 Welcome to day three of DrupalCon Portland! Woo! Sales and marketing coordinator at the Drupal Association. And I am Stephanie Alhash. I am the program coordinator for DrupalCon. It's day three of DrupalCon, and we want to dedicate today to our amazing volunteers. People who help make DrupalCon Portland possible. And if you look at this, it kind of reads like a movie credit. I'm not going to go through everybody, but it takes a lot of people to make this show happen because this is not easy. I want to call out a couple of people in particular, the sprint leads. These amazing women have helped onboard Drupal contributors, and they'll be doing a lot more tomorrow. If you see these guys, give them a hug, because they're amazing. But only if they won't win, they can get awkward. I want to thank our amazing global team, especially these three people. We have Paul Johnson to thank. He's actually in the UK right now participating virtually. But if you like any of the Twitter or the Facebook posts that you've seen for DrupalCon, it's because of him. And he's been tirelessly working to make sure that we get all the communications out to everyone. I also want to thank Rick Nationalinas, our global content lead. Because of all of his cat-herding of our global team, I've been free to run in circles. And to Emma Jane Westby, who's our speaker trainer. She's been providing speaker training webinars and making it so our speakers are better. So if Emma Jane has ever helped you, make sure to show her some love. Finally to the people who helped with the Oklahoma website. There's some people who helped on Monday, Tuesday, and I think Wednesday, helping get up a FEMA website for the victims of the Oklahoma tornado. So I want to give them a shout out because with all of the after hours activities, why wouldn't you want to go sit in a coding lounge for 24 hours and get all this stuff done? Sounds awesome. Our community is amazing. Thank you to our amazing DrupalCon team. Yes, they are amazing. Thank you again. But wait, there's more. DrupalCon is not done yet. Check out all these awesome activities we have going on. For instance, BOS, and the clicker won't go. OK, check out the whiteboards across from the registration desk to find out what is on the schedule for today. And speaking of BOS, if you are a Drupal trainer, come meet Stephanie and I at the DA booth at one o'clock, and we will kind of meander over to some open tables and talk about Drupal training. Social media, if you're on Twitter, please use these tags. And for today's keynote, please use hashtag DCLock. Hey, Stephanie. Yeah? Name this module. I think it's Path Auto. If you know what that is, come to trivia night tonight. And if you don't, you probably should go also. Yeah. 9 PM, Oregon Ballroom. The sprints. So we've had sprints going on before the conference. They're going on currently, and they're going to be going on the weekend following DrupalCon. All of these initiatives are going on. If you want to participate in them today, you can go to the Coder lounge, or you can come tomorrow to the contributions sprints and help out with these. And the Drupal store, if you have seen all the awesome Drupal branded gear, make sure to pick up your own. And remember, you're an Oregon. There's no sales tax. Plus, if you become a DA member now, or if you're a past DA member, you get a 5% discount. So it's basically free. And I'm pretty sure we can expense that, right? Oh, yeah, we can expense that, right, Holly? Yeah. OK. So now for some pro tips. Your cell phones, this or your laptop, pick one. We all have to share the internet, so please don't put all of your devices online. Evaluating the sessions. So if you have attended any of the sessions, help our speakers become better speakers, leave feedback. All you have to do is go to the session node and click Evaluate the session. We've shortened the questions, so they're easier to get through. It really helps our speakers. So please, if you have time, do that. And finally, I want to thank everybody for coming to Drupalcon, Portland, today three. Make sure that you remember tomorrow's contribution sprints to come to that. And now to save you from our ramblings. I'd like to introduce you to Michelle Johansson from Squishy Media, our amazing content lead. She coordinated the content team and made it so that we have all 100 of our amazing sessions. Thank you, Michelle. She is rainbows and sunshine. I'm Michelle Johansson from Squishy Media, one of your local shops here in Portland. So thanks all for being at Portland. I will skip the rain joke because it's a little too easy this week, but I promise you'll dry out and we'll just pretend like it was funny. So as Stephanie mentioned, I was also the content lead, and that meant that I got to work with some amazing local teams and shops here. I want to take a second for the content team to stand up. Anybody here? Come on, guys. They have spent hours for months reviewing all the sessions, finding all the speakers. Nope, stay standing. Yay, keep standing. We've also been invading all their shops, stealing all their team members, and the general support of the community here in Portland has been awesome. So the shouts are, I want to do a shout out to other Squishiers. Stand up, think, shout. Open sorcery, funny monkey, metal toad, superstar media, and all the amazing freelancers here in Portland. You guys stand up. These are the faces of Portland Drupal, who are all still sleeping, it looks like. Oh, awesome. Well, thank you, guys. It's been great, and let's keep it going here in Portland. So the real reason why we're here, Michael Lopp is an engineering leader who builds both people and software. He's a company that's such Borland, Netscape, and Apple. While he's not worrying about staying relevant, he writes about pens, bridges, poker, and werewolves at the popular blog Rands and Repose. Check it out. Michael has also written two books. Being Geek is a career handbook for geeks and nerds alike. And his first book, Managing Humans, is a popular guide to the art of engineering leadership, and clearly explains that while you might be rewarded for what you build, you will only be as successful because of your people. Michael's surfs, plays hockey, and drinks red wine in the redwoods of Northern California whenever he can because staying sane is more important than staying busy. Please help me welcome Michael Lopp. Good morning. Did I hear that the hashtag, is this right? Because I might have heard it wrong. Is do Lopp? Because that's what I heard, and that's kind of weird. OK, so it's Portland. It's 9 AM. Based on the number of tweets and mails I got about where to go, eat and drink, I'm assuming 9 AM is kind of early. Is that true? Because 9 AM for engineers is really fucking early. So quick show of hands. We're all friends, a little warm up. How many of you are willing to admit that you're hung over right now? Hung over. Really? Hmm. I don't know if I buy it. OK. Good morning. Let's go to the slides. What I want to talk about today, I need to get you guys in the frame of mind because you're building something right now and you're very happy about it. Or maybe you're not happy with what you're building right now. I don't know. But if I want to get you in as the mindset of the fact that the current job that you have, the thing that you're building right this moment, has an expiration date. Now, I've seen a lot of resumes. I have spent a lot of time hiring people. And I look at resumes and what I see with people who build stuff is we bore easily. And for whatever reason, I don't know why. It's about three years. Three years, you start that first year, it's like these people are great. I'm having so much fun. I'm learning all these new things. Next second year, like, God, I'm in the zone. I got a promotion. And then third year, you start going, what's next? What am I going to build next? What problem am I going to actually solve? How many grow? I do this consistently throughout my entire career. I was at Apple for eight and a half years before I went to Palantir, which is not the Palantir that you're thinking of. It's a different Palantir. I was at Apple for eight and a half years, which is just close to nine years. And about six months before I left, I was talking with my wife, I was sitting there at Apple, which is doing okay as a company, and I'm going, I'm bored. And she goes, gray, she's like, not this shit again. He's going to drop everything and change it all. And I did. And I went to a new company. But I want to talk about this mindset of going into that next thing you're going to do. And I want to talk about the team that you're going to need, the people that you're going to need to build that next thing. You are three years away from building something new, at most. Think about that. You love your job right now. I'm telling you, in two and a half years, you'll be like, all right, it's time to do something new. I'm going to talk about some archetypes today. The engineer, the designer, and the dictator. I'm Rand. I'm the guy on Twitter, sounds like a fortune cookie. More importantly, again, I was at Apple for about eight and a half years. I ran the store team, store.apple.com. That was me. If you're wondering why there's a big yellow sticky there, you can talk to me. I'll tell you the story. As it's already said, I wrote a couple of books, Managing Humans and Being Geek. The first is really a leadership guide for nerds and geeks to actually figure out leadership because most leadership books are awful. I'm not saying this is much better, but it's my best attempt. Being Geek is sort of a career guide. But your career is what we're here to talk about. That thing that you're going to go build next. You're going to need, imagine there's a table. It's a metaphor. At this table, when you go to this new thing that you're going to go do, and I guarantee you that you're going to go do this, no matter how happy you are right now, there are going to be three people that I care about, that you're going to care about. Each person needs to be at this table, in my opinion, for your thing to be successful. There's an engineer. You need someone to make it real. You need a designer, and I'll explain each of these roles. Someone to make it for the humans. And then you need a dictator, which I think is maybe contentious with this particular crowd. But you need someone to make sure it actually happens, and it actually gets done in less than five years. So let's talk about each of these roles. Let's give you a little bit of how I think about each of these roles. We'll start with, it's so strange not having the slides behind me. But it's better than that. Did you see the one at the beginning? It was a pink dental chart. You drop acid, and there was these dental charts. I was just tripping out back there. Anyway, the blue is much more acceptable. Anyway, you need an engineer. Of course you need an engineer. This is, of course, how are you going to build anything without an engineer? Everybody would think this is obvious, but they don't. This is what you get when you don't have an engineer. This is what I like to call chaos. This is what you get. There's a lot of folks out there, and I don't think this crowd is particularly related to this, but there's a lot of folks out there. MBAs, show of hands. Okay, sorry. It's only three, so they can't take me. There's a lot of MBA types. I'm going to make an MBA. It's an archetype. There's great MBAs out there. These folks who say, listen, because I have an idea, I can get it done. As long as I can write the spec, of course it's a real thing. And don't worry. What I'll do is I will outsource it or I'll do something strange where I don't actually understand the engineers there. And what happens is chaos, right? They don't understand what's going on there. So they don't have the engineer at the table. Now, to get into the engineer's mindset, to understand what I think engineers care about, I want to talk about this movie. How many of you have seen Tron Legacy? Show of hands. Oh, yeah. I had a feeling there. Target demographic achieved. Tron Legacy is the world's longest screensaver with an excellent soundtrack. It's just beautiful. Oh, my God. There's a plot, too. Which I have to give you because it's also beautiful and Daft Punk is an amazing thing. But there is a plot here. And inside of this, it's totally designed for we engineers, which is, if you haven't seen it, all three of you, the plot is basically that Flynn, our protagonist, well, his son's a protagonist, but our old protagonist from the first movie, is sitting there and he's figured out how to jack himself into the matrix or the grid or whatever you want to call it. And he's figured out how to duplicate himself. So while he's actually in the real world, his other person's inside of the world, and this is amazing because that would be cool because you could fork yourself and stuff. And so he's figured this out. And of course, whatever the, what was his name, his version of it was Clue. Thank you. Clue goes red, turns evil. Things go bad. But here's the thing. And this is the basic conceit of this entire movie is the idea, this is what they're doing here. And this is what you have to know when you're talking about engineers is there's a perfect system. The idea is that every variable can be solved. The flow chart can be completely understood and you can figure it all out. Which is totally impossible because you have these messy human beings on the planet on the Earth who are screwing things up all the time, but we don't care. We actually believe that we can take that chaos and we can make it understandable and well known. This is why you need an engineer sitting at the table. And again, I agree, I get, this crowd would think this is absurd, but there's a lot of people out there who think because they have an idea and they have a designer who's really good at Photoshop that they're going to be able to get a product out the door. This is absurd. You've got to have someone who cares about what I call the engineering mindset. The engineering mindset is the following set of rules, ideas, principles. Engineers strive to reduce chaos because it's inefficient. You can't have a perfect world if you have something there which is noisy and it's not generating perfect signal. We believe that there is a discoverable right and wrong answer to everything. We're willing to debate it until you can prove it to us. You probably had these arguments before and it drives you crazy because this engineer is sitting in the meeting raising his hand and keeping asking questions. He's like, why? Why? You're like, Bob, shut up. This is how it is. Bob's not going to do that. He's a volatile, by the way, but that's another talk. He's sitting there trying to gather data and he doesn't care how you feel. He just wants to understand the reason why it is whatever it is that you're suggesting. We are willing to take time to go deep in order to understand because if you don't have that variable solved for, then there's some chaos out there and something unpredictable might happen. We solve problems completely or we try to to the best of our ability. We prepare for the unexpected by being paranoid. You've been in this meeting too, right? You're sitting there going, Bob, it's an edge case. Don't worry about it. Bob's like, it's going to happen because it always does, right? It always does. He's driving you up the wall because you're saying two more weeks to get this done, this thing that's never going to happen. Of course, four months later, it happens and you're like, sorry, Bob, I totally screwed that one up. We believe that we're always rules that will predict what will come next. My job, the reason I write books, is I have this totally erroneous belief that I can get this perfect flowchart about how to deal with human beings and that I can actually predict what's going to happen. This is hard to do. We find facts. We're data driven. We could care less about your opinion if you can't back it up with data. We are willing to go to seemingly insane lengths for marginal efficiency improvements. How many of you have woke up on a Saturday morning, got high on coffee and sat working on your shell script, your bash profile for like six hours just to get one thing right? Target demographic, okay, I'm good. This is going to be easy talk. When no one raises their hand on that one, I'm in deep trouble. We sit here and we obsess about these little things, right? Other people are like, why are you sitting there caring about the font that you're choosing for that presentation for two weeks? Because I want it to be perfect. I want to explain to you why it's perfect. It's Fiatura and it's beautiful, by the way. Again, I keep on thinking it's behind me. We love signal. We hate noise. And we find all of these things. This exhausting list of things I just described to you. We find none of it to be work at all. This is just how we work. This is just how we think. What we have, what engineers have, what's happening at three years, every three years, is we're sitting there wondering what is the next thing that we're going to go build. We have an urge to go build a thing. This is the itch that every three years comes up that needs to be scratched, is what does that thing I need to build? You know the sensation, because you're engineers and you're people who build things. You know the sensation of like, I haven't built anything in a while. I'm going to go learn a language. I'm going to go do something. The good news is the interesting thing is over the last 20 or 30 years, an urge has kind of been taking over. The engineering mindset has been kind of taking over. What do the following websites have in common? We've got Facebook. Hopefully there's nothing embarrassing in that screenshot. You've got Facebook. You've got Quora. You've got Google. What's interesting about the three of these websites? What's interesting about this, what they have in common, companies actually know websites, is the CEO is an engineer. What? At Netscape. When I got to Netscape, I was there back in the day. It was Andreessen and all his NCSA cronies. Excuse me. And what happened was the traditional thing was you'd get to a certain size and then these three MBAs over here would take over. And that's changed in the last 10 years or so. Engineers are running the show. And that's an amazing thing. And the thing, I think the thing is what you're seeing is this mindset, this engineering mindset is starting to dictate a lot of the terms of how these companies are evolving. My company, Palantir, we're over 1,000 people now. We're 750 engineers. We don't have any sales team. We don't have a marketing team. It's all engineers running the show. Because what we're finding, what I believe is that this engineering mindset is a healthier way to run businesses into buildings. We believe in the perfect system. Engineers are awesome. Of course they're awesome. Here's the problem. Engineers running the show by themselves is a little problematic. The issue is if you're building consumer software, if you're building software that is facing eyeballs, you have an issue. Humans are going to be using your product at some point. Now, I'd like to tell a story here, which involves this thing right here. This is someone going into macOS 10, probably an earlier version of macOS 10. And they're hitting the file save. Now, it's an interesting word, save. Who are we saving it from? Why the word save? Now, how many of you have been in this state? You're sitting inside of whatever application, you're furiously typing, and you have a little twitch, right? You go and do file save, right? Why are you doing that? You're doing that because some part of your mind, and I think it's a smaller and smaller part, is waiting for something to just explode, right? You're sitting there, file save. For me, I do it like every seven seconds, right? Because I'm just, it's in my brain. It's save probably meant, I don't know who chose this word, but they probably meant something along the lines of save, like put it in a file cabinet. What I think you're doing is you're saving it from the engineers. Now, this screenshot's old. And you haven't seen it in a while. But there's someone who thought this was a good idea. Right? There was someone who said, listen, when something explodes, what we're going to do is we're going to throw up this blue screen, right? And we'll put some information in here so that we can triage the issue, right? When my mom sees this screen or saw this screen, she looks at it and goes, windows, okay, I'm in windows, that's good. A fatal exception. My mom thinks someone died. Someone thought this was a good idea. Someone said, this is okay. Now, I can pick on windows, but I can equally pick on macOS 10 as well because you've got the same screen. What we've done here is we've done it in four languages. Someone thought this was a good idea. And this is why you save your files. You're worried about this exact situation. You're worried about it. You're worried about it. You're worried about this exact situation occurring. So I have a prop. It's an iPad. It's not a prototype. Uh-huh. So this is an iPad. I can't see myself on screen. I know I'm on the other side. That's kind of freaking me out. So what I'm going to do here is I'm just going to close an application. This is Safari. I'm reading about the ship types of the app. So we'll go ahead and close an application here. You've done this a thousand times if you have an iPad. Here we go. We're closing an application. We're just clicking the button. And it goes away. Pretty simple. Actually, you didn't even close it. You just paused it. Now, what I'm going to do now is I'm going to have Safari crash. It was just a close again. But it's the same action. What happened? Now, Safari crashed. There was a crash log somewhere and it's getting sent up to the mothership for parsing by some evil set of people who are doing some strange with their data. What happened is someone chose to say, listen, it's a crash. And we understand that it's a crash. And you engineers with your perfect system engineering mindset are a little bit rageful that you didn't see like, hey, tell me what happened there. I would like to understand why I was at a crash. Am I out of space? Is the internet down? Is something going on? You are not the target audience. You are not the target audience. And you need someone to remind you of that. Which is why I think we need designers without a designer. This is what you get. I love Gmail. It's amazing. But do you remember this? It's gotten a little bit better, right? It's gotten a little bit better. But Google, back in the day, it was completely, it just felt, I mean, you knew that it was the engineers there because there were so many knobs and dials and options and look at all the things I can do. This is amazing, right? Confused a hell out of people. They'd get there and be like, whoa, I need a different, simpler, male client to actually see what's going on. What we're seeing here in the last minute is there's this fundamental tension about who owns the product. Who is the owner of the product? So, is it the designers who are translating for the humans? Is it the engineers who are actually building the product? And I was thinking about this. I was doing research for this talk. There's this fundamental tension. And it started years ago as the internet was growing. Software is making piles of money before Netscape arrived. Millions of users that were on the internet were making piles of money. You guys were buying software. It was great. Everyone was having fun. But it became what Netscape did, what the web did is made peace, computing just ubiquitous. Everyone wanted to be there. The first version of Netscape had all these options and knobs and dials and all this sort of stuff, and people just suffered through it because they were cool with that. They wanted to be on the bleeding edge. But here's the thing. Somewhere along here there was this inflection point where your mom got on the internet. And I will tell you what your mom wants to do. She wants to send a picture of her goddamn cat. That's all she wants to do, right? She doesn't care about JavaScript or frames or plugins or any of these other number of things that are out there that we all love because they give us optionality and different ways that we can do things. She wants to send a picture of her cat. All she wants to do, and everything else is mostly just confusing. Early software exploded a lot, and people were cool with that because they were part of the early adopters, and it was kind of cool. The deal we engineers had with the early adopters was like, hey, you're going to be on the bleeding edge. It's going to blow up quite a bit, but that's cool. But at some point with everyone here, we needed a different team. We needed a different mindset about how to be actually building our products. We need to have a designer. We need to have somewhere in there whose job it is to represent the humans. Now, what does a designer mean? It's interesting to me this is what it probably means, right? Designers in the crowd are probably good at Photoshop, right? That's all you do. You make it pretty. No rage. You guys all hung over and not here. For a word that has vastly changed the fortunes of a company it's worth noting there's no generally accepted definition of designer. It means they're good at Photoshop. This is not what it means. These are multidisciplinary folks that the engineers just think they're making pretty, but they have a huge job. They have an amazing amount of ability. It goes on and on the things that they are responsible for doing. Just pick this huge amount of things that they do. For simplicity's sake and I will piss off the designers in the crowd I want to give you a very basic definition of how I think about design from an engineering mindset. My definition is the following. A good designer has three traits. They are, they understand what most users want. They are able to translate what the user wants. They are expert at prioritizing focusing and describing that want. They're the great translator of what their humans want. And they're also really good for consumer software for cut software facing humans at using this knowledge to surprise and delight users to exceed their expectations. Sounds like a fun job. Sounds like a hard job. Let me talk about each of these. Let's talk about what the user wants. The user experiences. As I've already belabored a little bit they're good at designing for everyone, for most people. Not just the engineer, not just the designer. Everyone, they can step out of what they want or what the three people want and say this is what my set of users want. And this is a really hard job to do because you of course have proximity biased. You're working on the file system. So of course it's the most important thing. You're working on the chooser. And of course, the chooser is the most important thing. Who has jobs that are responsible to step back and care about what all the users want. They want to find the thing we all want by understanding what the users want. There's a company up here in Portland named Panic Software. You guys know Panic? Panic! They're a match shop. This is an early version of a product they did a couple years ago called Coda. Now, Cable, who's a friend of mine, he's the CEO of Panic. We were down at South by Southwest when it didn't suck. Sorry, South by. You suck now. Anyway, we were down and we were talking about, he's like, hey, Lop, Rans, whatever your name is. Let's sit here. I want to show you this product that I'm working on. We sat and looked down and he brought up the screen and showed it to me and I'm like, oh, my God, you're going to do this web development. You're going to do this web editor. This is amazing. I reached up to grab the mouse and he said, hey, what happens if I click? He's like, no, no, no. This is Photoshop. This is Photoshop. What Cable had done is he'd actually designed the entire user interface of Photoshop. This seems, you're all sitting there going like, wow, that seems like a lot of work. We have wireframes. We have whiteboards. We have all these ways of prototyping. Why in the world would he spend all this time to get it perfect inside of Photoshop? What he's trying to do, and obviously some of this artwork can be used actually in the final application, so it's not like a complete throwaway, but what he's trying to do by going pixel perfect, which again is a crap ton of work, exactly what he's going to be building and what the user wants. Designers are really good. The best designers are really good at expertly designing the want. And it's more work than you think. It's not. When you sit there at a whiteboard and you say it's a box, and then there's going to be this field and a dropdown and there's this button there, you are forgetting things. You are forgetting something important. I can't tell you what it is, but I think it's something. Taking the time to actually expertly design the want, I think it's something that designers are really good at. Designers are also really good at surprising and delighting the users, exceeding their expectations. How many of you have bought an Apple product? Quite a bit. Now, you buy, this is something that baffles me. It doesn't actually baffle me, I first heard about it, it baffles me. A lot of times what people do when they buy an Apple product, some people do, crazy people do is they sit there and they photograph the unboxing experience. Let's think about this. They are photographing probably the least interesting part of the product because they are sitting there and they're taking a box and they're undoing it getting it and they're taking pictures of something that they're going to throw away. This is trash that they're taking a picture of. Why are they doing this? Because the experience of opening an Apple product and other products where people spend time on that unboxing experience is kind of delightful. You have bought an iPhone, maybe an iPad or whatever it is, you take the box and it's in your hands and there's weight to it. That's cool. It's classic and you feel it. Maybe you lick it? No, you don't? Okay. That'd be weird, right? Okay, good. There's a line. So then you open it. Now an interesting thing about the opening is a little bit of sidebar with the iPhone. Next time if you ever get an iPhone and I highly recommend it is take the phone out, close the box and try to open it again. I'll put it on this back in Cupertino. The friction of the paint and how big the box is with the iPhone in it when you take it will come out like this. They've done that math. The weight of the complete weight of the box lends to the experience. What are they doing here? They're setting this first impression. You open the box, what's the thing you see? You don't see cables. You don't see documentation. It's all there. It's just hidden. It's all there that you were looking for which is the product. It's beautiful. This is a packaging experience but it's still a design experience. They're focusing on this first impression that is really important to Apple. The thing about designers is they have exactly the same urge as the engineers. They have an urge to build a thing. We are motivated in the same way. We have a different set of tools by which we do this building but it's exactly the same thing. This has been going on for a while. This is a wonderful... I call it a battle. People have issues with that but it's a battle between art and science. You've got the engineers who know how to build it so well and you use the perfect system to get you something reliable, beautiful and scales and on the other side you have these people who want to make it beautiful and awesome and understand what the users want. There's this fundamental tension between these folks who actually owns the product? Who is the person who is responsible for actually getting this thing out of the store, this beautiful thing that we want to go build? You've got the engineers. You've got our designers. Who's going to be in charge? Are these guys and gals just going to fight it out? No. This may be a contentious point for you at Drupal here but in my belief is you have to have a dictator. Now, pick this word deliberately because dictator is a pretty heavy-duty word and Chili Palmer, who's amazeballs, is sitting here being the dictator. He's the guy who's telling you how he wants. I want to point out what you get when you don't have a dictator and I will describe this in a role clearly. This is what you get. This is nothing. This is everything that you started that was a consumer-facing piece of software and you're an engineer and you over-engineered it. You put too many preferences in. You put too many options in and when people saw it they didn't understand what it was because you didn't have that moment of going like, holy crap, it's a Twitter for dogs. I mean, I don't know. Or it's something where you're this amazing designer and you do these beautiful pixel-perfect mock-ups but you outsourced it. You gave it to someone who didn't have any skin in the game to make this product great. So when you outsourced it, you got 50% of what you wanted. You said, oh, you know, they're half as much so that's why I got 50% of what I wanted. But now I have to go back and tell them what I actually want and then you got 70% and then you got to 85% and you've now spent as much money with the outsourcing as you would have if you had an engineer sitting next to you who actually cared about what you were building. You need someone there to moderate. You need someone there to make the decision. You need someone there who says I'm the one who's telling you how it is. The thing about dictators is they know what they want. They have to be good at it. They have to be talented. But they know what they want. They can make a decision. There's a lot of people that fake this. A lot of people that can get up in confidence and show you that they're a dictator. These are not the people that I'm talking about. I'm talking about the people who know what they want, have a very clear vision and a proven track record of what you want means totally and completely defining what you want. You need to be an expert in it otherwise it's just hope and confidence. Now, of course, think about dictators. Of course, this is a popular dictator, but I want to talk about someone else. This is Tosh. She's a... She runs a conference down in Wellington, New Zealand and she looks so friendly and nice. Sitting there with her cup of champagne. Now, she runs this conference down, this web-stock conference down in Wellington and I don't know, from New York to Wellington it's about 9,000 miles and year after year, I think it's seven years now, they've had this just amazing conference. Wellington. That's really far away, right? And they get amazing speakers every single time. Every single year you go like, wow. I always look at it and go, God, I wish I could go to that conference. That's amazing. How do they do this? On the other side of the planet, on an island that's really far away, it's a dictator. Tosh, who looks nice and friendly, we'll go back to Tosh here. So nice. Oh, no. You want... You interact with her, she's super nice. Great Tosh, how's it going? Oh, she's taking care of you. She makes you feel like a king. She's a speaker, she takes care of the conference, folks. She has complete and total vision of what she wants out of this conference. And it's everywhere. It's consistent. There's one message. And it was on the swag two times ago when I was there. It was on the swag. She wants to make sure that you feel awesome. It feels like a platitude, right? It feels like, oh, yeah, of course I'm awesome. It's a tweet. It's not a very good tweet, but it fits, right? But she said, everywhere you go going through this conference, you're on the mailing list, like with the speakers, and you're getting these emails from folks telling you what's going on. At the bottom it says, hey, Lop, you're on this mailing list because you're part of Webstock and because you're awesome. Everywhere, singular focus and making it the best possible conference out there. This is Wellington. It's amazing when she's pulled off. That's Tosh. What are some other examples out there? We've got jobs. We've got this person down in Wellington named Tosh. Dictator? What do you think? Any Microsoft people in the crowd? You're worried about raising your hand. This is not a dictator. This is not a dictator. This is a smart person who is an NBA too. I remember that he's not a dictator. The dictator left long ago. Here's the dictator. This is the person who actually knew exactly what he wanted. I remember the day at Netscape, 97, 96, I forget what it was. Netscape was ruling the world and we had this amazing browser and Microsoft had been screwing it up with IE1 and IE2. One of the people went to whatever the conference was for Microsoft. He came back when IE3 was being announced and he was like, I remember this mail because I have it kept because I was like, holy shit. James who wrote up the email said just so you know, and I'm summarizing, he says every single feature that the Nets version of Netscape has, they already have, it's faster and it looks better too. What happened was the dictator gates what he used to do is get on a boat somewhere and he used to go and think deeply about where he was going to take his company and read a lot of books, he'd come back and what they did, what Microsoft did after just completely blowing the internet and he completely pivoted Microsoft which was not a small company back then in one year. One year! It was amazing what happened, how much in a year every single product, not just IE, Word, everything became internet enabled. That is the power of what a dictator can do when he has a clear vision of what he or she wants. A good dictator allows for consistency that is usually killed by politics and collaboration. A good dictator kills ambiguity and prevents mediocrity. A good dictator creates unparalleled velocity and I'll explain each of these to you. A consistent experience. Now, there's this planet and on this planet there are Apple stores. Inside of these Apple stores if we go inside of them you see the stores. You've probably been in one of these. They're meant to look like museums. They were designed after museums, not after any other retail store you've ever seen. They went into museums, they said how does a museum effectively display art? Well, why open spaces, butcher board tables, not much crap? They said we want a clean, beautiful experience. Inside of the stores there are products like these boxes that we were talking about earlier. These boxes contain hardware. Inside of the hardware is the software. Inside of the software runs on silicon. This is a huge amount of work. All of these different teams that are inside of Apple and each of these people VPs, SVPs, whoever the hell they are are very smart people. They have ego. They're probably a little bit political. But they work together to achieve an experience that I don't think you've ever seen anywhere else. Now, why do they do this? Why did they do this? You bet they were scared of Steve. They were scared of him. It wasn't scared like he's going to come punch me in the face scared, but it was more there was this contract to make your store or your box or whatever it was you were building to make it amazing to make it part of a consistent experience and they were scared that they didn't do this. Each of these is a VP. One of them was Scott Forstall. He's no longer with us. But if you want to worry about Apple and if you're not a fanboy like I am if you are a fanboy like I am you worry about the fact that the galvanizing force necessarily that he was an amazing dictator in terms of design, which he was it was that he was an amazing dictator in terms of keeping all of these big egos in check and keeping the company pointed in one direction. I'm really curious to see what happens at WWC whether they can continue to have this consistency. Why do we care about consistency? Well, we want it to be amazing. We want it to fit all together. We want it to feel like everything has a consistent narrative. There's a death-killing ambiguity. When Apple 97 when Steve came back they had this many Macs. You guys remember this beige hell that we were in? 15 different product platforms. A zillion variants of each. I wasn't there. But when I look at this, I see engineers. I see engineers going like well we're going to need seven versions because these three options here these three options there. There's all of this optionality that we need to prevent and there's all these different customers. This was a disaster. They were spending a huge amount of time maintaining all of this different hardware all of this software to support this different hardware and when Steve came back he said listen to me what I'm going to do is I'm going to make it really simple for you. We're going to have the grid. Now, this was sorry about the low quality this is like YouTube screen grab they took that and they simplified it down to this they said we're going to be consumer and pro desktop and portable and this is until the consumer electronics piece of them this is all they were doing. They said we're going to do four great products down from 16. Now, what we're going to do with that since we have all these people now that don't have a job we're going to put them on the different teams we're going to have two teams running at the same times which means we're going to release products every nine months instead of 18 months. What Apple is doing always is they're working on the next generation they're well into the next generation whenever they're introducing them when they have on there right now. Why do we care about this death ambiguity to this death to mediocrity what a what a yard sale of mediocrity these companies you can't argue these companies aren't doing amazingly well but tell me the product that's inspired you tell me something that they've done well you've sat there and gone oh my god that's amazing what thing that HP do they're making crap tons well some of them are making money they're making a huge amount of money but these aren't product companies anymore sorry MBAs but these companies again wildly successful people working they're happily working getting things done but they're business models they're not product companies they're motivated by this spreadsheet we know we're going to make or we're going to lose the dictator Oracle still has a dictator but the dictators have mostly left a dictator a good dictator creates velocity they get things done they move us forward now consensus as a human being I really like this idea of us sitting down and having a debate about why are we going to get something done but there's a point you've been in this meeting it's seven it's ten of you talking about something very important and we're going around the table and everyone has an opinion and you're sitting going it's that meeting we're going to talk about everything for an hour and this is going to drive me absolutely crazy there's a dictator has a superpower and most of us don't like this because we're creative individuals who want to get things done and be heard but a dictator has a superpower which is this they can say no no we're not doing that no I don't think that's what our users want no that's not what our users want no we can't do this this year it's contrary to humans working together to have this person who can say no because we all want to be heard and kind of like have this kumbaya moment but a dictator is someone who's there who can actually say this is what we're going to do this is why we're going to do it and this is what we're not going to be doing why do we care about velocity and you've got to ship a product you've got to get the thing out the door debating is fun it's great to talk with these engineers and designers and to have it out but at the end of the day a deadline gets something out the door and a dictator can help you get to that deadline and you're in a hurry you've got to get something out quickly now dictators can be killed I'm talking about the dictators I'm talking about are folks they don't need to be necessarily culturally compliant but they're not just pure ego people who actually can get things done and I want you to think about the sort of things that a dictator can actually get done look at the results here let's go back to this iPad now the iPad is interesting for a lot of reasons and iOS is really interesting as well but one thing is you're sitting in there in the iPad and there was a time where I wanted to try an IA writer, it's a really good writing application it costs like $0.99 so of course to try out a $0.99 application I bought a $69 keyboard because that makes sense right I just wanted to try it out so I'm sitting there and I'm like okay I want to see if I can actually write on this iPad so I'm sitting at my $70 keyboard and I'm writing I'm sitting here writing something and what happens well there's a file saved because I've got this neural pathway issue and there's no way to save I can't save it there's actually no menu bar now that drove me a little bit crazy but then I thought about what had happened what a dictator had done you can't even give a file name you can't even give a file a name in iOS what Steve did, what a dictator did the engineer is crazy is he abstracted away the entire file system in iOS you can't put a file somewhere and for us engineering types the folks who like to organize things and have the 27 folders and all these sorts of things that's kind of crazy but he said listen your mom sending a photo of the cat does not involve saving a file it doesn't involve putting a file anywhere we're going to abstract away the file system which is amazing when you think about it when you think about someone getting rid of something we have years and years of leverage he said we're not going to have a file system there this is what the power of a good dictator can do this is the town hall in Wellington which is actually currently being rebuilt because of the earthquake down there in the Christ church it's a beautiful venue isn't it looks like church Tosh did this right she walked in the Wellington town hall eight years ago and said listen I'm telling whoever she needed to tell I'm going to bring down 600 people and the best speakers on the planet and I need town hall for this and they probably told her she was crazy but they built this amazing conference with these amazing speakers and it's a beautiful venue a dictator at work dictator not so much there's one here I think there's still a dictator somewhere at Microsoft and it feels like that thing you're looking at going like someone has a really clear vision of what they want to do here so there's still a dictator there but mostly he's left the thing about dictators is there are forces of nature in both personality and terms design vision because they absolutely know what they want you're in a hurry you are three years away from needing to go and build this next thing you're going to, here's the thing you're going to be at this table at this metaphoric table and the thing I want you to remember I was just thinking about this backstage is you're horrifically bad at something and if you don't know what it is look to your left or to your right, to your friend and say what am I bad at and I'm like yeah you're a really shitty designer I know you think you're good at it but you're bad now we love our ideas and we want to sit on them and we want to own them and we want to have complete control over them because they're our ideas we're bad at it at Palantir what we say is you have a superpower and you just focus on that superpower and let the other people come in and focus on what their superpowers might be when I sit there and I think about this designer this dictator and this engineer these are archetypes maybe talking about three people is you have to choose this person to make sure that you actually get something done the person who is going to be the decision maker they should be good at it they should be hopefully honorable but the idea is that they have to have these people you have to define these people when you go into building your product the other thing you need is you need that simple and that clear message about what it is that you're actually doing it's that tweet, that elevator pitch something simple something clear at Apple it's think different this is the thing that they do and this is what defines them at Wellington Webstock it's you're awesome I love this idea of a dictator who is doing good who is sitting there and building things because they love to do it I love dictators that are optimistic about the future and have amazing ability and can't wait to see what you guys are going to go build because I believe that you're awesome thank you very much is this on? still on we're going to do some Q&A I'm sneaking up behind you thank you Michael alright so we had a lot of good comments and questions and they're making us sit down today I don't know what we did wrong and they're running for it too I don't know so we had a great comment from Benji17fisher on Twitter asking it's kind of topical are the engineer, the designer and the dictator are you actually talking about you get it right in the right order Spock, McCoy and Kirk ooh it could be Scotty as the engineer I love that question the answer is yes Scotty engineer the question was Spock Benji said Spock was engineer but Scotty seems like an obvious choice McCoy being the designer now I want to compare and contrast Scotty and Spock yes the answer that's something there so the dictator is Kirk the designer who is the designer on the enterprise jeez that's a hard one who? McCoy? the creative one that's true they don't want to die you're right okay we'll go with McCoy this doesn't feel entirely right and then some Spock Scotty amalgamation for the engineering side so gravelpot which I don't think that's his real name the question is you always use the term engineer but never programmer or web developer so is there a difference or are you just using engineer it's kind of a catch-all yeah I use the word engineer there's this woman I worked in Borland how many remember Borland there's this woman named Liz I called her a developer and she went to town because she's like I don't develop my engineer so that Liz wherever she is on the planet right now beat it into my head that I think the term that I think best describes what this type of person is is the engineer developer is something to develop what web developer that's a specific instantiation engineer but engineer is my term of preference I think a lot of people might break it up into left brain versus right brain is that fair yeah I mean that's kind of you can easily that's an easy way to kind of look at the designer and engineer is that split as well okay then Eris Designs asked is there a place for the dictator and open source I'm sure that Dries is but I'm sure he's sat here nervous he's been on some of the slides but I was talking with someone last night because I was explaining what I was going to talk about and the dictator I think relative to open source maybe a contentious contentious topic because you've got how many people 1200 committers to Drupal right so who is the dictator there is there one should there be one I don't know I think it's I don't know it depends what you I heard your release cycle is like five to six years everyone cool with that you like that show a hands if you cool with five to six year release cycles all right I it's sort of you have to define what you want out of your out of your product right and I think what a dictator is is they speed things up now they have to do it in a way that's compliant with whatever your mission is whatever your culture is but I think they're good what you'll see you'll get speed out of them you have to have some checks and balances that has to be someone who is like auditing them I don't know exactly what that means but again you have to anoint that person to decide it's again especially open source it's I think it's to be a contentious topic because it's like everyone's contributing in this sort of this you know collaboration going on but if I you want to speed up I think a dictator could help I think you can also look at it is how do we grow new dictators and how do we fill those roles because I don't think it would be something where someone can come in from outside our community right you know and automatically they're a dictator but yeah how do we bring someone from either an engineering mind designer mindset into a dictator role at my current company what we do is we don't hire leads into the company we like no I came in there and I had lots of experience at Apple and I started as an individual because for this exact reason is we wanted the organism to kind of vet them and see that they are how they were going to whether they were going to succeed whether they're going to understand the culture I think you would have to I don't know how you would do it in a big huge open source community but you want to not you're going to grow them you're never going to bring someone in that would be absurd especially but in some classes by which this person is validated this person can be certified by whatever the organism is and then anointed as dictator and also there has to be that way to get them out too right like you're screwing up see them so in one of our core conversation sessions yesterday I wasn't there so this is second hand but their discussion about in Drupal 9 the next next version of Drupal initiative leads being split up into multiple roles so there would be an engineering lead a designer lead so I mean is that something that it seems like it's a step if I understand it correctly it seems like a step towards anointing someone who is the driver or the dictator when I think dictator I think complete vision for the whole damn thing it seems like that sort of a micro dictator role is sort of that person who has slightly more voice slightly more the person who can shape the conversation and whatnot and maybe that's a good way to start getting towards to I'm guessing the issue is people hate bureaucracy and they hate mental managers because these are people who are there and we don't understand why they have the power that they have and they hate that right but some organic way of sort of building that in a way that is going to be culturally compliant with the Drupal community that seems like a good way to start okay so over the past few years as a community we've made a conscious effort to increase the role of designers probably the past four years how do we know when we have the right mix of designers and engineers that's a hard question that's why I'm asking I don't know whenever I feel I don't know the answer of a question I think we should do a survey alright well here's your sample no I mean it really is it's sort of how do you know when you've got the right mix is the product useful is it pretty are we getting enough deals whatever it is it seems like the community sorry the customer base would know and then ask them is it easier to use or is the use gone up is it have the future set what kind of person are you does the current product actually meet your needs I'm a big fan of surveys but I'm a nerd I want data to actually back up these sorts of decisions so one of the things you write about often is I'm not sure if categorizing people is the right way of doing people kind of like you did with the engineer and the designer and your background is primarily in companies rather than open source organizations absolutely yeah but from your experience is there a big difference in what you write about as far as identifying and labeling and identifying people's motivations in for profit private companies versus open source communities I think it's all humans so I think the archetypes are all still there interesting to me about a big huge open source is you have these relationships that are going on there are people never meet so I have a lot of my team I'm meeting on a weekly basis in one on ones and we have meetings in Drupal in a lot of open source communities you never meet these folks and I'm really curious about sort of how conversations go on how conflicts resolve because I get asked this question a lot how do you deal with remote workers and I want everyone there so I can look at you and say are you lying to me and you go no I'm like oh yeah you are right right how do you do that in email right my current working theory on this I was thinking about this when I couldn't sleep last night is I think you either do one or the other if you're going to have people together and talking you should have them all together if you're going to have a very remote team you should never ever meet each other I swear to God I don't know why this is true but I think because you learn the skills to deal with each other in chat rooms and email and all that sort of thing and if you never meet each other you never go like oh wow this is a whole other different person and I have these new sets of rules that I have to deal with you because I'm now talking with you and having a beer with you and this sort of thing so maybe you just keep them separate right because I spent a lot of time dealing because people are used to like solving issues with me face to face and it generally goes off the rails and we generally have always cleaning up messes because we have that opportunity to actually talk the rule set changes when you're working closer together so I don't know so I'm not sure if you just suggested that this is the last Drupal con or not yes let's see you guys alright so last question it's about a blog post you wrote a couple months ago where you wrote that business cards are dead and you feel that resumes should be next and that a person's digital footprint is probably the most accurate yeah I was just saying I came I was in London yesterday and I was hanging out with all these British stodgy old characters and they were coming up and asking me questions and we of course get to them with the conversation he said well I can't do a British action sorry can I have your card and I'm like you know it's like minus 10 IQ points for me when someone asks me for their card because I'm like and he's a fine human and he's a great person but the idea of a business card it's like you know my name you can go to Google and you can find my address you can find out all sorts of interesting things about me so it's a sort of artifact in the past and resumes to me are the same way I mean they're interesting but they're the best possible version of you right you are of course telling the story in your favor so I look at a resume as sort of a press release as opposed to the facts so whenever I sit down and I'm looking at a resume I go okay what's your name Todd Taylor great throw this away just go to git and see what you've done here right oh do you have a blog that's interesting how do I actually figure out what you've actually built because the people I tend to work with have some sort of digital signature and that to me is far more valuable business cards are interesting resumes are interesting but they're not the true data the true signal you can get about people but as an open source community we probably have a leg up on providing a digital footprint for our users I mean in our community it's kind of skewed more towards coders because every thing is recorded on our user page people write documentation and contribute in other ways we don't do such a good job on that side of things but is there more that we can be doing to help people in a position like yours where you're looking to hire people like what other types of information would be good to get in front of you I think the GitHub guys are on to something here I think there's a view into all of your work that would be employer friendly something which is like hey it's an honest view it's not a resume but something that I can go you can get a sense they want to aggregate it you can maybe spend a little bit there but again to me it's more fun for me to stock you a little bit if I'm going to go hire you I'm making a big decision I want to go find that data and anything that I think you provided I hold it a little bit suspect Michael Lopp everybody thank you very much thank you very much alright thank you very much everybody have a good day