 for joining me so early this morning. Well, I'm on the East Coast, so it is kind of technically three hours later for me, but it's also a Saturday. We all got out of bed. That deserves some applause. Okay, so the title of my talk is ensuring the sustainability of your code learning community, so I can't even say it. My name is Rachel Ober. I'm coming in from Brooklyn, New York, and I'm really happy to be able to talk about this today because before I even knew this conference existed, I started developing these ideas of what I was learning from running a couple organizations the past few years, so I'm very thankful for being able to speak here today about what I learned. I'm gonna add a content warning, but really it's kind of like, it's a little bit of a bummer story, but I promise there is a happy ending, so I talk a little bit about depression, burnout, as well as conflict and relationships. So I work for Paperless Post, and our mission statement is reimagining invitations through technology and design to make people more connected at life's most important moments. We build a platform to be able to create cars and send them electronically, event management, et cetera. So why is sustainability so important whenever we're talking about any type of community? And for me, it's obviously you and your team are prone to being burned out, everybody's volunteering, you're not getting paid, what is the incentive? It's really sad to me to see something so wonderful kind of shrivel up and die because you can't sustain that type of energy consistently. And I also think these type of communities go on and inspire others to do really great, amazing work. For instance, with RailsBridge, there's been so many other communities that have branched out of it, taking this model and extending it to either other areas, other programming languages, other communities, et cetera. And that is why I believe setting yourself up for success is really strong, not only for yourself, but the entire community out there. As an example, as I was writing this presentation, there was an announcement that went out on the ADA Initiative website where they were talking about that they were taking, making the decision to shut down as an organization. And they did talk about all the great work that they did, they felt that they really accomplished everything that they set out to do. But I did notice the final paragraph that they were talking about was that the founders, I think there were two of them, had decided to move on. There were other interests in their life. They spent a long time trying to find somebody to pick up that work. But in the end, it was unsuccessful and they decided that the best thing to do was to shutter it down. Now, I'm not picking on ADA Initiative. It's definitely their choice, whether or not they wanna close it. But in my opinion, this was such a great organization that it's a little bit disappointing to see that prior steps, maybe many different things can go on for why a volunteer organization or a nonprofit can be shuttered. But I would like to see other people take steps to create a healthy environment to continue such good work on into the future. So for me, I've spent a long time, the past few years interacting with other people, teaching people I taught four times for General Assembly in Manhattan, the back end Ruby on Rails course. So I've had a lot of interfacing with students. I also co-founded a conference called RightSpeak Code and we hold conferences. We have meetups in different cities and we work to increase the visibility of women in technology. So I have a lot of experience working with organizers, putting on events, et cetera. I also founded what I'm talking about today, which is the local chapter of Rails Bridge in New York City. And in my real life, I am also a software developer at Paypal's post. In this presentation, I do have a couple key takeaways that I hope you get out of this. And mainly I'm gonna talk about the bus factor and what that means in terms of a volunteer organization. Talk about mission statements and setting goals and why that is so important for your own mental stability and the sustainability of your volunteer organization, how to better accept criticism and how to deal with it when it's appropriate to take it and when not delegating tasks without feeling guilty, when technology helps and when it hurts collaboration, what to do when these tips don't work because one size does not fit all and when the time comes to let things go. So this is my personal story and my story begins in 2013 where I had just finished my first round teaching at General Assembly and I got paid for that position. I worked on the curriculum and what I was seeing was that women in technology was a really hot topic. It was like, how do we increase diversity? How do we improve this situation? And I had heard about Railsbridge. I hadn't actually been to a workshop. However, I was really inspired with what they were doing and I had friends in Boston who were running workshops and I was really inspired to see how we could run more. And so like I said, this is my personal story. It kind of talks about how I dealt with stress that was also going on in my life and how I feel I came out better afterwards. So what is Railsbridge? Has anybody actually attended or volunteered? That's awesome. Thank you so much for contributing to the community. So if you don't know what Railsbridge is, we hold one and a half day workshops around the world. Basically, if you go to railsbridge.org, you can find out where your local either chapter is or different resources for when the next workshop is going to be held so you can volunteer. We also try our best to offer free childcare. We actually had our first childcare request earlier this year and it was amazing. We had like a whole family drive-in from New Jersey and they were like, thank you so much. This is amazing. They had like three or four generations. They had like a grandmother, parents, and couple, it was great. But we spend the first night installing Rails and the system on their computer so we get like a lot of different versions of Windows, a lot of different versions of Macs and you will see the rare Linux show up and then the next day we dive right into actually getting them to launch their first Rails site. Now, the problem that I saw was that there were only two workshops run in New York City prior to 2013 and Rails Bridge had been around since 2009 when it was started in San Francisco by Sarah Allen and Sarah May. And I said that this is ridiculous, like there's so many tech people now in New York City we really should try to run more of these free workshops. But the problem that we were faced with is that it is notoriously difficult to find space in New York City. Rent is sky high, tech was only kind of getting its foothold in Silicon Alley is what people are calling it. Yeah, I don't know. Our sponsorship opportunities were low because yeah, tech as an industry in New York City was still fairly new. You would either have to like talk to finance, fashion, news, that was like the main things and it's only been the last two or three years that's really started to take off where we have bigger companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter all of them are now moving into New York City. And also we found there was very high student interest but it was very hard to find people and not just people but qualified people to come and teach at a workshop or even just to kind of like get them interested to help formulate these ideas. So my solution was to start a chapter more like a group of people who was really dedicated to running workshops more frequently in the area and we wanted to be able to address the specific demographic in the New York City area. So I gathered my friends, I got a lot of opinions and like really stretched my network. Like I just remember being in college and my advisors always tell me like the biggest most important thing is your network and I'm like how do you build a network? Well I really started like figuring out how to do this because when you find out your venue isn't going to work out the week before you're running a big event you really learn how to ask for things without feeling bad. So we ended up running a fairly decent workshop. Yes, there was definitely some hurdles we had like I had somebody hook me up to this venue at the last minute when I got there they're like oh well you can sit in the entryway here and I'm like what? You don't have like a projector or anything for us so we kind of like built three classrooms on a whim but you know and yeah I was super stressed out but it was rewarding to hear people saying like thank you this is awesome when can we do it the next time. So that was great, run the first workshop. But as if you read the description of the talk here today you know that doesn't, it's like yay the princess won or the queen won whatever and they're happy ending but you know like the point of the project was that we would keep running workshops. So my story goes that after my third workshop if you want to know what kind of position this is just search Catloaf on Google but this is how I felt it's just kind of like just let me lay here. It was like we ran three workshops in 2013 and after my third one I just felt completely defeated. The organic community that I was really striving for just did not happen organically like it didn't just magically appear oh Rachel let me help you, let me help you and I'm like still running the majority of the things by myself and after that I really had to go rethink my life. So I'll pause here a little bit and return to it later in the presentation but somebody asked me a couple weeks ago whenever I was really struggling trying to figure out what I was gonna do with my career and she asked me imagine yourself at a party five years from now what are you celebrating? Because that is gonna help you determine where you should be spending your efforts for the next five years. So a hard lesson that I had to overcome was feeling trapped by my own expectations and it's kind of like I mean I guess a lot of creative people are like that where you kind of get an idea and then you get the next idea and it just kind of like grows like weeds and it becomes difficult to figure out what you're gonna work on next and you become overwhelmed by like this obligation that you're feeling to these people while you're running this free workshop and if you can't run it that often and in New York City we run workshops when as soon as we open registration on our registration page it's called bridgetruel.org it sells out within 24 hours at the very latest and we can only hold a max of maybe at most 60 students and so there's this obligation that you're feeling that you're not running it quickly enough and you're not helping as many people as you want. So that's why I came up that it's very important to have an accurate mission statement to describe what you're going to accomplish when you set out to do this project. I mean you're working for free. You need to define what your idea of success is. So I don't know, I specifically put this slide into the beginning whenever I talked about my work at paperless post that is our company mission statement that every decision that we make as a company goes back to the mission statement is does this decision fit in with what we're looking for? So that's the same thing with Railsbridge. I was getting a lot of requests for different things like oh can you do one for JavaScript? How about front end? Oh can you run one in New Jersey? And we really had to step back and really tackle our goals as they came. So whenever I went to develop this mission statement for Railsbridge NYC, I took a look first at what Railsbridge, the mothership, so to call, what their mission statement was. So there's is Railsbridge workshops are a free and fun way to get started or level up with Rails, Ruby and other web technologies. Our events focus on increasing diversity in tech so that people of all backgrounds can feel welcome and comfortable in our industry. So for New York City, we add on to what the Railsbridge proper mission statement is and Railsbridge NYC works to regularly hold free one and a half day workshops in the New York City area to help women learn how to program their first websites in Ruby and Ruby on Rails. So it's very focused, it happens in New York City, we run one and a half day workshops, we target women but we're open up to any type of minorities underserved in tech and their first websites in Ruby on Rails. So the next step after this is that once you've figured out your mission, set some goals and what does it mean to set goals? You're very specific, they're measurable, attainable, relevant and time bound. So you're being very specific on what it means to be successful. When I was running these workshops, I felt super exhausted afterwards and for whatever reason, even though people were telling me thank you so much, it's like I still felt not complete afterwards. I don't know if anybody else feels that it. Maybe it's the exhaustion or maybe you've set some type of expectation, like maybe you would imagine somebody that like confetti to come down from the heavens and it's like you're wonderful and everything is perfect in the world, you solve the diversity and tech problem or something, I don't know, but it's just like I don't know what I was expecting but that didn't happen obviously, otherwise I wouldn't be here. But it's like set your goals specific, it's like we are going to target 75 people, we want 15 of those people to be volunteers and we want to create this community that they're gonna wanna come back after they've been a student, they wanna come back as a volunteer or something like that, like be specific, we want to hold workshops four times a year, we want to get X amount of money so that we can sponsor childcare and food, et cetera, be specific. And then whenever, so this is the angry bus driver from South Park and I'm using her as an example of what I wanted to talk about next, which is the bus factor. I don't know if you've ever heard of it before, sometimes we talk about it in software development but it's essentially if you only have one person who knows what's going on, it's very dangerous that you might lose that person and for me, if you're in a volunteer organization and I'm frustrated and I'm the only person who knows anything, I'm gonna go outside, I'm gonna catch a bus and I'm gonna drive it and you're never gonna drive away and you're never gonna see or hear from me again and that ends my project. So we want to prevent something like that from ever happening again. So I've identified three sections that I'd like to illuminate on today. I wanna talk about materials and how we can distribute that better because that is like the core of what our, what our organization is about. We teach things, we need to keep information on a lot of different stuff, how to work better with people because your organization is all about talking to people, keeping your students happy and keeping your organization team happy and then of course, self, I'm gonna talk about the easiest thing and gradually get harder. Some materials are the easiest one and so I'm gonna specifically talk about different problems that we came up and the technical answers to it. So for instance, the problem we were finding is that as an organization, it's like you have conversations with people and that you might have these learned experiences but where are you actually jotting this down? Like are you keeping information about your sponsors? Who's donated money, how much? What did they pay for? Who was attending? Because you want to then take the people who attended the first time and get them to come back either as taking the class again or becoming the next generation of volunteers. So we also iterated a lot on how we were gonna better train the teachers because a lot of questions we were got were like, how do I talk to beginners? They were so separated from when they first learned Ruby on Rails and then also our curriculum is all on GitHub, make changes over time, you wanna make sure you have the most up-to-date information on there, how do you do that and then like where to order food and how much to allocate towards people. If you have 75 people, how many pieces of pizza is that, right? I don't know how many people have to do pizza math but it's like insane. Pizza math, it's a real thing. My main advice is create a main organization account and delegate to all of your organizers but act, like even in yourself, do not act in that organization account. That just holds, that's the skeleton key to everything else. So you are not the single point of failure. In RailsBridge, we benefit from the fact that we have the main RailsBridge organization which is part of Bridge Foundry, which is part of School Factory. So yeah, there's a couple levels but because we have, as a non-profit, we can get things like Google Apps for free. So we have the account NYC at railsbridge.org. It is administered by railsbridge.org. So if yes, I drive a bus away, somebody else has the keys to the castle. And that way, then I've delegated it to myself, my own Gmail account as well as the account of the main organizers. So everybody has access but you are still keeping private things such as emails of sponsors and other finance stuff private. This is a no-brainer. GitHub should be for any type of code or documentation. At railsbridge, all of our document, all of our curriculum, all of our help guides are open source and we keep everything on GitHub. It's very easy to just go in there. If somebody notices an error, please make a pull request, great. Ship it up to railsbridge proper. If we have any public documents, we also put it in there. We also keep our website, which I consider a communication tool in GitHub and I have it set up so that whenever I merge in a pull request, it automatically deploys to Heroku. So it's very easy so that I'm not the bottleneck and we can update it with the most recent information on our workshop and I have everything automated. So talking about our website, which we keep in GitHub, there's an interesting story that goes back to why it's important to keep a mission statement. We, a couple of years ago, we had somebody volunteer their time and that's like a very common thing that I hear is that people want to volunteer to help with the website, which is great. But without somebody who's kind of managing how it's getting built, it can become unwieldly very quickly. And our website is mainly a communication tool. It's not a web app. It's not very complicated outside of telling when the next event is, how to subscribe to our mailing list and how to volunteer or sponsor us. We, I've gotten into a lot of discussions how somebody had told me that this needs to be a learning tool. And so they took a flat HTML site and converted it into Ruby on Rails and said we need to give this to our community because if somebody asks us what can they work on next, we can give them the work, the website. That doesn't really work if we don't have somebody who's actually gonna accept that request and mentor somebody to actually be able to edit that website. So unfortunately, I do have the way that this site was built, we constantly forget how to actually edit, like what you do is you click the yellow box there and there's a pop-up. We always forget how to edit that and that makes it incredibly difficult to update the website. Like somebody will like edit the date, but they don't realize there's a second part that actually says where it happens and what the link is. So it's like little silly things like that that keeps us away from what our main objective is. Like I've made the decision that our website is no longer a learning tool. Does that fit with my mission? Did my mission state provide tools for newbies? No. There are much better organizations out there who are prepared to work with newbies to give them open source projects such as code montage. I think Coraline Ada just came out with something open source for women. There's plenty of people out there that that is their main goal. Railsbridge, our main goal is not to get people into open source even though that is a great mission. Okay, great. So another no-brainer is where do we keep our documents? So different documents that we keep in our Google Drive are email lists. So anybody who has attended a workshop, we get their email so that we can contact them later and we use it mainly to say, hey, how is your experience going? Would you be interested in coming back? Would you like to volunteer? Would you like to TA, et cetera? Also sponsorship information, venue details. All of this is private information that we still need to communicate as an organization. We'll give the privileges as needed but we keep them in our document folders like that. Anything not like document, specifically document like spreadsheets, graphs, agendas for meetings, we put into Dropbox. So this has like our logo. We might have a letter stating our nonprofit status. You can set up your main account, delegate it to other people and that's free storage. For announcement lists, I use MailChimp and I like it because I can create a main account and delegate it to other people. In this, I have these different things that I'm working on. I can give permission to Quincy, our teacher liaison and he can go in, he can see all the mails, the mailings that have been sent before. We import people such as previous volunteers and previous students and we can target people and send out information about the next teacher training when our next workshop is or any events happening in New York City. So we have that history there of all of these people and especially they're always, people are always asking me, I would love to help but I have no idea how to do sponsorship. Well, we can start putting information in here. It's accessible to anybody that has it and they're whenever we need it. Now a little bit more tricky is how do you give people access to passwords such as like Twitter. I would suggest a password manager such as one password or knee pass. I throw a key chain into Dropbox and that gives them access to the passwords that they need as well as can update across machines. I think one password is not free but I think there's some free alternatives out there. Now my last one is to do listen tasks and honestly I have not found a good task manager for a group so have your pick and try it, see how it goes. It seems like every year I'm trying to pick something else. Currently our RailsBridge team is using Asana and what I like about it is that I can just duplicate the task list over and over. We are all mainly doing the same thing over and over again for each workshop so it's very easy to just copy and paste. Now whenever I'm working with something like write, speak, code I think right now we're using Trello because we can kind of see what the status is over time. Your mileage may vary. Have fun. Cause it's a pain. And then the question becomes how do we actually communicate, learn, experience? And that one I'm going to add into my next section which is people. Now for us we're not a company. We don't all sit in the same office. Sometimes we're not even in the same time zone so we are constantly communicating asynchronously. So how do we make it that we are sharing information, everybody is getting updates to it. So my answer for that which has become hugely popular in the past year is using Slack. Now who is a part of a Slack room? Who's part of more than one Slack room? So yeah I have like a dozen set up at any one time for projects that I'm working on. But I like Slack if you haven't used it before because I have it on my phone, I have it on my computer, it pings me whenever somebody direct messaged me and it has this great search capability on it. So even though we have a private chat for organizers, whenever I add a new organizers you can give them the history, you can search for anything. If you remember, it's all there where we have conversations where like this morning I wished everybody good luck for the workshop that's happening today and they were talking about oh you know what, it's raining a lot in New York City, not a lot of people showed up to the workshop, maybe we only need X amount of pizzas or something like that. Whereas before whenever I had somebody else helping me with organizing I found, I was wondering what was going on and there was no transparency into it because she was setting up individual Google chats with other people and you can't really share that information and that's very exclusive where maybe you're only working with people who are organizing a workshop at that moment. Now with Slack we have anybody who's ever organized a workshop, they can jump in at any time and say oh you know what, I've got five extra minutes today, I can contact our sponsor and see if they're willing to sponsor an extra hundred dollars or something. It's very passive, it's very asynchronous and I think it's a really good tool. If we do need some FaceTime though, I use a tool called Doodle and you can basically pick a couple dates, pick a couple times and figure out when it makes sense to get on a Google Hangout video chat. And we used it recently because we were really trying to revamp how we train our teachers and we were just having a meeting, we set up an agenda ahead of time, always set an agenda, set what your time limit is and that ensures that you're really focusing on what you're talking about. And just in general people are hard and especially with a volunteer organization you'll get a bunch of people in and out, some people will be more helpful than others even though there's always people willing to help out but you also have to kind of consider if you actually want people to help you effectively, why are they there in the first place? It's not the money, I can assure you that because there is none. So it really makes a difference to be up forward with them and ask them what's your deal is kind of a bad thing but like, bad thing to say to them but like, why are you here? What do you do for a living? What is your history about learning how to program? Maybe that's what their impetus is to come in and say that they wanna give back to the community or are they looking to build up their resume? What make, and they want something to say that they really helped out with and none of these answers are necessarily bad, it's just that you being a lead organizer, if you know this upfront or you can guess it you can really target these people and get them into something that's going to maximize their needs and their wants with what your organization needs. For me, it's a lot about seeing people being helped by this, that you can tell them something that's changed their lives and that's what motivates me as well as like getting a thanks every now and then. Another big thing obviously is working together because it doesn't happen magically. You have a lot of different personalities involved. A lot of the people in our organizing team aren't full-time developers. Some of them work in finance, some of them work, trying to remember. I think one's a student right now, so we have varying interests and you have to be able to learn how to work together or your organization is not going to work out. And I've learned a lot about how to do interpersonal relationships and how to work out conflicts. And you have to ask yourself what you want to get out of that relationship and be able to talk to them about it. If you notice that a conflict is happening, how do you diffuse it? And I had my own conflict that happened when I was at the end of my third workshop where I was trying to train somebody else to help me out organizing where I wasn't doing the only work. And it turned out to be a very toxic relationship for the both of us and we were not unable to work it out. I think what it came down to was our motivations for why we were doing it in the first place. So for me, it goes back to my mission statement where I wanted to be able to continuously run workshops and my goal was to train somebody in my learned experience so that I wouldn't always, so that I wasn't the bottleneck. And I think for this other person, they wanted to be able to create a big party and a big event, which most of the time is fine and this person had a lot of experience running meetups. And so they were very interested in getting high profile sponsors in to sponsor us. And I was very worried about making sure that our volunteers had everything they need were trained in working with beginners. And I saw a lot of sponsors showing up and kind of mingling and people were asking them questions and they're like, oh, I'm just a sponsor. And they couldn't help, but we had a lot of extra people in the room. And something else that happened was during lunch, a lot of sponsors were given talk to sell things. And one of the most disheartening moments for me was whenever a company came in and they were talking about their technology and at the end of their presentation, they said, okay, ladies, we have a lot of product PM positions for you if you're interested in joining. And that was like a really big hit in the stomach because our main purpose was how to get more women in technology. So it was a very, I don't know that I handled it the most perfect way, but I definitely learned a lot of things out of it, trying to then communicate with her afterwards. So I said to say the relationship didn't work out. But then what also happened was she did give me a piece of her mind in an email. And I was very self-conscious after that. I was very paranoid after that because then I found out a couple days later when I saw one of the volunteers reply to that email and I was like, how did that happen? I found out that she had BCC at least one volunteer if not maybe all of the volunteers as she chewed me out. And at that point, I kind of felt, well, my reputation is ruined. I will never work in this town again kind of thing. But you know, you kind of take a step back. During that time, while I spent a lot of time analyzing myself and how I could do better as a leader, trying to figure out where I went wrong, trying to figure out how I could encourage the team a little bit better. Maybe I didn't spend enough time really working on it. Maybe I had some ego that I had to get over because whenever you're starting something, you are looking at it and like, this is my baby. Nobody hurt my baby and you feel very territorial over it. And it's like, at a certain point, you gotta let it go. It's like, you want to, at a certain point, the baby has gotta walk and walk out of the nest and be on their own. Otherwise, you're like a suffocating mother. And so part of that is like, we worked with finding quality teachers. We, it's like, I started to branch out about, okay, what are the real problems here? And part of the problem too is that even though you have volunteers, you have teachers, but what if the teachers that you're having aren't the ones that should be teaching? And it's not, it has many times nothing to do with their personality, they're not a bad person. They just are totally separated from where they are as an experienced programmer and whether or not they can talk on the level with the beginners. So we had a lot of conversations as an organization team about how we could do better at that and we have this tool called BridgeTroll and at the end of our workshops, we take the opportunity to send out assessments to our students and our volunteers to ask them like, okay, what did you like, what can we do better on, what can we do for next time? And we take a look, we've taken a look and we see when people say, well, this teacher was outstanding and we're making an effort to email then those volunteers and say, hey, you got really great reviews. We really wanna have you come back. What would make this experience better for you? And we really want to improve the student-teacher relationship and what we're going to end up doing is actually start at a teacher application process and what you run the risk of though is alienating the people who have volunteered before. So even though you're gonna implement this application system, we're gonna make an effort to talk to our previous teachers and say, hey, even though we're doing this application system, we still want you involved. Please come, you've got great things but we want to do our best in giving the best type of experience to our students. This in turn opens up a dialogue between these volunteers. They give us their opinions and we create a healthier community. All right. Now the most difficult thing is self. Oh, that's not playing. There we go. Are you exhausted, unmotivated to work on things you once loved, frustrated over minor things, unable to concentrate on tasks, underperforming at your job, not taking care of hygiene or health. And I apologize, there's an animation coming up but I think it's worth it. Then you may be suffering from burnout. So none of the stuff that I just told you means crap if you can't take care of yourself. And even then, sometimes life just gets in the way and you have stuff to do and your side project just might not mean as much to you anymore. So how do you handle that? So this is kind of like the emotional part of my presentation where this is a picture of myself. I think it was November of 2013 and I'm staring at a camera at General Assembly. They wanted to put my picture on their website and to highlight their teachers. So yes, I felt happy that I was doing that but I don't know if you can tell my shoulders are very rigid and my eyes just look like I'm in pain. And it has nothing to do with the cameraman, obviously. It's because at that point in my life, I was in physical pain because I had let this commitment that I had to RailsBridge plus everything else that I was doing in my life because for some reason I thought it was just keep piling stuff on, you'll get rewards for it. And I totally lost self, I totally lost sense of what my needs were as a person, as a human. And you know how on your plane flight they tell you please put on your air mask before helping others. It's like you have to take care of yourself before you can go out and help other people accomplish their goals. What are your personal needs? And for me, it was like, some people might be familiar with the spoon theory that you really don't have all the energy in the world and that was very true for me. And I had to understand that yes, when it gets dark I fall asleep and I call it my pumpkin time because I turn into a pumpkin like Cinderella's carriage. I'm no good after that. So I've moved all of my work into the morning and I'm most effective then. And I don't go to meetups as much anymore because that goes late and whenever I get home I'm so wound up I can't sleep. So you have to do these things to take care of yourself to understand what your body and what your soul is asking you to do. And once I figured out what my body was telling me to do I set up some conversations with Sarah Allen and I said, hey, I'm really having trouble finding people and I'm just doing too much. And we talked a little bit about how to effectively find people because what I was doing was I was leveraging my network but I was asking people who had full-time jobs who were exceptional coders and they were brilliant people and I love them but they weren't necessarily the right people to be teaching beginners. And she said, look for the people who are coming back. Look for the people who are asking questions and really try to target what they're asking for and then when they approach you ask them if they've ever thought about organizing a workshop. And that's how I met Bianca. Bianca went to my first workshop in early 2013 and she had posted a message to our alumni list saying like, hey, it's been a year and I'm wondering what other students were doing in their life post Railsbridge. And I'm really shy about certain things and I just jumped out there and I'm like, hi, would you be interested? Like I see that you're really excited about Railsbridge and you're following up on an entire year later, that's awesome, what are you up to? Would you be interested in helping out with the next Railsbridge? And to my great joy, she's like, yeah, that'd be awesome. How can I help? And the timing was working out perfectly because my sister was getting married, my life was getting in the way, I was gonna be in India for two weeks and I had absolutely no time to run Railsbridge but as the single organizer, if I would just let that go, if I wouldn't follow in with it and keep running these workshops, there was a really great chance that it would never happen again. I would move on and this thing that I put a lot of energy and emotional energy into just wouldn't exist anymore. And if you take a look at what this page says, Railsbridge proper just announced that they added Bianca to the board. Railsbridge changed her life so much that she wanted to go on and be on the board, help out, do more things. Like that is how much it changed and how much she was willing to contribute as an organizer. So I'm gonna approach this again. Imagine yourself at a party in five years. Whenever I answered it, I really said to my mentor, I was like I just see myself really working independently, maybe I've launched a company, maybe I've written a book and whenever I looked through all of my priorities, the last, what I really wanted was that Railsbridge was on the bottom and I had other things that I had started to move on to and it was a hard thing to kind of like, I didn't even know it existed in me that there was something like just do the work to get it in a place where you can hand it off to somebody and not be done with it, but just feel that you've done your work with it and you can let somebody else add to it. Like you're not the only person. So after that point, I really began to see that organic community start to rise. Whenever I learned to let go about being controlling over this organization and worrying so much about the minute details, I could step back, I could watch other people take in different responsibilities. Now I have somebody who does only teacher training, somebody who only works on alumni relations, somebody who's only doing venues. I don't have to go to venues anymore to make sure they have everything they need and so by giving up certain areas, I'm actually doing more because I have more freedom and if you saw the slide there before, I'm actually, there's actually a workshop going on right now in New York City that I helped organize but I'm not there because I've empowered other people to take over and I'm not worried that something's going to go wrong because I have outstanding people who have contributed to this organization. And I believe that if you keep your community open and transparent through sharing your materials, working interpersonally with other people that if life takes over, if you have to go to India for two weeks, there's always an open door for you to come back to and you're creating a community of sharing and a healthy community where you're ensuring people that it's going to sustain and not get burned out. So thank you. If you would, sorry, if you would like to talk about how you can start a chapter of RailsBridge or another type of code learning community, I would love to talk to you afterwards but thank you very much.