 I wasn't expecting to do this, so I didn't bring a laptop. But I'll be looking at my phone for quotes and stuff. So, I'm Amanda, and I currently live in Austin. I've been living here for a little over a year, and it's fantastic. Those of you who live here, no. But before I lived in Austin, I was in New York City, and for those of you who've been to New York City or have lived there, New Yorkers are stereotyped as being sometimes unfriendly, I can say that, because I live there, and very work focused. And one day, when I was living there, I found myself looking at stars. And I was looking at them, and I was like, wow, these are really beautiful. And realized that sometimes in day-to-day life, I never really took the time to look at those and to look at nature and be one with that. And that, I think, has to do with today's connection. I know that I have experienced a phenomenon of going to Facebook and then Twitter and then checking GroupMe to see if I have new messages and immediately going back to Facebook and realizing I was just there 30 seconds ago. And I never have to be bored, but that comes at a price sometimes, because I think that we let precious moments slip away. And in spite of some of these reflections, I really enjoy my career as a web developer. And I know some of you are probably thinking, oh no, this is gonna turn really preachy and she's gonna tell us all to turn our computers and not use them anymore. And I'm not going to do that, because I really love using my computer as well. But I wanna talk about balance and how can we balance using technology and our careers as developers or whatever we do with the feeling that the way that we consume technology just isn't right. When I was in college, I had a friend whose BlackBerry was like an extension of his arm and we would be at like a meal and he'd get an email and say, hold on and stop the conversation, this email is time sensitive. And in retrospect, it was really the conversation that was time sensitive. All of the emails are gonna be there later. And so we have this society, this need to always get back to things right away and immediacy. And so there is an interview that I read from psychologist Sherry Turkle, who wrote a book that admittedly I haven't read, but I've read the interview. And in the interview, she says, the idea that we should put each other on pause as though we were machines in order to attend to those who are not present has become commonplace. It needs to be examined. I don't think that this is how we wanna treat each other. And many agree with that idea. In fact, if you Google the words social media creates the first autocomplete result is social media creates isolation. A relatively recent story that stuck with me was that of the suicide of Madison Holleran, who was a 19 year old track runner at UPenn. And in January, 2014, she took her life by jumping off a nine story parking garage. So ESPN published an article about this because she was a runner. And the article reads the life Madison projected on her own Instagram feed was filled with shots that seemed to confirm everyone's expectations. Of course she was loving her first year of college. Of course she enjoyed running. Her mom remembers looking at a photo on her feed and saying, Madison, you look so happy at this party. Mom, Madison said, it's just a picture. And I think that story really brings to light something that we wanna think about, which is that we generally only share the positive elements of our life. So if you go to Facebook or Instagram, you're seeing the best aspects of everybody else's life. And so we begin to feel like we feel alone in our mixed emotions. We have sadness, which like joy is universal, but it's not projected. And I wanna point to a recent survey conducted by Girl Scouts. And in this survey, 74% of girls agreed that other girls tried to make themselves look quote cooler than they are on social networking sites. So that was a little bit about the problem. And now the question is, what is the solution? And I think it's actually something that has been spoken to multiple times today, which is mindfulness and awareness. So I love technology and I love my job, and I think we should be aware on both a societal level and a personal level. Now on a societal level, just I think we should be aware that social media and technology can be dangerous, right? When we post all the positive aspects and try to give back to society by using it in a positive light. One company that really does that very well is DoSomething.org. That's a company that I look up to a lot because they use technology to spread social good to young people. I've never worked for them. I'm not repping them. I just think that they do great work and they have 3.6 million members, which are young people who they encourage to get involved with something. And finally, on a personal level, I think it's just very important to balance using technology with noticing what's around us. I have one final anecdote, which is that while discussing this topic with a friend, he pointed out an interesting phenomenon. On the F train in Brooklyn, there's a point at which the train comes above the ground. If you look out the window, you can see the Statue of Liberty and when you come out, you'll notice that a lot of kids do. They'll go up against the windows and look at the Statue of Liberty. However, the adults all go back to their phone because they've received service again. So just like anything else, consuming technology, even for us engineers, is about balance. So I issue myself a challenge and it's really easy to get complacent even in the year and a half or so since I started thinking about this, which is to notice something new every day. So feel free to join me. We can all as engineers and tech people strive for a future full of innovation, but let's try not to forget beauty. So there are other areas where we need to seek balance, but we didn't and so the world got worse and worse until natural food was just a pixelated memory. But luckily, we had science and even more luckily, in the ground we found these pellets that we could use to manufacture food and energy, everything that we thought we had completely used up. And we created these machines, these pellet acquisition capsules or packs for short to help us process these. So that's the backstory of this book that I released. It's now free on my website so you can go through all of it. And what it does is it, aside from telling you this heart-rending story of apocalypse, it teaches you some JavaScript. It assumes that you don't know anything about JavaScript and it uses modern JavaScript ES6. It also teaches you HTML5 Canvas, which is an API that you might not know of. Well, you know of it. You might not have used much before. And it teaches you just a little bit of Ember just because it makes some things easier. So it starts off super simple. This is just the code to draw a circle. There, there's how we start. And then it gets pretty complicated into some stuff, game loops and things like that. And this is the main loop for this right here. So you're collecting lots of pellets to feed your entire society. Very useful. So you can go, I don't have time in five minutes to share everything in the book, but you can go read it for free. But if you don't wanna learn all that, you just want the easy mode. If you're running an Ember application, then you can install Pacman and you can even create your own levels and then just with one little, that's handlebars, that's like our version of ERB. Just one line. Have Pacman in your app. So that's the GitHub if you wanna look at the code. And if you're interested specifically in Ember, you can go learn about it here. That's not free. But, but what is free is following me on Twitter. All right. Hey everyone. My name is Brandon McKinnis. I work for a company called Modern Message. Modern Message represent, woo, in Dallas. And though I am a dev by day, I am a voice actor by night. I do a lot of stuff for Funimation in Dallas and I dub a lot of anime and some video games. I play a character named Corteo in an anime currently broadcasting called 91 Days. I play a character named Erlong Shen. Yeah, Erlong Shen. In a game called Smite and I'm also in a radio spot for Mr. Rooter. If you hear a guy that is in a very severe state of grief from a plumbing disaster, that is me on the radio. So one thing that I'm really passionate about is the cross pollination between seemingly disparate fields. So for me, I've learned a lot in voice acting about things that have helped me as a developer and I think it can help us all if that knowledge is shared. When you're working in an environment where there is strife, it harms your productivity. If you are in a harmonious environment, it sustains that productivity. So one thing that contributes to strife very much so is miscommunication. When you have stakeholders and product owners interfacing with developers, there's usually a large disparity in the personality types of those different roles and the way those personalities communicate. So if there are miscommunications, it causes strife, pushes down productivity. So I thought to myself, hey, something that I've learned in voice acting that has helped me immensely as a developer is how to deal with these communications issues. So to be effective, you pretty much need two different things. One, you need to understand what needs to be done or what the product owner wants and two, you have to have the competency to achieve that. So in voice acting, if I'm in a commercial spot and an agency representative says, that was a good read, but make it friendlier. I go, okay. My technical brain immediately goes, do I need to increase the pitch on that? Do I make that faster? Do I smile while I say it? What do I do? But I can't say that because if I say, do you want me to increase tempo, they're gonna look at me with a completely blank face. I can't say that. I have to tailor my communication style and usually in those sessions that we just try something, try something, try something until it works. That's probably not the best approach if you're developing. Let's just try this and let's try this and let's try this. Meanwhile, a year later, your product is not done. So that's terrible, right? But in the same way, if you're trying to understand the needs of someone and you have a product owner that says, okay, well, we have a system where in our game or in our whatever, if they achieve something, they get a badge. Let's say you've built that out and it supports one badge and suddenly your product owner says, it has to support two badges in a week and you go, oh, well, you're gonna need to communicate to that person what they need to take into account for that, right? And so it's immensely important for you to tailor that communication style so they understand but you have an obstacle there. You can't just say, well, these are the technical reasons why. They're not gonna understand because their work is fundamentally different from yours. So even though it takes a lot of work for you to sort of extrapolate that communication style towards, well, it affects other parts of the system and this is why if you get them on your side, you restore harmony and you can develop in a much more stress-free environment and everyone's happier, which is why this is important. The second part, competence. If you're competent, you're gonna be able to get stuff done. So in voice acting, if a director says to me, okay, this character needs to have grit and a Northern UK accent. If I don't know what that is, I'm not gonna be able to talk to him like this. It's not gonna work out, right? So if you can't do that, then it doesn't work out. That's the second part. Kind of like, well, if a stakeholder comes to you and says implement a payment system, if you have no idea where to even start, that's not gonna turn out well, right? So there's that. So my theme here is that miscommunications can cause so many problems and communication, I think, is fundamentally important to how we develop and how people communicate and how fast we get things done without feeling overwhelmed, without burning out, without stressing. And so that is what I have been thinking about. And I'm thinking about putting this into a larger talk. I worked in Japan for a year and a half as an interpreter and a programmer and I learned a lot of things with that, too. So if the response on this is good, I may turn this into a full talk. So tweet me about it if you have any questions. And again, I'm Brandon McKinnis, water message. Oh, we're hiring, by the way. So there's that, too. So thanks, everyone. Thanks, Brandon. So while I'm not hiring, I am paying you to be my friend if you're interested. A few months ago, I went hiking in Banff and Jasper National Park in Canada with a... Okay, I'm sorry, I'll let you. I'm all the leering that I could say. He was supposed to stand up here and just say, wrong. A few months ago, I went hiking in Banff and Jasper National Park with a woman who has a PhD in bare biology, which means I went hiking with the Banff of Banff. One of the most interesting parts of our day was when she described a research study that the parks and universities in Alberta were doing in combination with the Canada Pacific Railroad. There are only around 70 grizzlies in the Banff and Jasper National Park area that call those places home. And one of the most common ways they die is by chilling on the railroad tracks and getting hit by the trains. So this obviously derails the Canada Pacific, both literally and figuratively. So they had an investment in it and actually spent a million dollars to research why bears were hanging out and why when the train was coming they weren't moving. So there's three different ways that you get around Banff. You can hike, which takes a while and you'll probably get eaten. You can drive, but you could also risk hitting a bear there as well. Fortunately they've built natural land bridges and tunnels which are super cool. Natural vegetation covering these bridges and it's just for wildlife to cross over or under. But they're multi-million dollars, each one individually. So it's not really like the cheapest route. And the third way is there's the railroad system which also lugs cargo through the parks. So through this research project, they've discovered some really interesting things. Like that the trains are actually dropping grain along the way and that's why bears are really attracted specifically to the tracks rather than other areas where they actually have to put effort into finding food. They're pretty lazy like us. Past food. And let's see, I lost my place. I've never done this. It's so much scarier up here than it is in the back row. Oh yeah, so bears were also, after talking to the conductors, they found out that bears were actually running away from the train while the train was coming and wailing its horn or whatever version of noise that's called. So it's actually really depressing for the conductors to watch the bear running away from them as they hit it. So really psychologically damaging for the conductors as well. So the study findings don't actually come out until next month. This was just anecdotal stuff from the person that I hung out with. And I found it really interesting because I do not only development but also design and it reminded me a lot of the user flows that we have to have in our apps. I work in health tech where there's a lot of legal reasons why we might want to or need to include a user flow that we don't actually want the users to follow. So something that not only applies to health tech but other things as well as like terms and conditions, you have to provide that but you don't really want your users to read every line and sit there forever. You want them to get to the next step. So kind of hiding that but still making it available and not getting sued about it. That reminds me of the fact that in these parks they have to have the railroad tracks. They can't put a fence because animals need to be able to cross. They can't put bridges and tunnels because those are multi-million dollars each. So they really need to figure out a way indirectly to just convince bears to stay away and once they are there to actually get out. It also reminds me of the concept of King Baby. I don't know if anyone knows what that is but in design your users are lazy so like babies sleep all day and don't walk and they're not super smart. They're just gonna like clank, clank, clank, whatever and that's really derogatory to my friend Micah. So I'm now going to think of them as my users as a grizzly bears and big and hairy and stupid and lazy. That's it. Oh, it didn't go through my pretty pictures. This is me and my grandpa in Banff and this is the pretty lake and those are maybe the things that bears eat. That's a glacier. It looks like a cake. It's my cool grandpa again. Oh, I thought that was a video. Maybe it is. Oh yeah, it's an avalanche on a glacier. It's pretty cool. And it was really loud. This is bad, bad audio, but it's pretty cool. Okay, that's it. Thank you. I'm gonna talk to you about human empowerment and pro wrestling and what we in tech can learn from that as time is down. All right, sorry for that ghetto intro. I just really wanted to get some music in there. All right, so yeah, I'm gonna talk about pro wrestling and before you even ask, yes, I know it's fake. You know what else is fake? Movies, we still watch them. Okay, shut up. Let's continue. So if you were a woman in wrestling, maybe like in the late 1990s, up until a few years ago, it really sucked to be you because you really have to conform to this norm of being tall, blonde, tan, and having big boobs. And if you really wanted to wrestle and be actually taken seriously as an athlete, you really couldn't do that because you were stuck doing things like this. So, and then also stuff like this. Women were actually told you cannot throw punches. You can't wrestle. You need to do this stuff. And WWE was wondering why aren't people watching? Why are people walking out during these matches? How can we make people care? And this was a combination of policies that WWE enacted, but then also how different women started trying to change the business or from women. So here's an example of a woman that, her name is Becky Lynch and she had a huge hard time trying to get, we call it get over. It really means try to be popular. And that's because she got stuck doing stupid gimmicks like this, dancing around, because she was Irish. So of course you're gonna do Lord of the Dance and dress like a leprechaun, and nobody cared. That's until her and a few other women decided, you know, enough is enough, I'm gonna be myself. This is me and I'm gonna do the best that I can. I'm gonna grab your attention with the little time that I have on stage. And they started changing the business from within and people started caring. And other women followed suit. We have someone like Sasha Banks who calls herself the boss. And she just tries to embody and personify this idea of like, yeah, I'm a wrestler and I'm a woman and I can do this. They started throwing together these amazing matches until finally they took notice and they said we're gonna put you on the main event. And women have never really been on the main event of a big show like this. So they started really changing things. And we have wrestlers now that look like this. This is Bailey, she obviously, you know, a broom net, she wears her hair up in a ponytail just like a normal person. She doesn't wear provocative clothing. So it's like this big departure from wanting to be, we're wanting female wrestlers to conform to this norm. And they actually got fans to care. So this is a male fan who's actually wearing a Bailey shirt. That's her gimmick. She hugs people, she's nice. So I feel like when you can get guys to wear a shirt that says I'm a hugger and you can actually get 20,000 guys in a huge stadium to wear this shirt, you really achieve what you set out to achieve. So how did WWE manage to turn around women's wrestling? There's three things that I feel like they've done to really try to turn things around. One of them is that they stopped calling women divas. So in the past, it was the divas division, female wrestlers weren't wrestlers, they were divas. So this has huge connotations. This meant that the matches were hair pulling and things like that. There were cat fights. There weren't actual wrestling matches. So once they decided to do away with that language and call it the women's division and call it the women's championship, that's when they started to turn around this sort of idea that female wrestling was not a thing. And I feel like in tech this is really important. We see this a lot in things like job posts and even blog posts. Some job posts don't always include or don't always use gender inclusive language that's why people miss out. A lot of women, if they feel like they only, the statistic is that if women see a job post and they don't match as many requirements, they just don't apply, whereas men are more likely to take the risk and say, yeah, I'll just go ahead and apply. So a lot of the times even our job post things are not attracting the right of people that we want. So even if we want to hire diversity, we can't. But this also becomes important in blog posts. There was someone that I respect a lot that threw out this quote in a blog post that was completely unrelated to women in tech. And even though I really respect him and I know that he didn't mean it in a bad way, throwing away comments like this in a blog post, like, oh, it's like that hot girl in high school who had you do her homework. These things are hurtful because when you use language like that as something that's completely unrelated, you're continuing to perpetuate the stereotype that women can't do this. And that's why there are not more women in tech. So even in little throwaway things that you might not necessarily think is gonna hurt anybody, it could actually cost someone to feel discomfort. So I know what you're thinking. It's not about being PC bull crap. It's about trying to be inclusive. Number two that I think that they did really well was trying to break down stereotypes. So here is a girl, her name is Nia Jax. And she is the first plus-sized women's wrestler. And what's great about this is that no one ever really makes a joke about her weight. It's not even really commented on. She just is and she's just there and she's a badass. And in our world, we still have a lot of these unconscious biases and stereotypes. So when this company put out this ad trying to recruit engineers, they got blamed for hiring a model to be on their ads. Little did people know that she was actually a developer that worked for that company. And that's how the hashtag I look like an engineer got started because people were still applying their unconscious biases towards what a developer should look like. And we all know that we look as diverse as anything. But in the media and in other places, we see that developers look like this or developers look like this and I'm almost done. And neither of this is everybody. So if we want to break down stereotypes, we really need to reach out to people. We should not make assumptions better yet what Marty said, assume the best out of people. Reach out and mentor to people that are interested and try to get them to come to tech because they might just need a friendly hand. And ensuring that our voices are heard and there's someone in your team who rarely talks and she happens to be a girl or an underrepresented person in tech. Reach out to them, make it a point to say, I want to know what this person thinks. Number three, embrace non-traditional backgrounds. A lot of people when they say, yeah, we really want to bring people into tech, we want to hire diverse, but we don't want to lower the bar. Nobody is asking you to lower the bar. Here's a girl, her name is Amber Moon and she just made her own way. She said, I'm gonna make WWE want me. She spent a lot of time in the Indies and just made her name for herself. And guess what, WWE came knocking on her door even though she took a different path. We don't want you to lower the bar. We're talented, we can do this. But maybe a better hiring process that's real unconscious bias can help bring in the people that you want. So focusing on things like value fit instead of culture fit can actually be much better for you or even things like blind review processes that will completely free you from that unconscious bias. So we can all benefit from diversity. It's gonna make a better product than something that we all want to be a part of. And it's also gonna inspire other people to be more like themselves. And I think that ultimately that's gonna make everybody better and happier. So I just got back from a two week vacation where I didn't touch the computer at all which is pretty nice if you're a programmer. And I ended up doing a puzzle for about five days. This thing is not easy. So yeah, I know, right? A thousand pieces. I'm like, oh, I can do that, it's not a new problem. Yeah, my wife walked down at one point and she was like, no, walking. So I first started off by going with the border. I mean, that's pretty much what everybody does. And then I started thinking about like, there's gotta be a better way to hack this thing. So after you get this done, kind of like where do you go from here? So when you look at this jelly bean puzzle, it's a little confusing because there's a lot of different colors. Some of them kind of blend together and it's kind of difficult to figure out where to next. So I started with connections here. And so if you look at this, you can see I've kind of zoomed in where these different connections come in you can kind of look at the pieces and start figuring out that, okay? So I was like, okay, well, I can kind of start to put these pieces in the, about the area where they go. And you know, you eventually start to find more and start putting them together. And then so it started to come together a little bit as a puzzle. And the next step is I focused on these glares. And you can see all of the glares are unique. So that's one thing that's very, very interesting about doing this puzzle is that you've got unique glares and even though you may have the same kind of glares on the same colors, like the two pink ones, they're different enough to where you can kind of start playing around with pink ones and find the glares that go together. And you can plug those glares into where you think they're going to go. So after that, then I kind of filled in the details and really just I started this corner right down here because that corner is awful. If you look, it's got like pink and orange going together. And you really, it doesn't run together at all. I mean, it runs together nonstop. So really this is the one that was the easier one to go with because you see all these different colors. So I started thinking about this in kind of like a programmer sort of way. It's like with the border, that's kind of like your base. You know, these are things that you know how to go together already in an application. And so that's kind of the easy start that you start to put together at first. You can get a nice base to your app going first. And then when you start thinking about connections, these are stuff that you kind of know about already. You know pretty much how it's going to work. So maybe you're like authentication, something like that. And then the glares are stuff that maybe you've worked with before, but it's not as familiar. You kind of have an idea, but whatever. The details are the ones that really you kind of have to think about. And it took me a lot of, like I said, even especially up in that top corner, it's like really just looking at pieces in the minute details before actually going up and pulling it. Because I could sit there and go try different pieces based on one after the other. But really when I started to make progress is when I looked at the individual pieces and figured out their little details and said, okay, this is where this goes. So you kind of apply that to software. You know, has a nice little parallel. So that's about it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.