 I first met Aaron Patterson at, oh, it was Karim Havachi. Somewhere in the pizza place in Seattle. Red line. Red line. Want to do that thing? That thing? Oh, yeah, come on up. And at the Seattle RV, the Ruby group up there. And a couple years later, again, that have amazing friends, friends will kick in. And I decided, I'm done with the freelance contract working world. I want to get into some sort of salary, full-time job. And he and John Barnett and Fish and Chips were working on making more people look on ad using the Fibonacci templates. And they needed me to call me in. And I got the job or whatever. So we battled through the trenches of online advertising together. And then later on, the trenches of the buzz.com together. I've had a good fortune of working with Aaron a few times. And Ron has something to say first. That was a really great intro. Really great. But I have something to say. This guy is a really unique figure in our community. He is the only person who actually has his own theme song. And so a few people didn't know what that was all about. So they thought, we'd like to know a little bit more about this kind of love character. So I'd like to perform for you an interpretation of a song, Words by Josh Schuster. Music by Jim Warrick. Let me put up my costume. Join in if you know this one. Zoom as wide. He's a ruby brigadier. And he's the nicest guy that is here. Ten to love Japanese because. OK, so thank you. OK, OK. So TMI with Ten to love. Very happy to be here. And the first thing I want to say is I want to talk a little bit about Evan and Shane. And so my fiancee described to me the relationship between Evan and Shane. And I just have to repeat it. It's kind of strange. She has a strange sense of humor. But Evan is the tree. And Shane is the mushroom. They go together. And let me like, I'll tell you how they go together. I'm also an amateur of my colleges. That is somebody who studies mushrooms. And so it's kind of interesting. She is Japanese. And the word for mushroom in Japanese is kinoko, which literally translated means child of tree. And I actually think that's really interesting because trees and mushrooms actually have a symbiotic relationship that work together. The way they do that is the roots, if you will, the mushroom, the mycelium will grow around, actually surround the roots of the tree. And they'll provide carbon dioxide to the tree. And the tree will provide nutrients back to the mushrooms. Kind of interesting because if you want to go find certain particular mushrooms, you go look for particular trees because those trees and mushrooms work together. So I thought that was kind of funny and cute. And I wanted to share that with you. And oh, yes. So I made a mistake. Shane invited me to speak at this conference, and I was super excited too because I thought it was a conference about Farmville. I love Farmville. I thought I was the only one. So I was like, ah, sweet. Everybody who loves Farmville, let's talk about Farmville. So I have like a whole speech prepared about the most effective farming technique. But then I found out at Farmhouse Conference, I was like, oh, OK. I guess I have to talk about something a little bit different. But since we're having a story time now, I want to tell you my most memorable story of Shane. I'm totally going to embarrass him now. I've probably ruined the story. So oh, very important thing, the stories that I'm going to tell you today may or may not be true. OK? So one day, Shane would go to dinner with us. And we went to dinner at a Korean restaurant. And Shane is vegan. And he ordered this pancake there. They have a vegetable pancake. It's a vegetable pancake. And the guy brought it, and we were having dinner. And Shane's like, what is this? He hands it to me, and I'm like, ah, that's sweet. And I'm like, and it's delicious. And Shane's like, I ordered a vegetable pancake here. It says vegetable pancake. What's the deal? And so he's like, he gets the owner of the restaurant. And the guy's like, Korean guy. And he's like, yeah, this is the vegetable pancake. And Shane's like, well, how does seafood in it? And he's like, yeah, it's a vegetable pancake. And Shane's like, well, where does it say that there's seafood on this? It says vegetable pancake. And the guy says, oh, it's written right there in Korean. I thought it was a sad ending because he didn't get to have his pancake. But I found the story amusing, so I wanted to share it with you. But continuing on from that, I have three main topics I want to talk about is lying and trust. And I want to talk about superpowers. And the last thing I want to talk about is taking risks. And it actually may not particularly be in that order. So we'll see. So I grew up in Salt Lake City. And it was kind of strange for me. My childhood was kind of strange because I grew up in a non-Mormon family in Salt Lake City. But I didn't know that it was strange until I moved away from Salt Lake City. But yeah, I grew up there. And they would send, the Mormon church would send missionary storehouse frequently. And one of the interesting things is that they'll do anything to give you the first reading, anything. And my dad, he had to replace a water heater diet. We had a 50 gallon water heater. And we were all at school. Nobody was home to help him with this. The plug, the drainage plug was just completely plugged up so he couldn't drain the water out. And 50 gallons of water is about 400 pounds plus the weight of this freaking thing. So he can't move it by himself. But then these missionaries show up at the house like, hey, we want to do that for you. And he's like, all right. Why don't you help me with this water heater? So they helped him move it out. And totally awesome. They gave him a first reading. He offered them a beer. They said, no, thanks. So my friend, I went to high school in Salt Lake City. And my best friend in high school, he would borrow his uncle's car. And by borrow, I mean, steal it. And would come pick me up. And we would go joy-riding. And I lived in the poorer part of Salt Lake City. And right across the street from me lived a Japanese family. And their son had this crew. And they called themselves the Oriental Mafia. And I was a guest member or whatever. And they'd do gang signs and whatnot. But I wasn't really involved too much. But they would have these fast and furious car meetup type things right across the street from me. So my friend shows up one night to get me. And the way this worked was I would sneak out of the window of my bedroom and we would go do our thing. He comes by and I fell asleep. So I was totally just totally asleep. And the mafia was having their car club meeting. And my friend was parked in front of our house. And he starts honking the horn to wake me up and give me to come out. And I just totally slept through it. And it turns out what happened was he kept honking the horn. And then these guys thought he was honking at them. And so they're like, oh, he's trying to start shit with us. And my friend was like, oh, fuck, what am I going to do? So he starts driving away. And then they start chasing him. And he doesn't know my neighborhood very well. So eventually he turns down this dead end street. And he stopped at this dead end street. And they block him off. He can't leave. And so he gets out of the car. And they're like, hey, what's up? Are you trying to start shit with us? And he's like, no, I'm coming to pick up my friend. And they're like, who's your friend? And he's like, Aaron. And they're like, oh, Aaron Patterson? He's like, yes. And they're like, oh. OK. And let him go. So that was an interesting story he told me. But when we were out doing these, the times that I did wake up and go with him, we would talk about lame superpowers. If we had superpowers, what would be a dumb one? My favorite one to talk about was having magnetic hair. But not super magnetic. Not shit would come flying at you or anything. But store paperclips and stuff. And it seemed like it would be fairly useful. But maybe, now that I'm older and a bit more hairy, probably inconvenient. So anyway, I went to high school in Salt Lake City. Started going to college. And then to pay for college, I worked at a website that I got to think of a fake name for it now. Awesomecarsight.com is where I worked. I worked at awesomecarsight.com. You may have heard of it. I don't know. I really liked working there. It was pretty fun. And I totally forgot where I was going with this. So I continued working there. But I worked there as a programmer. I worked there as a programmer to pay for college to learn to be a programmer. That's what I decided I wanted to do is I wanted to be a programmer. And it was kind of strange. I got this job basically out of high school. And I was doing it to pay for school. And I kind of, oh, wow. Actually, I kind of love doing this. And I'm starting to get better at it. And they kept giving me more responsibilities at work. And eventually I was like, well, all right. I don't have time for school anymore. I'm going to school to do the thing that I'm already doing. So eventually I just dropped out and stopped continuing the school. And I don't know. It's kind of weird because my parents grew up very poor. They grew up in South Dakota as both of their families were ranchers. And they were very poor people. My grandparents did not go to college, not finish school. My parents did, and worked themselves out of this situation, moved to cities, and became middle class people. So going to school was very important to my family. So I felt kind of bad that I had dropped out of school. I studied programming a lot. I loved it. I became good at it, succeeded in my career. And I attributed that to trying to make my family happy. And I attributed it to that for a long time. But later on I've realized that the reason I actually do it is because I just love it. I found the thing that I want to do. I want to be the best at it. So I study it as hard, as much as possible. And that was the actual reason I started doing it. So I found a goal through this. Even though I didn't finish school, I found a goal. And that was actually what was really important to me. But while I was working at Awesome, oh, OK. Lying is hilarious. So while I was working at awesomecarstife.com, we had a secretary there. Her son was famous. And I was not very good at celebrity at the time. I'm much better at celebrities now. So I don't remember who he is, but he was very famous. He was one of people's top 10 most beautiful people. And she came to me. And she said, well, you're very smart. And she was Mormon, and her son is Mormon. And she was concerned that her son was having pre-marital sex. Because he's famous and out, I think, here in LA. And she said to me, hey, can you break into his email account? And let me know, tell me, is he doing it? So I can read this and check up on him and stuff. And the first thing that comes to mind is, what the fuck? Why are you doing this to your kid? So then immediately, the second thing that comes to my mind is, ah, I'm going to fuck with her. So I tell her, well, yeah, I do actually know how to break into people's email accounts. But the thing is, I was convicted of felony hacking. And I'm not actually even supposed to be working with computers right now. So I'd rather just not do this and keep myself on the down low here and just continue with my job. And so 30 minutes later, I had somebody come to my desk and be like, are you really a hacker? I heard that you're actually a hacker. Oh, yeah. About an hour later, I had the CEO of the company call me into the office. Our company was only 14 people. He was like, I heard that you are a hacker. And I'm like, dude, no. I told him the story. I'm like, no, I'm just fucking with him. She wanted to break into her son's email account. So I lied to her to get her embarrassed for it, basically. And so when I was practicing this, I don't understand how I tied this into the next thing, so I was just going to do it. Continue. So as I work on, I do a lot of work in open source. I work for the man. I work for AT&T, and I do open source software all day. And I love doing it. I love working with the developer community. But one of the important things I found is when working with customers, even before I was working as a library developer, even working with customers, I found a very important thing to me was honesty with the people I was working with. Honesty with my customers, trusting people. It was very important, because let's say you get somebody who sends a bug report. Every time I get a bug report, I trust that this person is actually having this problem. And I think this is an important attitude to have when you're doing development on a particular library. And the thing is, they might have something off to the side, something that's not related causing the issue, or maybe it's nothing to do with your library. Or maybe they haven't described the problem very well, but they are actually having a problem. You need to trust them if they're having this. So what I try to do is I try to educate these people into how to report a better bug, or figure out exactly what is wrong with it, and then educate them so that in the future, well, either A, they're not bugging me anymore about something that's not wrong, or B, even better, they help other people the way that I'm helping them, or C, I actually fix a bug in my code, which is awesome. I also think that it helps build a very good community around the software that you're developing to, because people want to come back and help you out. So the last thing I want to talk about is taking risks. My timer shut off. I don't know if I'm running ahead. I'm very nervous, because I have no slides. So I can't remind myself what I'm supposed to be talking about. So awesomecarcompany.com. I was a parole programmer there. Then from there, I moved to socialnetwork.com in Seattle. I work at socialnetwork.com. And I have to tell you, I love. So OK, I've worked for large companies, and I've worked for small companies. And I like working for large companies, particularly because it's more hilarious. I think probably I'm just like, I have a sixth sense of humor as the problem. When I see horrible, stupid processes, I'm just like, I can't believe I have to fill out all this paper work. And I just love it. And also the characters, the characters of these giant companies, they're crazy. So I want to tell you about one of the particular characters I had at socialnetwork.com. So when I started working at socialnetwork.com, I was a parole programmer there. And we hired a guy to be a middle manager. And he was, I don't know, my manager, something, above me but below the CTO. And this guy always had Sun Tzu's Art of War on his desk. And so I already thought he was kind of a douche. And he somehow crafted himself to get his boss fired, who's a CTO, and move himself into the CTO position. And he would go around the office with a shopping cart and say, oh, you don't need to have a desk. You can have a normal office like me, literally a shopping cart from a store, pushing it around in our office. And he would go around to each person every day and say, is there anything I can do for you today? And I'm like, let me continue working. And sometimes, every person, he would do this, everyone in the IT department, everyone who's underneath him. And one person said, wash my car. And he was like, OK, which one's your car? So he went and washed her car. And I'm just like, OK, all right, awesome. So I still don't want him to wash my car, because I don't really want to owe anything to the dude who keeps Sun Tzu's Art of War on his desk. So that's fine, whatever. But he wanted to leave his mark on the company. And the way that he wanted to do that is he wanted to convert us from modpro to Java. And this was around 2002 or 2003 when the bubble had burst. And he was like, all right, we're moving to Java. Well, at first, he wanted it to be a grassroots thing. And all the developers said, no, this is a bad idea. We shouldn't just go rewrite our website in this. We're doing fine. And eventually it just turned into you will rewrite it in Java or you will have to go look for other work. And I'm like, hello. The job market isn't so awesome now. I think I'll learn Java. So I became a Java programmer. And this guy was just so weird. We had, I was on the team, the small team, to do our first conversion to Java. And everybody on the small team had motorcycles, except me. I had a scooter. After we got this first cycle done, oh, and it's powder blue. After we got this first cycle done, he's like, all right. Let's see if you guys like, I want you guys to ride your motorcycles through the office. And I'm like, I don't think that's a good idea. This doesn't sound like it'll turn out well. So the other guys are like, all right, fine, we'll do it. So they rode their motorcycles through the office. And I did not participate. And it didn't turn out so well for the office. I mean, broken things and marks on the carpet and whatnot was not that awesome. But so this entire time that I was working with this guy, or the CTO, apparently, members of our executive team, we had in our office, we had a wall of mailboxes where everybody got their mail. So everybody in the company had their own little slot where they would get their mail. And there were, like, I didn't know this well was happening. But members of the executive team were getting these letters put into their mailboxes, like anonymous letters that were like ransom style notes that had a poor grammar and some of that typewriters, some of them. Some of them were literally like the cut out letters and like put them on a piece of paper. And they would say things like, you need to fire this guy because he's a Jew or something like this. Like crazy shit, right? And they put hidden cameras into it. Like somehow they secretly put hidden cameras into where the mailbox to monitor the mailboxes. It turned out it was crazy CTO doing it. They caught him red handed on camera. He would come in to the office early, deliver these letters. And it was all like his Machiavellian plan to like, honestly, I have no fucking clue what you're supposed to accomplish here. I am now the bestest guy at socialnetwork.com. I don't understand the motivation, but dude was totally crazy. He immediately got canned. I don't think I have a particular point to the story. And it's story time, right? So I wanted to share that story. But anyway, I'm working. He gets canned and move on with my life. We get somebody else new. I'm still, you know, the wake of this terror is that now we're switched to Java by some crazy dude. And we can't just like go back, right? It's not like we don't say there wasn't nobody said, oh, hey, crazy guy made this decision. Maybe it wasn't a good decision. Nobody said that. Like no, we're going to keep going forward with crazy guys. OK, all right. So we switched completely to Java. I was a Java developer for many years. And then I started to hate my job a lot. Hated being a Java developer. When I was a mod developer, all the awesome stuff that we have with Rails, like instantly reload the page and see your shit live, we had all that. We had it all. And we moved from that to 10-minute compile time and five-minute server startup time. And I just wanted to shoot myself. And the entire time that I was this Java dev, I'm like, man, Pearl 6 is going to come out. Oh, we'll be in Pearl 6? We'll be back on that. I won't have to worry about this. I can move on with my life. And I'm like, it's just not coming. Years, years, years, years, just not coming. And finally, one guy at work is like, hey, man, you should check out this Ruby thing. You should check out Ruby. So I started learning Ruby. This was pre-Rails. I'm just learning it as another news scripting language. And I'm like, learning it, I'm like, oh, my god. This is what Pearl 6 is supposed to be. This is what I've been waiting for. I love it. And then Rails came out. And I started working with that all my spare time. And I'm like, oh, my god, things are so easy. And it became incredibly depressing to me because tasks that took me all day to do at work would take me like two minutes in this other thing. And I'm like, seriously, I'm spending all day fussing around with XML configuration files and building this stupid application when I could have done it in like two minutes over here. It was insanely depressing. And after a while, one of the guys that worked quit and started a startup company where I went to work with Shane eventually. And he contacted me and he said, hey, do you want to come work for us? You get to work on Ruby. We're going to do it in Rails and you could be a Ruby developer. And this was back in, shoot, when was this? 2006, yeah. It was not easy to get a Ruby job then. And he's like, the catch is, you have to take a 33% pay cut. And I'm like, ugh. Ugh. 33% ugh. And I'm like, but this is, I was so miserable at my job. I was just like, fuck it. I'll do it. So I quit my job, took a huge risk, huge pay cut, go to this place, and started doing something that, working in a language that I love. And I thought what was interesting is that Matt said, I want to make this language for developer happiness, like I do this for developer happiness. But what I thought was weird is that the time when I discovered Ruby is actually what made me insanely depressed. I'm like, you made this for happiness? But I feel like, shit, why is that? I don't understand. But anyway, I took this risk, went to the startup company, and became so much happier. And I feel insanely lucky that now I can demand my Java salary again as a Ruby programmer. It makes me feel very good. But life went on with that. And then eventually, I got a job at AT&T. I was tired of being a startup guy. Oh, I mean, telephone company. I got a job at telephonecompany.com. And I was really tired of working in a startup scene. I worked at a larger socialnetwork.com thing, where it was basically like nine to five. I could have a real life outside of work. It's something where I'm spending all day, every day, working as soon as I wake up, boom, working until as soon as I go to bed, working. And it just burned me out so much. And one of the things I hated about working at this company is that I am a morning person. And most developers that I know are not morning people, including my boss at this company. So I would get in and be working at 8. I'd be in before 8, working. And I'd be like, all right, I am tired, dying. I need to go home. So 6, 6.30, I'm like, I got to go. And my boss is like, what the fuck? He's only been here for a little while. And it's because he showed up to work at 10 or 11. I'm like, dude, I've been here all morning. I don't understand. So I got very tired of that. I wanted to go back to a larger company with crazy people, although I haven't met crazy people at this job. And anyway, well, at AT&T, I was out one night. Well, I'm working at telephonecompany.com. And I was out one night with my fiance. And we were drinking a lot. And I was like, I really want to be an open source developer. I want to code open source. I want to write code for other developers to use for free and complain to her about it. And she's like, you know what you should do? She'd give a presentation to your boss. And I'm like, that is a great idea. Well, I'm hammered. So I go, let's go home now. We go home immediately. I fire up keynote. I'm like, put together all these slides. And then I text message my boss. I'm not sure what time it was, maybe midnight or something. I'm like, I have a talk to you tomorrow. And that was like a Friday night. And he returns the text message to me. He's like, OK. So I get on the chat with it. I'm like, you know, I sleep in the morning. I'm like, oh, did I do what I think I did? OK, well, why don't I just follow through with this and see what happens. So I get on the instant message with him. And I have a presentation to give you. And I can just see in his face, he's like, fuck, he's going to quit. And I'm like, OK. Here, I give him a presentation. And what I told him was, I had done all this. I did all this open source stuff in the community before. And many of the developers there used my software. But I didn't really have time to maintain it anymore. And I have all these things, like I'd made these things to make our development team more efficient. And I need more time to do this. And I want to be able to make our development team more efficient. So bring the bottom line up, right? I don't know if that's the right phrase. I don't know if it's this thing. But make it so that they're faster, better, or whatever. And I was completely surprised when he just said, OK. You want to do this full time? Like, yes. He's like, OK. Wait. Oh? Really? He's like, yeah. After a month or two, we'll take a month or two to get you transitioned over to this position. And it took a little bit longer than a month or two. But he actually followed through. And I was like, OK, I have this position doing this. So at telephonecompany.com, I've been an open source developer for over a year now. And I think that the big lesson I learned from these things was to take risks. Because, I mean, really, to me, life's too short to be not striving for the things that we want to do, right? I mean, even if you fail, it doesn't matter. You move on. And you just keep trying until you get to that position and do that thing that you want to do. So that's really the thing that I want to leave you with. So take risks. Continue on with your life. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah, where did your handle tenderlobe come from? Aside from the obvious being the most out of it. So I was hanging out with some girlfriends of mine. Probably it was a gathering of women and me. And we were hanging out watching America's Next Top Model or something like that. And they're like, OK, what's the grossest thing that a guy can say to you? And my friend says, oh, the grossest thing that he can say is, I want to make tenderlobe to you. And I was like, that is hilarious. Boom, register tenderlobemaking.com. The next day, I send her an email. Check out this website, or I put it on. So I guess I got it to troll a friend. You're welcome. I do this whole programming world. And last week, we spoke about how programming can be very isolated. You see very extroverted. Do you ever find, at times, that writing code is programming and you're writing it to be isolated? Do that work that still is part of you wanting to go out or be around people? Actually, my extrovertedness is a lie. I am actually an introvert. I love interacting with people, but the way that I recharge is by being by myself. So I will probably go home and be drained tomorrow. But I work by myself all day. I work from home. But most of my pair programming and interactions happen online. So what we do is we'll pair a program online. I do most of my interactions online. So I mean, I guess I'm not really alone, but nobody's sitting next to me or anything. I'm not wearing pants. Yes, that is correct. I do my job pantsless. Any other questions? One of the best things about working from home is every day is pants optional. So my favorite story, I guess this isn't a story about I was in your life, but my favorite or a shared thing with you is every day of the week, whether you're on projects that you're always the happiest about or working on a feature of a new year and the trenches means at least it's Friday. At least it's Friday. Yes, depressing humor gets us through the day. There are certainly some characters at the place. Some full sleep and mid-sentence. Some pictures of that person exist on the internet. OK, tender love. Thank you.