 Thank you. Thank you All right, so as Chris mentioned today in this talk We are going to be speaking our I'm going to speaking on personal growth and or running a business and keeping up with changing technology It's a really long title But I'm going to try to distill it into some really practical steps I'm going to start with two seemingly unrelated stories But before we do that, this is the farthest west I have ever been in the United States So if I sound as if I have a southern draw, that's why I Don't think I have one but people tell me I do So anyway, I'm excited to speak on this topic because Every other word camp I've been to I've spoken on the developer track because by trade. That's what it is I do But when Chris asked me to speak on this it allowed me to kind of step outside of my comfort zone and For any of you who know Chris, you know He likes to tell stories and so this is going to give me a chance to tell a couple of stories that are more Personal in terms of how I do what it is that I do for a living and I hope that it helps all of you And this is going to be geared towards people who are running a business who are maybe managing a development team Who are developers running a business who are freelancers any of that? But first I want to give a little bit Introduction as to who I am so you have some background Before I get into these stories because otherwise as if the stories are maybe weird enough you're going to think who is this guy So as you know, my name is Tom. So what's up? Nice to meet you all of that I am as Chris said I'm self-employed my company is press where you can find it on the web at press where dot co and I have been married to my high school sweetheart for eight years We have two crazy terrier muts. So we've had our entire marriage and we have two Beautiful daughters that everything that I do now I love my work, but everything that I do is a love of labor for my work But most importantly my family Now before we get started and you can raise your hands or not There's no right or wrong answer. So hopefully it's cool to raise your hand But I want to ask a couple of questions because it's going to help me tailor certain parts of this talk first how many of you Manage developers, maybe you're a developer yourself, but you manage them. Okay. Wow, great. You're brave people if How many of you are developers who answer to someone else either a manager or clients or Customers, okay, great. So either you manage them or you're answering to someone else. That's awesome I'm sorry. What if you're managing yourself that works that I do the same thing. So this will this will hit on all of those points So if you have heard me speak before you know that I normally encourage questions throughout the presentation But for the sake of time and for the sake of everything I want to cover that's not going to be the case through this Well, we will hold questions until the end but Enough of the introductory stuff. I want to start telling these two stories and as a heads up They're gonna sound seemingly unrelated at first and I'm going to use a little bit about where I'm from Being the southeastern United States for the first story and the second story will be more about computing But hang with me through it because they will converge by the end. Okay, so a Little bit before I got into computing or around the same time really I had convinced myself that somewhere along the way in my life I was going to play lead guitar in a rock and roll band and it's funny because So many guys and girls that I know somewhere in their teenage years. Yeah, I'm gonna do that too I'm gonna I'm gonna pick up an axe and I'm gonna shred and I'm gonna listen to maybe I'm gonna listen to journey or maybe I'm gonna listen to some other of my favorite bands and then I'm gonna learn it and start a band. It's gonna be great and I Believe this I sincerely believe this about myself Despite the fact that I also had an insatiable curiosity about computers and I'll talk about that a little bit more later Now I grew up Listening to country music. I know that sounds almost like a cliche Here's a guy from Georgia with maybe a little bit of a southern draw talking about country music I want to clarify for those of you who are in the audience I was raised listening to people like George Strait and Randy Travis and Travis Tritt and Johnny Cash and Hank Williams Junior and his father Hank Williams and Merle Haggard and Chris Christopherson the list goes on Now in terms of modern country music, I can't say I'm as big as a fan not because I think there's anything wrong with it It just doesn't appeal to my sense of music but Above all else what country music taught me from a musical standpoint the songs aren't that hard to learn especially old-school country but when it comes to What they're saying in the song There it is exceptionally good songwriting in the fact that it is telling a story And The story is often I know I know what the I know what the cliche is it's it's they're gonna talk about relationships beer and maybe a horse or a truck But these old guys like Johnny Cash, they they wrote about so much more And and you hear that from other people like Chris Christopherson and Merle Haggard I mean these guys wrote really compelling stories in a context of country music but I Really really love rock and roll and I really got into rock and roll the very first time so we had a local channel when I was in junior high school called the box and This was before TRL or total request on MTV where and it was a local channel where you call in you request a song that corresponded to a To a key code or a number, you know, maybe 101 or 527 or whatever and It would then queue up the video you wanted to see on this channel now how the channel made money I have no idea they had no commercials all they did was show videos and a phone number across the bottom and they had a ticker for what song and What is it that you and the key code for the song that you wanted to hear? but one day I was watching it was called the box music network and one day I was watching the box and The video for Metallica's Unforgiven 2 came on now for those of you who are Metallica fans You know that anything from load forward is It's very divisive, but I had never heard anyone play guitar Like I had heard Kurt Hammett and James Hetfield play at that time and I was hooked and I mean it was I'm gonna go request that video again and then in the meantime. I'm gonna hop on the internet and look these guys up So at the same time my dad had this huge Old record player sitting in our sun room when I say huge. I mean it's like the size of a couch This was a legit record player And I went I started digging through all of his old vinyl records And he had stuff from the Eagles and he had stuff from a band called Boston and he had stuff from a band called foreigner And I was like never heard of these people So I put on the records and it's just sit spend the record and listen And it was it was a whole other world listening to this stuff and I thought This is I want to learn to play guitar like these bands because this is awesome So normally when someone wants to learn to play guitar, they're gonna go buy the instrument or they're gonna borrow an instrument They're gonna sit down and try to learn it now It's much easier now to learn how to play the guitar through various online courses and things like that But I tend to be more of a fan of learning from people who have gone or who are a little further down the road than you So I began taking lessons and I was learning Top 40 music and for someone who wanted to learn rock and roll and wanted to learn how to shred Matchbox 20 as good as they are was not what I had in mind when learning to play the guitar But I went with it anyway And here's the with the one well There's a number of when there's a number of advantages that's brought with it But here's the one thing is that when I would then take my guitar to school and People would want to hear a song because I had learned all of these top 40 hits I could probably play the song that they knew and people for whatever reason There's something about hearing someone play the guitar and playing a song that you know That's just cool, especially when you're a teenager but This was a far cry from what I thought I was going to learn and I don't want to say I was discouraged But I was a little confused as to where I was headed So anyway, this was the very beginning or this was the proverbial gateway drug Into me learning more about the guitar as an instrument and about music in general So I had as I mentioned an insatiable curiosity both for computing and music and this curiosity for music ended up Leading me into learning more about scales and theory and progressions And so I had this foundation of okay this is how songs are constructed and how chords work and things like that and then I was able to learn a lot more about Just the instrument and and how you play it from a theoretical standpoint because I had a little bit of a foundation on songwriting and This then moved me into listening to a wider variety of Music, I mean I have a picture of Bob Dylan up here But then I started to dig into deeper cuts as they call them or deeper tracks of people that were not necessarily Released on records and these things these these were available on Serious satellite radio before the merger with XM There was literally a deep cuts channel and every time I was in the car I was listening to them the song sounded like they were recorded in a garage and Sometimes that's a interesting That provides a very interesting sound sometimes it sucks But you got to hear songs in their rawest form and you got to hear maybe demos or things that were just never released So it helped you grow in terms of listening to what these Guys and what these bands were writing on things that were never put on a record for the masses to hear Or for the radio to play or for the record company to sell now I Was on track I thought To have my rock and roll band so me and a few guys got together I had a rhythm guitarist and my brother was playing bass and I had lead guitar and We had a singer and a drummer and we played a couple of gigs and it was like oh my gosh This is the real thing there's people here listening to us and we're playing and some of its cover tunes And we had written one song together because everybody's got a white run song even if it sucks and You know I mean whatever but it was it was awesome and then that kind of fell apart for a variety of reasons So then at the very beginning of college I got in with another group and I played a few gigs with them and it was fantastic I was playing Some some music that I loved some that was I liked But I was getting to play lead guitar and I was getting to perform in front of people and I was getting to really just enjoy the music But then that didn't work out so My last ditch effort was not to Have a rock and roll band It was just to create a CD of original tunes And so the way that I did that was my brother who played bass He and I got a drum set and we taught ourselves how to play the drums and then he learned a variety of I mean he in terms of bass guitar just soared in terms of here his conceptual understanding of how to write great bass lines And then I would I learned how to Track We would mic up the drums. I learned how to track those I learned how to run everything through a mixer and then I learned how to put everything together on a Computer and then produce an MP3 So we went from having the box on TV before TRL now to where we're mixing MP3s on our computer so we made a CD of about five or six original tunes and That was it I didn't send it anywhere I didn't If I saying all of you would get up and leave so It was for fun. I learned a lot, but and I and I think one day Maybe I will still go back to music more so than I am now But the bottom line that I learned from as a young kid listening to create listening to our country music Going up to rock and roll going up to learning these songs trying to do bands Etc. Is that if I didn't know a song I could learn it because I had the foundational understanding of the principles that would allow me to sit down Hear the song pick it out or read the music or you know because the unit look up the tab and then play it or Another way to put it is if I didn't know a song I could learn it and then the more principles I knew the easier it was to learn new material and to write new material But then I Blanked and it all changed so as I said earlier around that time I got into I was also getting into computing now I was convinced that computing was going to be some part of my life even if I didn't know how it was going to lead me to where I am today and That that means both standing here in front of all of you talking about this is also building software for other people and That insatiable curiosity about music was just as strong for computing now My family's first computer was the Apple 2e and if you know when that came out, you know that I was a That was too young to really get a lot about the computer I knew that if I loaded these two huge five inch floppy disks in and I waited for it to It would load up this game and I would get to play it on a black and green screen and whatever I had an Atari so I would go sit down and play an Atari because it had color and it had better sound and It didn't make these crazy noises and it didn't require discs. I'll just pop a cartridge in but Shortly after we had an Atari we then got a Nintendo entertainment system And I remember getting a really curious on screen when I was playing by myself I remember seeing all these other characters interact on a screen Maybe it was Bowser or maybe it was Ganondorf or something like that I was and I got really curious to say how are these things knowing what to do on screen? How are they reacting to what I'm doing or for the for the for the for the lesser quality games? why are these guys not reacting to what I'm doing at all and I remember asking my parents that and my dad who had he's not involved in the computing industry at all But he said he's like they're these these gaming systems are computers and they run the games or the programs that they run And that stuck with me even though I didn't really know what to do with that So around eight years old we got our first PC and it was a 386 I think it had one or two megs of RAM it had windows 3.1 and the guy who brought it over to set it up for us showed us After he booted into Windows. He showed us a gameplay of doom and Wolfenstein and if you're an eight-year-old kid and you get a call and you get a computer after you've been playing Super Mario Brothers and you are shooting guns at demons or at these at these fictional Nazis on your screen you're hooked and So luckily at my parents were very into Wanting to stay current with the trend so the first internet service that we had was prodigy. Did anyone here use prodigy? Oh, wow. Okay. Awesome. So you remember prodigy Shortly after prodigy, we got America online and that is kind of what blew the doors open into me starting to get into programming As I like to put it it's really what was me standing at the top of the slippery slope that I am still on today so at 14.4 Bod modem I start I remembered my Parents saying that the video game systems were just computers running programs and I got curious as to here's this beige box and here are these things on the screen and I know I'm connected to a computer somewhere that we now call the cloud and How is all of this happening? so After spending about a year online and kind of exploring and and breaking the computer and getting it fixed and Breaking it again and getting it fixed again I decided to get on to the forums that are on AOL which you know, this was I mean There were there were there was there was use net and bulletin boards and things like that that were happening online at the time But in my super limited experience as a kid I knew AOL forums and AOL chat rooms, so I got involved there and I had stumbled across I remember reading about visual basic and I remember reading like this is a way to write programs for windows and then there was some jargon that I didn't understand because I was I Mean that was too young and I did not have any experience with When it came to start talking about APIs and memory management, whatever I was too young I just wanted to make cool things happen on my computer So I got a copy of visual basic 3 and I learned enough to begin manipulating the windows gooey So the first thing that I wrote was not a video game And the first thing that I wrote was not Something really cool or really useful for people. It was a program that some of you may know they were called progies and You would get online and I learned how to manipulate the because it was manipulating the windows interface I could then grab references to elements on the screen for America online And I could instant message my friends and since it was a program I could send them a flood of instant messages and kick them offline and ha ha look at what I did and then There became this kind of subculture of people who are who are writing progies and you would trade with people and you're like Oh, wow, there's people doing some really cool stuff And so you get there you say hey, I'll trade you these two programs for there I'll trade you these two progies for this progy and I will give you the email address of this person You can try his pro anyway became this whole like black market of these stupid programs and That is how I learned to write my first programs on windows, but then I learned about IRC so Popped on IRC began chatting with people. Wow. This is a vastly different culture I mean AOL was okay, but this is like cutthroat. So you play the part and you sit there and you watch and you kind of lurk and Then I got exposed to Linux and see C++ and some other some other programming languages like that well with With Linux this was before we were able to Where I lived it wasn't easy for me to download the Linux to any Linux distribution So I literally had someone mail me the CDs or the CDRs with a copy of I forget red hat Linux and I tried to install that on my machine But my PC at this time the graphics card was not advanced enough to run X windows So here I am running Linux which is supposed to be awesome by all the proclaims computer nerds And I can't get past the friggin command prompt to launch a GUI So anyway, I thought well, okay, I know enough to still work with the command line I know enough to work with a New programming language and run the compiler and so I got a book on C and they started talking about Memory management and pointers and linked lists and on trees and I'm like maybe 10 years old And I thought okay, I can't whatever so then I kind of put that aside and got into working on computers and tearing them apart And rebuilding them and it became a really expensive hobby I mean I started to take these computers apart and rebuild them Sometimes they worked sometimes they didn't sometimes they caught fire That's not a joke and then I would have to tell my parents the computers on fire again I think we're gonna need another one and so and so luckily we were able to Afford new computers and my parents were fortunate and Encouraging enough of despite the fact that I this was just a money pit. I was showing a keen interest in this and so they they got me a visual basic five Professional edition compiler along with two books and I read them cover to cover I did every exercise that they had I learned things that I did not know that I could do I stopped writing AOL progies I got really interested in socket programming Would write little chat applications really client server applications and things like that But this presented a problem because all of a sudden I was just as passionate about wanting to be a rock star as I was about wanting to be a computer nerd And so I had to make a choice Well when I went to college I opted to study computer science And I went to the Georgia Institute of Technology or Georgia Tech I don't know what I don't know even if you guys have heard of it out here but it's an engineering school and The computer science program is really strong and I went there and I loved everything I was learning and I learned it just how much I did not know and I learned how hard Or I learned how much how smart people really are and you're just like oh my gosh I'm never gonna be able to do what these people are doing but You push hard and you get better and you study and things get a little bit easier And we covered things that went all the way from logic gates to processors and RAM to networking and theory and operating systems Assembly here. I am back at sea except this time. I'm actually able to write it We talked about small talk and Java and so on and so on we did the web and we talked about emerging languages And at the time rails was a framework that was really beginning to gain traction But this bred a fear in me and when I say fear I don't mean that I'm giving this lip service Like I was legitimately scared and the question that keep comp that kept coming up for me was how am I supposed to keep up with All of this stuff well alone find a job so You've heard of FOMO or fear of missing out and I had Phone hodge which is fear of not having a job because I don't know every single thing We're studying and I have no idea how I'm supposed to absorb all of this and learn all of this and be ready for the interviews and be ready to tackle all of this and So while I was in school, I did a number of internships and at this point the internships You know they come in they tell you what they want they want to know about your projects and what you've worked on and then I was working with anything from classic ASP and VBScript and XML that was stored as a blob in a database and I Could that's I digress on that And and then I worked with a number of front-end libraries now before jQuery There was prototype JS, which was a really neat JavaScript framework, but that's where I really got my feet wet with JavaScript and I absolutely loved what I was doing and so out of school I worked as a software engineer for a major internet company. I had a fantastic boss The culture was great. I had great benefits. I Looked forward to going to work every morning. It was challenging. I was learning a lot but I knew that I wanted to pursue self-employment and this is where the stories Start to converge because when I began my journey on self-employment the question still remained or the question returned of how am I supposed to keep up with everything that's happening and This if you remember from earlier in the talk with music I said if I didn't know a song I could learn it and the more principles I knew that easier it was to learn new material and Though this was more or less found that are influenced by music It became a highly influential into how I began to view software If I don't know a technology, I can learn it the more principles. I know The easier it is to learn new material now principles would be something like object-oriented programming or procedural programming If you know the paradigm learning the language is secondary you can do that, but you've got to learn the principles Now for the sake of time I'm going to go ahead and proceed into the last part of this Presentation into which I want to talk about running a business now for those of us who are self-employed or maybe we're a manager Or we're at the top of a company or wherever is Technology helps drive our business if you have an online product or a piece of software the technology that you're using helps drive that business forward and We should also be striving to elegantly solve problems and by elegantly Simply put that does not mean we should cobble something together ship it and hope it works This is not the Millennium Falcon or Han Solo is saying you have me baby hold together This is a very well put together a piece of software that is solving a problem for someone and when we do it that way It helps us continue to grow our products And it helps our users because they have a very stable very easy to hopefully easy to use product But this can be distilled into two points and that is experience of what's available Or what you're using and awareness of what's out there. Maybe it's on the horizon Maybe it's already been Delivered or maybe it's about to be delivered, but it's experience and awareness. So how do you keep up with the technology? There are four points that I have first. I think Okay, okay First there are principles and you need to emphasize principles and foundations over technology and at some point in develop in the developers career You end up learning a variety of print of principles that are going to transcend The technology that's being used and when you're able to do that you're able to pick up a new language and a set of tools after some learning Now if you're a manager when you communicate something that your developers need to do make sure that you explain to them The why behind the business need because as a developer If I'm building something or if they're building something and they don't know why it is they're building it It's going to make it really hard to make a decision an architectural decision or a tech not technological decision on how to build it The second point is go deep rather than wide when I first started working for myself. I was doing vanilla web-based projects I was doing Ruby on rails and I was doing WordPress fast forward a few years I solely work in WordPress and attend in the technologies that are tangential to it I am far more a fan of being a I would rather not be a jack-of-all-trades and master of none but an expert in something or in a handful of some things And since I've made that choice. I've had more success. I've been more profitable and I have loved what I've done Three stay aware of what's out there. You've seen things this weekend such as maybe the WordPress REST API Maybe you've never heard of it before maybe you have but because you know, it's out there You can begin thinking about it how you might incorporate this in your Excuse me in your work, but this raises a question when there's things out there such as AngularJS And there's things out there such as React and there's things like the REST API and there's I mean you name it It's out there and you have no idea how you're supposed to keep up with everything that's out there While maintaining your business while continuing to be a good developer Connect with those who know more and that sounds so simple, right? Oh, I just need to talk to people who are wiser than me Well that idea of mentorship has been around for thousands of years and we read it in all these other fields Why would it be different than ours and in our specific field? We had the advantage that a lot of people don't and that we can read blogs You can write your own blog and invite comments. You can subscribe to newsletters Follow other people on Twitter as long as you can You know filter out the noise and you can talk to those who know other technologies just in case and this will help you Short-cut a lot of what other people may experience when having to learn new technologies Know that's a lot of information and I know that that was really fast But these four points are what I have found to be Consistently successful in keeping up with technology so I've gone from being Afraid of not having a job to being able to run a business To stay current with technology to be on top of what's out there to know how to learn what's out there and to continue to Move my business forward So thank you very much for having me, San Diego You have a fantastic and a beautiful city if you have any questions at all for whatever times remaining I'm open to that Okay, we'll have questions in the back. Thank you very much for listening