!!Con West 2020 - Opening remarks

Hi, everyone! Welcome to !!Con West 2020! (applause) I apologize for the slightly late start. My name is Lindsey Kuper. I’m Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering here in the Computer Science and Engineering department at the Baskin School of Engineering at UC Santa Cruz. I want to give a particular welcome to to everyone who is at a !!Con for the first time. So, if you’re here for the first time, can I see a show of hands? That’s amazing. Let’s give a round of applause. (applause) I won’t ask you to show your hands, but a lot of people are also here at their first conference ever! So if we could get a round of applause for those people as well…

01:08 - (applause) So I have a few bits of administrivia to share before I hand things off to my fellow organizer, Joshua, who is going to talk about our code of conduct. First of all, the restrooms. There are two all gender restrooms in the back of the auditorium. Both of them have some baskets with pads and tampons on them. There are men’s and women’s restrooms in the building across the courtyard that way, and another all gender restroom in the basement of the building next door. So if there’s a line, you can always go across the courtyard and next door.

01:52 - I was asked to mention that along the left side of the sections in all three sections, there are left-handed desks! So if you need a left-handed desk, you can sit on the left side of a section. We have a lost and found. It’s this box right here. If you’ve lost anything, look there. We do not want you to get the conference plague. It’s a pretty common affliction of people who attend conferences, so I’ve broken this rule myself already a few times today, but we would like to encourage people to… Instead of shaking hands, just wave enthusiastically. All right. And with that, I’m going to turn it over to Joshua to talk about our code of conduct.

02:42 - (applause) >> Hi there! Good morning! I was trying to put together… Can you hear that? Excellent. I was trying to put together thoughts about a code of conduct and the big question that I want to answer is: Why have a code of conduct? It’s a common thing to put a code of conduct on your website to say you have a code of conduct. That’s not why we want to have a code of conduct. It’s not because we have to have a code of conduct, but it’s because we intentionally want to set how !!Con feels. I’m gonna let you in on a little secret about !!Con.

03:26 - So this is a conference, if you’re not aware, of 10-minute lightning talks, the joy, excitement, and surprise of programming. If you weren’t aware. Hi, welcome! But that’s only a little bit of it. The other side is that it’s also about bringing that kind of joy, excitement, and surprise to faces who don’t usually get to be in the room. I’m gonna mangle a quote from Dr. King and say that this is a natural follow-on. Because withholding joy, excitement, and surprise from anyone is a threat to joy, excitement, and surprise for everyone. Right? We can’t have it without getting everyone in the room.

04:11 - So I’m going to let you in on a second secret about !!Con, because the first secret is not a very good secret. The second secret is that !!Con is not about diversity and inclusion. I actually don’t like either of those, and here’s why. Diverse to me means that I want to bring a token one of you into the room because you can benefit me, because diverse ideas are better and you can take your diverse ideas and give them to me. I don’t like that. Inclusive means, this space belongs to me, but I’m going to let you be here. Include you into my space. And I don’t like that either.

04:49 - So The code of conduct is here because I would like to have an equitable and representative space, where everybody gets to stand on the same level and see the same things rather than for any benefit to me, and I would like to see not just a token one or two people of this or that, but a space that represents the gamut of humanity. That’s my other second little secret about !!Con. No matter what section of humanity you come from, I want to welcome you here. So. The code of conduct bit. It’s on our website. The short form is: Be kind to your fellow attendees. Make everyone feel like they’re welcome here. We did a spin on our code of conduct this year. We edited it some, in response to – tweaking it from last year. What I’ve discovered is that there are a lot of ways to be unkind. If you do it accidentally, please apologize and if you do it intentionally, this might not be the right place for you. Rather than telling you what not to do, I’m just saying: please act in line with our values.

06:10 - Make it a joyful, exciting, and surprising space. At the risk of going on too long about that, how can you do that? I want to give you three tips. Avoid feigning surprise. You can take this outside of !!Con too. Like if someone goes… I’ve never heard you can use colon as a token in bash. Rather than saying you never heard that you can use colon as a token in bash? Rather than doing that, take a moment to revel in the excitement that they’re about to learn that you can write a fork bomb in 9 characters in bash. So avoid feigning surprise if you can do that. Another thing is “well, actually”. You’re about to tell me…

06:56 - Actually, I think it’s 10 characters that that fork bomb is. Because I didn’t count. I just thought of that. As it turns out, telling me that adds basically nothing. A fork bomb is short in bash. So, don’t do that! There’s just no need for it. The third one is… This is a wide family of things. There are subtle -isms. It’s obvious to say you don’t belong here. That’s an obvious -ism. The subtle one is to say… My grandmother could do this. That’s subtly excluding the class of folks who are older and women and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Try and avoid that.

07:35 - We’re not gonna kick you out of the conference if you do it, but be mindful. If someone says you did it, say… Good point. Thanks. So, if you’re not sure, read our code of conduct, it’s on our web site, it won’t take long. We want you to have confidence in our code of conduct; we wrote a transparency report last year. It’s interesting reading. Keep us honest. If you run into trouble, find someone wearing one of these yellow shirts or click the form link at the bottom of the code of conduct, or our friends at Twilio set up an SMS gateway. If you want to talk to us or any of those things: 831-713-2605.

08:21 - And so I’m tempted to say: Now that I’m done talking about things that are a bummer, I’m gonna talk about things that are also a bummer. But the code of conduct is actually not a bummer. I’m excited about it because it makes !!Con special. You’ve probably heard there’s a strike on campus. There are graduate student workers who are fighting for a living wage. It is a bummer that they have to fight. But I am proud to introduce Sohum Banerjea to talk about that. Welcome, Sohum. >> Hello. Whoa. Okay. Hi, everybody. I’m Sohum Banerjea, a PhD student at the CSE department. I work in programming languages. And as of yesterday, the University of California, Santa Cruz, fired me from all further ASE appointments, for striking for a living wage. As an international student, this carries with it an abnegation of the university’s promise to support us over the course of our studies, and the threat of effective deportation. We are not allowed to stay in the country unless we maintain student status; we can’t maintain student status without paying tuition, and can’t pay tuition without tuition remission. You see the course of logic.

09:46 - But this should not be surprising, because this is only the latest reification in the forces that pushed us to strike in the first place. So what is the COLA campaign? The demand is extremely simple. Pay us enough to live here. Our graduate funding packages promise us $19,000 a year to live, work, and research in this city. How much it costs to to live in Santa Cruz as a single healthy student vary, but they start at $25,000, and go up to $31,000 a year. To note, the lower end of that number is given by the university in its own official documentation.

10:35 - Despite that, the university has repeatedly ignored for years our attempts to go through official channels, to bargain, to plead, and to draw attention to the plight facing its graduate student workers. Our union pushed through a controversial contract in 2018 that we at Santa Cruz overwhelmingly voted against, so we finally felt forced to take direct action and to hell with the no strikes clause. (applause) And so here we are. Months of stone walling and millions of dollars spent on police brutality later, here we are. In having this response, in deciding to fire the graduate student workers whose only request was that the university pay us enough to live here, the UC system has shown the lie of its diversity marketing. It has shown that it does not care about access to education.

11:39 - It shows that voices and faces like mine are only welcome here as long as we stay quiet and are willing to be taken advantage of. If you live in California, this is what your public university system is doing. If you live in America, this is what your public university system is doing. If you live in the world, this is not what your public university system is doing. (sigh) And that’s awful. Look. I’m not here to bum you out. Although I have done a pretty good job of it at this point. What can you do to help? There’s a lot. Put pressure on public officials and the university system. Donate to the strike fund. We’ve had an outpouring of support in the wake of these firings. It’s frankly humbling. Tell everyone you know in a position of power or even not in a position of power. Tell everyone you know that this is happening. Because we are done staying silent.

12:50 - (applause) >> Thank you very much. I want to mention that the !!Con organizers are grateful to the strike organizing committee for essentially being willing to let us have this conference. As many of you know, we spoke with the strike organizing team and they agreed that attending this conference this weekend did not constitute crossing the picket line. We’re grateful to them for being wiling to say that, because, understandably, we had a lot of speakers and attendees who were ready to bail. I’m really grateful that this conference was able to happen, despite the strike. So… On a more positive note…

13:42 - !!Con was started by a group of good friends and I in New York in 2014. And it started honestly as a joke, and then it became a real conference. And then six years later, it’s become one of the most important and rewarding aspects of my career. And it’s just my incredible honor and privilege to be able to bring !!Con West now to Santa Cruz for the second year in a row. (applause) So I want to say a little bit about why we do !!Con West. Computing is popular.

14:22 - We encourage young people to “learn to code” so they can get that high paying job, make themselves or their country more competitive in the global economy, or maybe help their country go to war. But none of those things are why I study computer science. I study CS because I find the ideas awe inspiring and I find the people awe inspiring. And that is why we do !!Con. And it seems relevant here to share a couple of quotations with you from Rachel Carson, who had something to say about child-like wonder. She said – and I think this is from her book, The Sense of Wonder – she wrote a child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful. Full of wonder and excitement.

15:11 - It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. If I had influence over the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the Christening of all children, I would ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructable that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantment of later years, the alienation from the sources of our strength. And that is what !!Con is about. It’s about having a sense of wonder and awe about computing and about the people who do computing. And there’s one last thing to say about that. So one might ask… Isn’t it frivolous of us to be here talking about joy and wonder and eating doughnuts while so many bad things are happening in the world, while the world is burning? To that, I think the best thing I can say is another Rachel Carson quote.

16:16 - She wrote: The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders of the universe about us, the less taste we will have for the destruction of our race. Wonder and humility are wholesome emotions, and they do not exist side by side with the lust for destruction. In other words, it is not frivolous for us to be here talking about joy and excitement. It is in fact essential. That is why we do !!Con. (applause) So with that, I’m very proud to be able to introduce our first keynote speaker, isis lovecruft. isis is a cryptographer who has contributed to Signal, the Tor Project, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and many others.

17:03 - They enjoy making fast, safe, and hard-to-misuse cryptographic libraries in Rust, walking through the woods with their wolfhound familiar and casting curses on evil doers in tech to turn them into umbrellas. Please give your warmest welcome to isis lovecruft. .