!!Con West 2020: Closing remarks

Do I have a microphone? I do. All right. Always bad news when you give me a microphone. No, I’m kidding. Thanks for coming. I have some prepared remarks. But the worst case scenario is that I’m gonna ad lib, and that’s about what’s gonna happen. I don’t know. I feel like there’s been this theme today of empowerment. So we started off with Erin’s talk. In which she told us about the kind of consequence of disempowerment, of not being able to control your computing environment, and what happens when people are no longer – when people – this keeps resonating in my head. Canvas is something that you’re not allowed to control.

01:14 - And as a result, Canvas controls you, right? Canvas is used to take power away from people who are organizing on this campus. Later, Kate told us about casual creators and empowering casual creators, and what does it do to take away – there’s a word that Kate used, and it’s transmogrified in my head to… Disgust! I was gonna say shame. But disgust. And so right now, Lee provides this bookend at the end of today to tell us: Here are 12 concrete steps, here is a, here is something that I had never heard of, and applying these directly to kind of the model of how we operate, the model of things that we can do in the computing realm – so I’m just delighted by that. So I wanted to share my delight with you. So that’s my ad lib. Here’s my prepared remarks. The closing of !!Con is this kind of emotional moment for me. It’s been – putting together a conference is a lot of work. It’s this… it’s kind of this moment of taking a breath. And that’s kind of… That’s nice also.

02:31 - But it’s also this closing, this feeling of !!Con. So I’m gonna bring out this quote again, that Lindsey had earlier, from Rachel Carson. “I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and enchantment of later years, the sterile preoccupation with the things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength. That’s the Gift of Wonder.” I wrote in my blog – which you are not expected to read my blog – I wrote in my blog a few months ago about the !!Con feeling. And at the end of !!Con West last year, I spoke a little bit about how we create this space together. And…

03:22 - So here I am, like a little bit nervous, to bring this here. Because what I wrote there is like to a little tiny audience. And now I have all of you. So this is kind of like a personal… Do I take the moment here to bring in, like, my religious and ethnic background and all that kind of sort of stuff? I’m gonna do it. Because that’s what we do here. I’m glad… And I’ve kind of been hearing side conversations all over… Of people who have brought more than just their technical background to !!Con.

03:53 - So I have this kind of story, and there’s this – in the Jewish tradition, there’s this idea of… So on Friday night, through Saturday, that’s the rest day. The Sabbath, Shabbat, whatever you want to call it. And there’s this concept of the Shabbat spice. On Shabbat, you make – or in my family’s case – you buy challah. It’s a specific bread. And you can make that any day of the week, right? It’s not… I mean, it is a pain to make. That’s why I don’t make it. But you could make it any day of the week. But it tastes better on Friday night. And you can get it any day of the week, right? But it tastes better on Friday night, after you’ve turned out the lights. And why is that? And so the mythos is that there’s this special ingredient called the Shabbat spice. There’s this special ingredient called the Shabbat spice.

04:50 - And so this ingredient – I’m gonna quote Lindsey again, who said earlier that, “It’s not frivolous for us to be here talking about joy and excitement. It’s essential.” And it’s not frivolous to take the day of rest, right? It’s essential. It’s not frivolous to have !!Con. It’s important that we have !!Con. So right. And even I will say that even relatively non-observant Jews like myself will periodically get a whiff of the Shabbat spice on Friday. So !!Con to me has that feeling. It’s this kind of special… This special moment that comes around once a year. And so the closing of !!Con West mirrors, in my mind anyway, mirrors the closing, the end of that last day of… That last hour of the day of rest.

05:43 - And there’s this ceremony, havdalah, where you kind of sing and you chant, and it’s halfway between mourning that like… Now we are going to go back to our normal day… But also it’s this moment of hope. That we get to take that… Kind of that special feeling, and bring it back with us. And there’s this weird thing. A lot of Judaism is not Messianic, like the savior kind of thing. Havdalah weirdly is, and like everytime, like last week, I went back and the world was still kind of gross outside.

06:19 - And the week before I went back and the world was kind of gross, but this week, when I open my door and I turn the lights back on, maybe it will still be Shabbat outside, and maybe this year, when I open the door, it will still be !!Con outside. So I don’t know. I kind of have that… It’s this kind of very emotional moment for me, the closing of !!Con, as I prepare to open the door and see what’s outside. So it’s kind of just like… This last moment is a moment to savor it. Anyway, that’s my thing. So here’s my list of thank yous. A thank you to you, our audience. Give yourself a round of applause. (applause) Many of you are here for the first time. And that’s great. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you for coming to !!Con. I hope you enjoy this. I hope you take this outside in the world with you. Some of you are back at !!Con West for the second time. And that’s exciting. Lindsey brought this up earlier. We were talking about this earlier.

07:23 - And that’s exciting, because now we’re starting to build a community here together of people who, like, come back for this again! So that’s great. I wanted to thank !!Con’s past, who set the stage for this. And !!Con’s future. And so that’s my opportunity to tell you that the call for proposals for !!Con 2020 closes tonight, anywhere on earth time? Is that correct? Did I get that right? Unless… So that’s the case. Okay. I have sponsors to thank. There are sponsors. Our phenomenal sponsors, UC Santa Cruz, Baskin School of Engineering, and the computer science and engineering department. They provided this venue in kind. They gave us a bunch of money, with which we bought all sorts of…

08:12 - Like the custodial services, things like that. They gave us a bunch of money. And there’s a whole bunch of folks in those departments who put in – I’m gonna hold applause for sponsors all until the end, by the way. There’s a whole bunch of folks in those few departments that helped us out. LightStep, so they brought three incredible people, and I’m so glad that LightStep joined us. Not only did they come in at a phenomenal sponsorship.

08:40 - They sponsored the delicious falafel lunch yesterday, they’ve sponsored captioning. And let’s see… And so the question is: One question I had is who and what is LightStep and why do you need them? And the answer is observability if you run cloud services and you have felt the pain of grepping logs. Which I have. Because I’m a hardware engineer, but I still run cloud services. If you’ve felt the pain of grepping logs, then you should talk to LightStep. So those are our phenomenal sponsors. Let’s have a round of applause for our phenomenal sponsors.

09:16 - (applause) This year we had an excellent sponsor. Twilio came in at the excellent sponsorship level. And I want to say that actually for one of my clients, I use Twilio, and their sales organization is really, really good, and their product is really, really good. So if you have cause to put a SIM card in something and program the SIM card, you should talk to Twilio, and on the other end, if you want to answer somebody’s telephone call or answer somebody’s SMS, then you should also talk to Twilio. So those are why you should talk to Twilio. Let’s give them a round of applause.

09:53 - (applause) We came in with four awesome sponsors this year. Recurse Center – we love Recurse Center. Okay, Recurse Center. If you want to go take a break from your job and spend six weeks learning to do something, self-directed if you want. If you want !!Con for six weeks, you should go talk to Recurse Center So Recurse Center are great. And by the way, they sponsored – if you’re watching on the live stream, or if you’re watching a recorded version of this, Recurse Center sponsored that. We had Mapbox. So they do – as the name might suggest – they do custom integrated maps.

10:36 - And if you use Strava, which I do, I’m kind of like a cyclist nerd, all of their new map tiles and special maps that have elevation and all that kind of stuff – that’s Mapbox. Another sponsor is Accelerated Tech, which is this weird two-person consultancy. That’s me. Building hardware and software solutions, and also come work with me. So if you really like that kind of thing. Hi. Come talk to me. Heap! So they’re doing web product analytics. So if you want to know where people are clicking on your website, and why they are or are not converting to click the “Buy” button on your website, you should talk to Heap Analytics. So those are our four awesome sponsors.

11:19 - Can I have a round of applause for them? (applause) Okay. I have a supporting team. From UCSC, we had Ady Weinstein and Melissa Baker, who helped us put together, who helped us like actually order the food, which is good. Juan Perez and Phil Johnston from Learning Technologies helped us, and in particular I want to thank Juan who came in here at 8 am Saturday morning to help us get all that set up. I think that’s super incredible. The University catering team. They were responsible for the snacks and breakfasts and coffee. And the grounds and custodial staff, who were supervised by Eva Banuelos.

12:01 - The transportation staff for shuttle buses. I don’t know if you took the shuttle buses this year. If you did, I can’t express my gratitude enough for them getting all that set up. In the back there, Cindy Backman and Demi Smith have been recording, and have been recording all of the slides, and have done all of this effort to get the live stream up and running. They are the Confreaks team. And White Coat Captioning, Mirabai Knight is over on that screen typing right now.

12:32 - Can I have a round of applause for all of the above? (applause) I have a bunch of speakers. So there are too many speakers. I cannot list the name of every speaker. I do want to give shoutouts especially to Kate Compton. We had three speakers who bailed at the last moment. Like… Literally Thursday night, we had two speakers who had a health emergency and another speaker who had another personal emergency. So Kate came in here and gave this incredible keynote on two days of notice.

13:08 - And I just can’t express my gratitude enough for Kate Compton. And all the speakers. (applause) And finally, so I think that’s all that I have. The organizers for this weekend, Dema Abu Adas, Dev Purandare, Gargi Sharma is somewhere… in the back there, along with Jeena Lee, Lindsey Kuper, Varun Gandhi, and I am Joshua Wise. The shuttle is at 4:40 PM. Thank you very much. Good night. Get home safe. (applause) .