just pay attention to your breath are you breathing fast or slow shallow or deep what does it feel like and try if you can to stay with your breathing as you breathe in and out just think to yourself breathing in and breathing out okay how many people thought that felt like an eternity how many people were pitching in the world series in their minds it's interesting to think about how quickly your mind goes somewhere else I wonder if he's kind of tell us it's been 30 seconds he had you know he said not to check my email but I really want to it's amazing how your mind jumps so quickly to that next thing how hard it is to try to stay in a mindful state imagine how much of a challenge it is for you to focus and be productive when you're with this sort of constant barrage of all these other cool communication things that that we all like why do we like them you know what we're being social we're talking to our friends we've got a community I know a guy in you know Europe who's writing really cool code we got something to talk about I'm not saying any of those things are bad I think they're great I think the human race is evolving in a way through that kind of communication I mean you saw a big change when you know when trains were were built you could get across an entire country in in a period of weeks that was unheard of when when big boats were built you could cross the ocean you know this is just a step in our evolution as as a speed as a species we're communicating in a completely new way but it's challenging enough to try to mitigate all of those different streams of information that are coming in when your mind itself is constantly chattering one of the things that when you when you get into meditation and you do it the advice that they that they give you is you eventually learn that that kind of thinking is just thinking of those are just thoughts you no longer have this kind of association that those thoughts are me the background noise is there not just in your mind but isn't the things that you build to there's a lot of extra stuff that we don't even know that we're putting into the stuff that we write those extra features the chatter that we're bringing to the applications when we build them I think a big part of it comes from asking the right questions you know especially how many people here are independent like somebody hires you to write code not not working full-time for somebody but like you're an independent person okay I think it's even it's even harder for the people who are working full-time at companies because you've got this corporate infrastructure you've got bosses you've got people who say it needs to do this when you're independent a lot of the time maybe you don't even know it but I'm willing to bet that if a customer came to you and wanted to hire you they're not hiring you because you type well or because they think that you have good code skills they've hired you because they think you're gonna create a great product behind that they've hired you because they think that you know what you're doing they expect you to tell them how it should be and most of the time as developers especially in that role and I was there for years like well they said they wanted it to work like this they said that's what they said I'm just not just gonna do it that way I don't make them angry I gotta pay the mortgage but in reality they want you to tell them no they want you if you do it right they put the best way to do that is by asking the right kind of questions if you know in the back of your head that something needs to really be built a certain way and they're opposing it that's because they have assumptions well you have assumptions too when you come and start trying to work on a problem you're bringing that baggage that chatter that background noise you're bringing that in say no and and turn that around and forget your assumptions why are you building something what assumptions have I already made do I believe that those assumptions are true do you believe your own thoughts this is Abraham Walt he was a mathematician he was born in Hungary and he came to the United States when the Nazis invaded Austria and he became a statistician working for the government in World War two one of the things the projects that he worked on and I should give credit to Garrett Diamond and Cameron Mall who talked about this very thing before one of the the projects that he worked on the US government during World War two had these planes and they would fly the planes on missions and the planes would get attacked by the enemies and and they were very interested to say well how can we strengthen our planes how can we make them more resilient to attack how can we increase their survival rate so our friend Abraham said well he theorized that the bullet hits are going to be uniformly distributed across the entire aircraft in other words any one area the aircraft is just as likely to be hit as any other now it was correct about that when they actually plotted out where all the bullets were well what the government was doing is they were coming back and you know these planes would come out to battle and then some of them wouldn't make it and some of them would and the ones that made it back usually were riddled with bullet holes and so these are the points on the planes that came back these are where the the bullet holes penetrated the plane this is where they got hit the government said perfect that's where we're going to reinforce the planes that is where we need to armor this place but if you think about it if it will this is this is where the planes are being hit therefore this is where we need to armor them but that's not true that's not the right kind of logic I don't want to be mean to our customers but that's customer logic that's not developer logic right there it's it's my friend Garrett he said if you ask the wrong question then the answer is irrelevant a lot of the time we need to teach our clients or our bosses what the right questions are but that's not easy and it's especially not easy for us for you guys why because you you know too much already once you have knowledge it's incredibly difficult for us to remember what it's like to not have that knowledge think about that the things that you know all of us in this room I can say get help y'all know what it means I can talk about a commit y'all know what it means I can talk about anything to do with Ruby and rails you guys probably know it even better than I do we have this shared body of knowledge but how do you explain Ruby on rails to your mom how do you explain what you do for a living to your grandparents or to somebody who has never used a computer because the things that we build are not really real the way that a can opener is really you can't hold it in your hand what we what we do it's all in our minds and it's in the minds of people that that are using the software that we know and this this concept of you knowing too much some developers I'm sure none of you but some developers sometimes come across as being arrogant because we know too much we know more than our customers know and you know what we do technically speaking generally we do we know too much it's hard for us it's hard for us to remember what it was like to be in their shoes to not know what we know and it's hard to find that reference point you know we live in private silos a lot of the time this community we all know we all have the shared body of information the more you talk with other developers the more you talk with people in this community the more you start to think that you're normal the more you start to think that everybody thinks like this and it's a we don't most people don't think like us I mean we we have a unique kind of window into a world that I think is very creative most people don't get we have to sort of get out of these silos I mean it there used to be this expression that people would use where they would say oh you know be your own user figure out you know you know what use yourself as if you were the user but we're terrible at that if we were left to design all of that stuff and come up with all that stuff nine times out of ten we build something for ourselves but we're not the end user most of our users spend their time using other websites not the ones that we built they spend their time using other applications not the ones we come up with we're bad cases when it comes to figuring out what works and what doesn't a lot of the time I sometimes you know whether they're friends or other people will come to me and say again help help you figure out how to make my application better why are we getting the kind of customer signups or retention that we want you know and when you think about that you say well who did you design this app for who designed this app who built it I don't want to get into the whole conversation of focus groups they're pretty bad too the answer is there there is no definitive answer but it's the approach that really counts if you're trying to forget what you think you know if you're trying to create space you're gonna be successful what do I mean when I say that I don't just mean physical space I or screen space I mean try to create a spaciousness around what you do try to you know everybody has deadlines but try to move more slowly try not to let that constant chatter that we are always experiencing affect the kind of code that we write and the kind of products that we reduce and I know this kind of sounds like you know this this big lofty picture of a perfect world up in the sky but these are the kinds of things you could really apply when you're trying to solve a problem and not just in your code but in the implementation those things you know the websites that have big giant colorful everything's a jacksify I mean why do you need to you need does every single thing need to you know poof out and be draggable you know sometimes yeah that's a perfectly good solution to a problem but don't go into it thinking which part of the screen are they gonna want to drag just build the website build the form let the let the functionality determine the implementation for a change this is kind of the final message I want to leave you with because before I used to years ago I used to say the opposite and this whole conference has been about doing more and being more productive and I think you can be more productive by doing less maybe that sounds backwards but if you have an idea you want to reduce that idea you want to simplify it you want to distill it you want to try and say what am I really getting at here how would I explain this to my mom or my grandmother or that person is never used a computer if it's hard to do that then it means you might need to you might benefit from simplifying things a little bit more reduce the concept reduce it down once you have an idea simplify it and reduce it even more you know if you're building an application you're launching a service make a list of the things that you absolutely must do to be successful and then throw half of them away just to get started you know so many times people are trying to build everything into one application it becomes this do-all solution and I was talking earlier to the to the New Relic guys we were talking about of 37 signals says they get to a point with their application where they they realize that the application is is doing enough when is your application doing enough when is the time to say this this now needs to be a whole new application this needs to be something else we can't keep augmenting it it's almost that iPhone application mentality these iPhone apps are known for doing one thing I have an app on my iPhone that's a little level that you can use to like you know it doesn't it's not also you know a flashlight it just it's just the level you know that's great about iPhone apps because they only cost 99 cents and you can just download them and put them on your phone and try using when you need them we've almost gone the other way we've almost said well we want it apps that do everything you know we've we've lost track of our ideas so besides doing less relax people think of meditation as a way to relax and chill out and solve problems it really isn't when you're meditating and scientists have shown this they hooked up little electrodes to to you know like Tibetan monks and stuff when they were they were doing their meditation and they found by studying them and also by by looking at their brains and studying the way that their brains worked and what was actually going on when they were meditating they found to their surprise that they do not look like the brains of people who were sleeping or or relaxing or or anything like that at all what they found or that their brains looked exactly the same as the brains of people who were who were very very focused on something very much like the way an athlete or somebody who's shooting a bow and arrow or doing target practice paying attention somebody who is working very hard at solving a problem those same brain patterns would light up in the mind of a meditator when I read that I laughed of course because I know that that 45 minutes every morning when I'm sitting there my I'm focusing harder than I'll probably focus on the rest of the day and yeah I'll feel more calm and peaceful but I wouldn't necessarily think that relaxation is the goal the goal is to kind of get that clarity in that piece the byproduct is that you feel more relaxed and I think if we have a relaxed approach to the things that we build if we relax and we stop trying to do so much quiet that chatter down maybe we can build something that lasts that's it