 You can see what I'd normally do by the fact I've left the talk CSS logo on there. So I'm a stranger. I have no code whatsoever in this, so now you can supposed to be sleeping. This is one of those inspirational things that will hopefully make more sense in this t-shirt. That's probably more complex in your JavaScript. I'm here to talk about fear. Fear is something that is innate in humanity. We fear things, probably in biology altogether to be honest. It's something that happens when we're in front of some kind of danger or something. We basically respond with fear. It stops us from walking in front of a bus or picking up a spider. It's a very good thing. Fear manifests itself in different ways for different people. How you react to something depends on your life. My pictures are weird. Some of them you'll think are great, others you'll just be scratching head, but it's okay. Some things are frightening in a matter of a while. What I like about this is this thing is actually really genuinely swinging the knife at the guys. So if you're wondering, the animals have turned against us and we're kind of ruined. You're not scared by this, I don't think I want to be scared. Come on, Craig, get up. Use a gun. Use a gun. You want to see a crab with a gun? That's super close. In code, regular expression is probably the most fear-inducing thing that's out there. It depends. What would life actually be like without fear? Thanks to Tim's suggestion of fear tattoo. In Australia, we'd call someone with one of these a bogan, he'd say an arbing or something, I think. Don't alter your body because you regret it. There's one known human amongst our seven billion or so who has no fear. She's got a problem with her amygdala and she actually does not have fear. Because she survived long enough to be discovered and to be researched, there's an incredible paper written about her. She's known as SM in the paper, we don't know what her actual name is. To test out what no fear actually is like, the people during the study took her into three different situations to see how she would react and to see what it's really like to not have fear because it's something that's so intrinsic for us. So she was taken to a pet store with all sorts of exotic animals and she was told 15 times that if she asked 15 times if she could touch one of the really large poisonous snakes, it just kept getting told, no, you will kill you. Being killed was bad. She kept trying to pat the tarantulas that were going to attack her. Tarantulas don't kill you, but you don't want to get bitten by one, it's not really a good idea. But she was just inherently curious into these things. Asked about it before her and she said, oh yes, fight is a scary, but it's a social norm rather than an actual reaction that she has. They then took her to a sanitarium that's been abandoned and is rated as the most haunted place on earth. To make things more interesting than that, they did it at night on Halloween and they took 15 other people with her as test subjects and then got some people in there to jump out of her in costumes and basically try to scare the pants off her and it didn't work. She just thought it was hilarious as people dressed up as monsters and things. She thought, this is great. Fear is a good thing. Franklin D Roosevelt's famous quote, only thing fear is fear itself, this is wrong. It's very wrong. You should be scared about walking in front of a bus. The reason that SM is actually with us today is basically because of cognitive behavioural therapy where she's been taught that walking in front of a bus is a bad thing because you'll die and your friends will miss you. Your friends missing you is a bad thing, so don't do that. Your friends would be upset. Yeah, I don't want my friends to be upset, therefore I'll leave it to them. No concern. It's really strange. Tonight, what I'm going to talk about is four different fears that make a difference to us as developers. Things that we basically face every day. And the idea is to know what affects you and therefore you can actually do something about it. It doesn't mean the fears go away because there's basically nothing you can do to make that happen. But when they're affecting you, you'll have a better idea of what's going on and being able to adjust your behaviour accordingly. The first fear is the fear of the unknown. This is when you haven't seen something before and you just don't like it and that's the standard behaviour for anything. You've seen the Instagram logo launched recently, the new iPhone logo. When I looked at it, I've got quite a design background. I looked at it, I looked at the history of the app and everything. I thought they've actually done a pretty good job. Most of the reaction is really bad. But this is normal. You don't like anything different. Anything that's new, anything you haven't seen before and it happens over and over again. When we're in our 90s, maybe not us because we're 10 people and kind of like that stuff. But most people would be looking at stuff and say, oh, what's with this new, you know, crazy AR thing that these kids are playing with or rot their brains? It's the fear of the unknown that's driving that. This is telling us that TV is going to kill us all, basically, from the 80s. The real risk at this is you become comfortable with normality and you don't ever look for change. That's what fear of the unknown basically drives in you. All we basically want is tomorrow to be the same as today, which was the same as yesterday, and that makes us happy in the short term. It's not good for us, though. Fear of failure is the next thing, which is a derivative of fear of the unknown. We don't want to try anything new because we might get it wrong. Who wants to get something wrong? Because you might end up making a really bad error message here. I'm from Perth in Australia originally and this is from the Transport iOS app that they've never done an error message like that because that is bad for them. At least they're kind of trying, I guess. There's a precautionary principle that applies here where you don't want to try anything too radical because you might fail, so you just don't even try, but too hard to try. That's basically what you need to fight. Fear of inadequacy. This is basically manifested as imposter syndrome. Personally, I get struck quite badly and it makes me not want to do things like what I'm doing right now because what do I know about any of this? As a programmer, we will basically be confronted with a meeting and you'll be sitting there and talking about something and your boss is telling you something is how it is and you know quite well that it's not, but you'll just sit there and say, who am I to say anything different? And that's what inadequacy is all about. We basically feel like this dog here, we probably don't feel as cute as the dog, but I've got no idea what's going on. This is really, really hard. If you don't have fear of inadequacy, then the odds are that you are actually inadequate of what you're doing. It's really curious how this works. You're looking at Dunning-Kruger effect where if you're smart enough to know that you're not very good at what you're doing, then you're probably okay at it. And conversely, if you think you're really awesome at something, then you're probably not. Donald Trump is a classic example. Kiasu, you're missing out. Everyone else is doing the thing, therefore I'm going to do it as well because what could be so wrong about it? Angular is great because it's written by Google, so let's just do what Google is doing. I've had this justification at my office, it's right. Without actually looking at the merits, good or bad or anything, to say, well, they're doing it big, it has to be all right. What could be wrong? But you become a sheep, you become cargo-cultured. Cargo cults arose from World War II where the U.S. drops supplies on various islands that didn't really have much contact with technology or anything outside. And during the war, all these supply crates just came from the sky, fell on the islands in the villages like, this is awesome. Never seen this stuff before, food's coming from heaven. This is brilliant. Then the war ended, the supply drops ended, and the islanders were sitting there like, oh, what's going on? So they actually created their own planes out of bamboo and trees and things like that to try to get the gods to bring the cargo back. This is the cargo cult. And this is basically what we do where we fall into that pattern of repeating something because we didn't really understand what was going on in the first place. And you fear inadequacy can drive you towards that, where rather than actually stepping out and trying something different, you just keep repeating even though it's not quite right for you. It pushes us further towards this, which is inaction is an action. If you stand by, then the world is going to turn whether you like it or not. And you turn into Wile E. George Coyote, basically, where the market has moved from underneath you, but you're still going. Countless examples of this. Not too hard to really think about when this happens quite often. Blackberry, for example, that said keyboards are going to hang around forever. The rest of the mobile industry that said touchscreen, no one wants that. The screen's too big anyway. This is the risk that you basically up against. So now we know what we're scared of. How do we actually fix it? And if you've seen The Martian or read the book, you'll know that science fixes everything. This is a scientific method. And the scientific method can be pretty much applied to anything. And it's a good way to actually... I'm going to go through some of these bits and just show you how it can actually improve what you do. The first most important thing is to question. If you don't question, then you're just another one of these chairs here, basically, because you're just going along the fluoride. You need to actually ask what's going on. Look at something from a different angle. Try to think about how it might behave differently. The risk of this, of course, is to overdo it. If anyone's done any design work, then you know that everyone else thinks they're a designer and they tell you everything. This is... You have the same thing in code. I'm just mad. A scientist does both code and design. I love code because no one tells me what to do with this. You basically need to press ahead with questions anyway because there's an innate fear of change as we discussed earlier on. This is digital ocean. They know about the fear of change. So the button down the bottom, this is when they do releases and there's a change thing. You have to press the button that says, I do not fear change to go ahead. So this is basically trying to make people aware that I don't want these things changed. It's different from what I had last time. It's like, well, change is okay. It's all right. Facebook got quite caught up in this for a while because they did a lot of studies of what users were doing after they brought changes in and they realised that every time they changed something they had really bad feedback. At first their reaction was to, let's fix it immediately. Then they realised, let's take a step back and now we know that no one actually likes any change. We'll just let the things ride and test them out properly. Do not fear change. Research is basically your next step on from questioning. If you don't research, then you've basically got an opinion and an opinion is worth something if you've got experience but it's not worth all that much in the end. So you need to basically look for something. Looking for something can be doing your own original research if you've got resources and a drive for it. You might search for something else. It can be really hard. Sometimes answers will just leap out at you. The risk of not basing your decisions on research is you end up with hippo highest paid person's opinion, which is basically where your boss, whoever else project manager comes along and says, well, I think it should just be this way. You've got an opinion, they've got an opinion, who's right? They get paid law, so why not? If you don't have anything behind your opinions, then they're about as empty as this article. I love this one because it's trying to say something really groundbreaking from Yahoo, but there's no content here. It's like emails from bosses. Everything's in the subject. This wasn't even a rendering bug, I think I just didn't upload the content properly. I didn't forget to put the ads on though. That's guaranteed. I've kind of already gone through this, but the basic difference is between when you're putting something forward and saying my research shows this versus I think this. If you've done research on it, then it's inherently got a whole lot more weight. You can even quote your references on it if it's something that you're doing in writing. I've recently got asked to do a carousel for a client and if you know anything much about your stuff, carousels are not a great idea for most things. But do carousels are probably a bad person. It's okay. I've spent some time, I didn't know this because I've been doing this stuff for years, but I still took the time to actually put together a pretty lengthy email. I quoted all my references and everything else like that, and then they just turned around and the highest paid person's opinion won. I feel better that I try it, I think. Once you've done your research, you can prototype and start trying something out. The earlier you get into this, the better. You've got to fail early and fail often. This is where we have to fight our fear of failure because we don't want to do anything too radically different. The easiest way of doing this in practice is that every time you iterate through your product, try one thing that's different from last time. You might have like a really solid, like one of your mini modules or something else like that that you rely on. But this time around, jump into Google and see if there's something better for it. Just to see if you can actually improve your product along the way. And maybe you'll reinforce what you've already got, which is fine. Maybe you'll find something completely different this time that will revolutionise your product. But the point of questioning and the point of this in the first place is that you don't just arbitrarily follow what you're doing. This guy's Brad Bird. He's one of my favourite directors. And not many people know that one because he didn't do so well. But one thing he said on Twitter a while ago is that you really need to follow some ideas all the way through to their end before you know if they're going to work or not. And that's really the point of prototyping. And you see plenty of products out there that are well researched. Microsoft are a classic for this. They do an incredible amount of research behind their products and yet they fail at things. Because it took them to that point to get to the market before they realised they just didn't quite work. And that's a risk that you're going to face that you basically do everything right and still fail. But at least they tried. The converse is Samsung, where they basically copy whoever else is out there and just hope for the best. And when the shotgun strategy doesn't work, what's left Samsung? Yeah, Samsung. Testing is absolutely critical. Testing it when it's released is not a great idea. Sometimes things just aren't going to work out. Like they've done this rudimentary testing will help you. I think you're meant to walk through and take over the figure or something like that. Yeah, I'm not sure. Good old Sydney. Once you've done everything, you need to actually review what you've done. Design has never done. Software has never finished. Your product is never actually done with. If you work for an agency it is, but then it's not really because it's going to come back to bite you or someone else at some potential point. Keep questioning, keep looking for improvements because there will be something different around from what you've seen. If you do it well, you basically, this is probably going to be hard to read, it says, don't tell me what's wrong with you because I will find out and tell you. This is the ultimate of where you need to be. You could sit there and basically wait for the user to tell you when there's an error, but if you're monitoring things properly, if you know your environment really well, then when the user phones up and says, hey, I had a crash, you can say, yes, I know, I've just rolled a fix into testing and we'll have it out in the next hour. Don't know how reliable that is for Chinese medicine, but maybe you ought to hear some symptoms, maybe not. You need to basically keep testing to make sure your original hypothesis is still valid because otherwise, basically, yes, you've done your research, but it may not be current anymore. The risk is that sometimes you'll have some pressure on you. No fear, right? This phase has done. Agile is really classic for falling into this trap where you've released the thing, just shut up and get on to the next one, and design often fails really badly in this where once the thing is finished, then you just have to forget it and move on, but that's not good, that's not healthy for the product. You need to keep looking backwards and make sure that what you've done is basically like regression testing, but unless you're a tester and you don't have to worry about that, you look at your own little role in the project and make sure that what you're doing still makes sense. You do need to actually go all the way through to releasing something onto the market and beyond before you even know what it is meant to do. When the Kindle came out, everyone thought it was going to change everything that paper books were going to be in the past and that was going to be in the end of it. But what's actually happened is the Kindle's plateaued. Yes, it's taken out all the competitors in the e-book world more or less, but they've got their own little niche market amongst hardcore readers who like reading lots of things anyway. I love my Kindle. Book sales, paper sales are pretty healthy these days. Kindle's not threatening them anymore. But would you turn around and say that therefore the Kindle is a failure, not at all. The original plan was to conquer the world, which is great. The reality is it's turned out is not quite that, but it's still a very successful product. And this is where revisiting your original assumptions is important. If your original goal was to do this incredible thing and conquer the world, but you've taken 10% of it instead, then be happy with that because at least that's a good achievement. If you don't look back at that, then you look at it and everything's a failure, which is not a really good way to be. The real crux of it is what have you got to lose. And Kodak are a classic example of this. This is a 1989 digital SLR and one of the first it was created. The guy who built this is Steve Sassen who created the first CCD, the first digital camera in 1975. He worked at Kodak. They said this is great, but we're a film company. We don't do digital. So they put him back to his lab. He came back with this in 1989 and this is actually Nikon, I think. So he hijacked other people's hardware and still made it work. And not long after this turned into something pretty similar to a DSLR that we know. And they still said, no, film is pretty solid. We're good with this. They licensed their technology off to other people, which turned it into the digital camera revolution that's killed Kodak as of 2012. This is basically back to Waleikiak Kodi. They didn't see the market shifting even though they were long past the cliff. Only thing that kept them going in their last few years was the royalties of everyone else using their digital camera technology, which is insane. I'm quoting fictional characters here, which is a little bit desperate. But until you've lost your reputation, you never realise what a burden it was or what freedom really is. Basically you've failed already. You're already at the bottom. So you might as well have to go anyway because why not? Otherwise you're just going to end up there anyway. And I have to quote Bowie because I'm still quite cut up over here. I don't know where I'm going from here but I promise it won't be boring. If you have a go, then it's going to be interesting. You can fail spectacularly and at least people will pay some attention to what you're doing at this. It's really obvious with the SpaceX things that are going on. When their rockets fail because someone's miscalculated, it blows up badly. A lot of the space exploration, the probes that have gone off to Mars and trying to land on asteroids and things, someone gets a decimal point wrong and the whole project fails and a billion dollars are literally up in flames. At least they're how to go. They're not going to be sitting there still staring up at the moon and wondering if they'd be able to get there. The last thing you want to be doing is sitting on the sidelines. The way I see it is the difference between mediocrity and something better than that. And you may never get anywhere above average but if you have a go, at least you'll have some satisfaction that you've tried. Thank you. You'll find the slides for this on SlideShare and find me on Twitter. Dare ask me questions. This was really frightening actually doing this because I'm a developer. I don't know that side. But you do your research, you put something together and it kind of works. Thanks for giving this very looking talk. Thank you. While I'm still in stage, when did this slide come from? I don't know. I run Singapore CSS so I've snuck in here and fooled you all. This time next week if you want to learn about some front-end stuff join us at Dash next Thursday. So it is a week from now. We haven't been around as long as Singapore JS and we don't have as many people but try really hard. Come and join us. We're always looking for speakers as well so if you're keen to tell us about any kind of front-end related thing then you can be semi on topic and that's alright. And then when you've done with that you may want to drink. I'm fairly new to Singapore and I don't know that many people here so this is basically my excuse to have a beer with people because nothing breaks down the fear like a frothy pint or something. The front-end is our third bar food so please come along to that if you're interested in beer and I don't think we ever talk about any development thing but you can pretend that if that makes sense. Thank you.