How y'all doing today? I messed that up. I got to do that again. Sorry. Welcome to

the RubyConf keynote. I'm your host, Saron, and today we're talking about how to build authentic and engage, that's right, two things, communities. Now, the key word, the star of today's talk is that very last word, communities. And to really dig

into communities and explore it and unpack it, first, I have to tell you a little bit about my childhood. So I'm Ethiopian. I'm an immigrant. I was born in the capital of Ethiopia. Shout-outs if you know what that is. It's Addis Ababa. And my father came to the U.S. in this country first, and then my mother and I followed about

a year later. And when we came here, I grew up in a very traditional, stereotypical Ethiopian immigrant household. Now, if you are not familiar with the stereotype of traditional Ethiopian immigrant households, don't worry. I'm going to tell you all about it. My father

was very strict. He was a disciplinarian. He believed in education, and, well, actually that was kind of it. He really just believed in education. He believed that if you got good grades, and the only good grade, of course, is an A+, unless you're in one of those really sketchy classes where they don't do pluses and minuses, and you just

have to deal with just an A, then fine, we'll take it. And he believed that you would then go to a really good college. And, of course, that college was Harvard. I don't really, I don't think that he knew about, like, Ivy Leagues as a concept, but he knew about Harvard. So that was the goal. And if you did those things, then you would end up with the most respectable profession that there is, which is, of course,

to be a doctor. So we've all failed as a unit. We failed. That's okay. That's fine. And if you did these things, then you would have a life that was not necessarily happy, but that was successful. And why be happy when you can be successful? So that was his

goal for me. That was the life that he planned for me. And so in order for me to follow this plan, of course, I had to have a distraction-free childhood, okay? Anything that would take me off this path was just not acceptable. Having friends over to have fun?

Absolutely not. To go to other people's houses where they would not be doing their math homework? I don't think so. To go to the mall where lives the ultimate distraction? Boys. Not okay. So let's just say that I didn't really get out much as a kid. In fact, the only community

that I really knew and that I interacted with on a regular basis was our own community, Ethiopian immigrant community. And if you think about the Ethiopian immigrant community, really if you think about any immigrant community, it's a relatively vulnerable one.

You have people who've left everything behind, going from one country to another country, which often feels like going from one world to a whole other world. They don't always speak the language, and if they do, they don't speak it well. They're leaving behind their physical stuff, their families, a lot of times their kids, their spouse. They're also leaving behind their professions, their careers, because a lot of

those, especially professional degrees, do not transfer. They're starting over in almost every sense of the word. And when they get here, they're not always welcome, they're not always wanted, and they're definitely not always safe. But for some reason,

they seem to always find that welcome, wanting, safe place in our living room. That's where they gathered. And the person who gathered them was my mommy. That's me and my mommy. Aren't we so cute? Yes, we are. As you can see, I've always been fly. And my mom was a community

organizer. She was a community builder. And at that point, you know, as a kid, I think I took that for granted. I didn't think much of that because, well, she's a nice lady. She cooks good food. Her living room is nice. It has some cushy seats. So why wouldn't you want to hang out with us? But if you really think about

it, especially as an adult looking back, there were lots of nice people in our community. There are lots of people who could cook well. And frankly, there were people who had bigger living rooms and more resources than we did. So why did they keep coming back to our living room? What made our living room feel so magical? There are a few things I think that

my mother did intentionally that created this magical living room. That's what we're going to dig into now. The first is that she was first to serve and last to eat. She was the host that ran around and made sure that your plates were full, your cups were full, that you were

happy and fed and comfortable. And maybe at the end, if she had a chance to grab her own plate, she'd put something together. And we'd kind of chase her around and go, you need to eat, you need to eat. And she'd go, uh-huh, uh-huh, okay, whatever. And she was so focused on making sure that we were taken care of. And by doing that, what she told us was

we were the most important people in the room, that our needs were valued. The other thing that she did was she led by observing. She wasn't one of those hosts who would clink a glass and make an announcement and say, hello, welcome to my dinner party. I don't know where that accent came from. It definitely doesn't talk like that.

But she didn't do that kind of thing. She led by watching, making sure you were happy, noticing little things, jumping in to fix them. She'd look at your plate, and she would notice that you didn't eat one of your dishes. And she would go, why didn't you eat that? Was something wrong? And you'll say, oh, it was too spicy. It was a little too spicy.

Don't do heat that well. And she'd go, okay. And she wouldn't say anything. But the next time that you come over to the magical living room, she'd have a whole set of dishes just for you. And they were the not spicy version of the stuff that everyone else was eating. And she'd pull you aside and she'd go, this, this right here, that's for you.

And she wouldn't make a big fuss about it. There was no announcement of how amazing and thoughtful she was. But by that little act of noticing, jumping in, solving, observing, leading by observing, she made you feel like your little problem of not eating that one dish was important. The last thing she did is she solved many little problems.

My favorite example of this is Thanksgiving a few years ago. So in case you don't know, Thanksgiving is an American holiday. We don't really do that in Ethiopia. But because you have the day off and we are in America, we celebrate. We have family over.

We cook mostly Ethiopian dishes. We also do have the turkey and the mashed potatoes and the mac and cheese. And one Thanksgiving a few years ago, we forgot the gravy. And I said, thank you. Yes. Yes. Yes. It's terrific. I understand. And I said to my mom, oh, Michael, we forgot the gravy. What are we going to do? Is the grocery store even open at this hour?

It's pretty like, oh, my God, are we going to have to go to the gas station? Are we getting gas station gravy? Unacceptable. How are we going to solve this problem? And my mom said, don't worry. I'll take care of it. And we're all crowded around her in the kitchen watching her. And she goes and grabs some flour and some spices and some

turkey juice. Is that how you make gravy? I'm not entirely sure. And she whips together something, and it's the best gravy I've ever had. Now, this may not seem like a big deal to you, but you have to understand, we don't do gravy, okay? Our spices are not made from flour and spices and turkey juice,

okay? Our spices are made from a lot of onions and a lot of spices, okay? That's our version of sauces and gravies. We don't do turkey gravy. So the fact that she just figured out how to put together gravy while everyone's standing watching and waiting was incredible to me. And at the end of the day, Thanksgiving would not have been ruined,

arguably, if there was no gravy. But she saw that little problem, and she jumped on it, she figured it out, and she made dinner a little bit more delicious for us. Now, if you abstract some of the steps I talked about in these examples, you might notice a little pattern, and that pattern is that she was understanding,

understanding her community, understanding her people. She was building, whether it's gravy or new dishes, she was learning, she was observing, taking a step back, taking notes, and then she was iterating, making it better for us. Do these steps look familiar? I kind of hope they do. Yeah? Yeah? It's kind of like product building, right? It's

kind of like the stuff we do all the time. What she was doing in building up her community and creating that magical living room for us is not really fundamentally that different from what we all do. And in doing these things, even though in her world she was applying it to relatively small problems, after all, most of the examples I gave you were related to just

food. By doing these things, she made us all feel like we were valued. She made us feel like we were wanted and welcome and safe. Fast forward many years later, I am now an adult, I'm a growing woman, thank you very much, and I decided that I was going to learn to code,

and if you don't know, if you don't remember, if that was too long ago for you, learning to code looks a lot like this. You turn into a cartoon when you learn to code. Now, learning to code for me was super frustrating, it was painful, it was difficult, it felt like it was me against the computer, and the computer is always right. And I did it for a few months on my own, and then I decided to apply and enrolled in a boot camp.

I graduated from the Flatiron School in Manhattan. Actually, they're in a bunch of places now, shout out to Flatiron School. And when I got to that boot camp, I was suddenly in a room full of 44 other people who understood the highs and the lows, who knew what it felt like when nothing worked, and how worth it was when it finally did. And for me, the biggest value of

that was really that community. And when I graduated, I felt so lucky, I was so excited. They make you hold a keyboard up when you graduate, so you're like officially a developer. And those are the rules. And when I graduated, I was so excited, I said,

yes, I am finally a real developer, I can do things, I know some stuff. But really what I knew most was the fact that that community of students was really what helped me get across that finish line and finish strong. Now, the problem is that that community in that boot camp cost me $11,000 and many months without a salary. And this is frankly

kind of on the cheap end. Boot camps nowadays go up to $20,000, $25,000. And even if you can afford that, and keep in mind, there aren't like student loans, right? And even if you can afford that, not a lot of people can go three, four, six months without income, and then

another couple months when they're looking for a job. So that's an inaccessible investment. And what I understood from that experience is that community is key, especially for me. Community was everything, and also inaccessible. But don't worry, I'm going to do something

about it. Have no fear. I decided that I was going to build a way for people to have that sense of community. I was going to build something called CodeNewbie. Shout out, raise your hand if you've heard of a Twitter chat. Raise your hand, raise your hand, raise your hand, raise your hand. Okay, y'all got some learning to do. That's okay. I'm here. I'm going to figure it out. Don't worry. So a Twitter chat

is when you have a hashtag for us who was CodeNewbie, and then you pick a time and a day. For us, it's Wednesday. It's actually today. Wednesday at 6 p.m. Pacific time, 9 p.m. Eastern time. And the idea with a Twitter chat is that if you all get on Twitter at that time and you do a search for that hashtag and everyone's tweeting and using the hashtag,

then you get a nice little thread. You get a conversation you can follow, you can jump in, you can favorite, you can retweet, you can engage. And so I said this Twitter chat medium sounds like a really good accessible way to find other new developers, to find your community. And at that point, this was about four years ago now, it seemed like everybody was doing

a Twitter chat. There was a Twitter chat for every single topic. And so I said, okay, how do I build a magical Twitter chat? What does that look like? How do you make it magical? Well, for us, there were a couple things. Number one is we had three rules. We start every single Twitter chat with three rules. Be helpful, be supportive, be nice. And in starting off this way, every single one, we've done hundreds at this point.

By starting off this way, what we're doing is telling you how we expect you to behave when you come hang out with us. You better be nice, you better be helpful, you better be supportive. But the other thing it does is it signals to everyone else what

they can expect when they join. It says, hey, if you need support, if you need help, if you need a little bit of kindness in your world, especially on your coding journey, this place will give you that. The other thing we did, which I think is very, very important, is we were disgustingly, sickeningly, aggressively nice. If you tweeted us and said,

oh, I just finished a coding tutorial, you know what you're going to get? Five heart emojis. Did you just say that you submitted your first pull request? Yeah, you're proud of that?

Yeah? Look at these gifs. That's right. That's right. Oh, I'm sorry, are you nervous? Are you nervous for your first technical interview tomorrow for your first developer job? You are? Yeah? Well, get these huggy smiley emojis. This is the best one. Seriously,

this right here is where it's at. Right here. Huggy smiley emoji. But in being aggressively disgustingly nice, what we're doing is we keep out people who find that kind of annoying. Because it is kind of annoying. Right? Can you imagine going up to someone, trying to be mean to them and going, you're ugly, and they're like, I love you.

That doesn't really work. What do you say? You're like, okay, I need to get away from you. Which is fine. Here's the thing about inclusion. Inclusion makes it sound like you want everybody in your community, but you don't. You don't. There are some people you'll want to keep out. You want to keep out the bad apples and the assholes and the mean people,

and when you're really disgustingly nice to people, they don't want to sit with you. And that's fine. That's totally fine. In fact, I didn't even appreciate how seriously I took this until a few years ago. It was a Wednesday morning. I woke up,

and I had this horrible pain, this terrible pain in my right shoulder. And throughout the day, it was getting worse and worse to the point where I couldn't even lift. I couldn't lift my arm. It was so painful. And literally two minutes, two minutes before the Twitter chat started, it got so bad that I started screaming in pain, just crying in pain. And my poor husband,

who's sitting right there, hey, baby. Raise your hand. How you doing? So fine. He looks at me and he goes, I think we should go to the emergency room.

And I'm like, no. It's Twitter chat time. And I said, I'm going to dictate, and you're going to type. So he's sitting at the computer on my laptop, and he's responding to people and tweeting. And I'm like, there's not enough exclamation points. Three exclamation points minimum, OK? Susie tweets, oh, I just finished my first book. Congratulate, Susie.

And there's a time in your life when you find yourself screaming emojis at the person that you love, and when you realize how seriously you take the work that you do. So the Twitter chats are going amazingly. People are finding mentors and support systems

and resources and saying all these wonderful things. And then I started getting a few DMs. I got a few messages from people who said, hey, I love what you're doing. I love this Twitter chat idea. I want to participate. I want to get that help and support.

But when you do your Twitter chat, I'm still asleep. I'm halfway across the world, and it's 2 o'clock in the morning for me. Or it's 6 o'clock in the morning, and I have to get the kids ready for school. What can you do for me? How can I join in? And this is when I realized that developers and Twitter chat organizers have a common enemy. Time zones. Terrible. Terrible. The worst. The worst. And I said, oh, man,

what am I going to do? I can't be awake at every single hour. And especially at that point, these Twitter chats were a fun side project and I had a full-time job. And even if I could, I don't really want to be doing Twitter chats at every single hour.

But I said I think there's something we can do. I think we can iterate and we can do an alternate chat. So now we do a morning chat on Sundays at 11 a.m. Pacific time. And that one's more of a coding check-in. It's an opportunity for you to say here's what I did this week and here's what I'm going to do next week. It's a nice little accountability

situation. But here's the thing. If those people had not spoken up, we would not have those Sunday morning chats. That time zone issue wasn't one that was top of mind for me. I was so excited about just the fact that we have this community that that barrier was in my blind spot. So code newbie continues. Things are going great.

The chats are going awesome. But what I realize in these Twitter chats is that Twitter is a really great way to discover new people and new ideas and to quickly, efficiently get a lot of information in just one little hour. But it's not a great medium to dig deep, to explore,

to unpack something. And so I thought, okay, what's a better way to do that? And because my first job out of college was actually working at NPR, I thought podcasting, audio, that's a really great medium. That's a really great tool to do that. Now, when I looked at the technical podcast, the options out there, what I understood

was that there are a lot of technical content but few technical stories. A lot of the technical shows nerd out, geek out about the tech, which is awesome. But for newer developers, this idea of coding is interesting because of what you can do with it and who you can do it with and what

the effects are. There's this whole story element, the people of it, the where, the why, the how, that's really, really fascinating. And I found largely overlooked by these podcasts. But I have no fear. I am here. And I decided that I'm going to build the code to be podcast. But how do you build a podcast that is magical? What does that look

like? What does that mean? So there are a couple things. Number one, for our community, it is super important that they hear validation that they belong. That is huge. Because when you think about who developers are, they're two pretty dominant narratives. Number one

is the idea that you went to a top ten school, you have your computer science degree and now you're working at a big tech company or a hot new startup and you're kind of set for life. Or the other one is that you were born with a computer and you've been coding since birth. And that's kind of it. Those are really the two main stories. And I knew

that wasn't true. I know that people become developers from all different backgrounds and for different reasons. And I wanted to showcase that. And so what I did was I tried to pick guests who come from all different kinds of different places. So here's a little snapshot of some of the guests that we've had. And we try to think about

race and gender but also parts of the world, what languages they code in, how they got to coding, how they became developers. And it was fascinating to me to hear stories of people who I just assumed had been coding since they were born tell me, oh, I didn't actually discover coding until I was 25. You hoot a cat, great example,

created Ember.js, right? Did not know coding until he was about 25. Chad Fowler, another great example, was a saxophonist. Could you have guessed? A saxophonist. Didn't know what code was until about 22, 23. And those stories are super important to tell. And in doing so, you create almost an anti-narrative that says that there is no

narrative. That if you want to do it, if you put in the time and the work, that you belong here. There is a space for you. So validation is super important. But there's another kind of validation, which is that they can do this. So many times developers, there's this fear that, oh, I'm too stupid, I'm not made for this,

I'm not born for this. And it's super important for me that we combat that. And there are many ways to do this. A lot of it is in the types of questions you ask and, you know, the guest that you pick and the way you design the interview. But there's something really small that I try and do that I want to call out. A lot of times in our shows,

we talk about technical things and the guest will mention a buzz word, some piece of jargon, some technical term that the audience may not be familiar with. And so they'll say, for example, testing, let's do a simple one, testing. And they'll say, hey, you know, we test your code. And most hosts, if they catch that, they'll say, oh, can you define what testing is

for people listening who may not be familiar? And that sounds very thoughtful. Sounds like a nice kind thing to do. But in phrasing it that way, can you define testing for people who may not know what that is? What you're really saying is I know what

testing is. You know what testing is. Those other people should know what testing is. But for some reason, they don't. So can we help them out? It feels a little bit like charity, like knowledge charity, that's a thing. If that isn't a thing, I totally coined it, came up with it, okay? Yeah. But it feels a little bit like charity. And for the person

listening, it's a little paper cut. It's a little reminder that I really should have known what that is. So what I try and do in my show is I pretend not to know anything. That's my strategy. Testing, oh, what is testing? I've heard of that before. Can you explain what that is to me? I try to be the audience, to be that person who doesn't know.

And it's funny because sometimes I'll get texts from friends who listen to the show and go, I know you know what that is. I'm like, yes, usually I do, but that's not the job. The other thing that I try and do to make this podcast magical is that I try to get out

of the way. This is super important. I am the host, the executive producer, the booker on the show, but I am also the least important person on an episode. And I'm going to prove it to you. I'm going to prove that I get out of the way. This is our episode, season 5, episode 8 with Chad Fowler. These are the audio files for it. As you can see, that top row

is my audio. And that bottom is Chad. Chad likes to talk. And as you can see, I don't really say that much. In fact, most of those audio waves aren't even me asking questions. They're sound effects. They're me going, mm-hmm, and mm. That's all you need

to be a podcast host, by the way. If you can nail those two sound effects down, you are good. You are absolutely good. But I am not the star. Me talking doesn't really do anything

for the audience. It's Chad. It's his story that's inspiring, that's educating, that's entertaining. So I try and give him all the space that he needs. And just to prove to you that that wasn't a unique example, here's one we did with Scott Hanselman. This one's an early one. This is episode 17. We've done 190 episodes so far. And same thing,

I think Scott likes to talk a little bit more than Chad. That's okay, though. But same idea, right? I say very, very little. And he says a whole lot, as he should. The audience learns from him, not from me. So things are going great. People are saying awesome, amazing things about how they're learning, and they're inspired, and they're excited, and they're motivated. And then about a year ago, we started a brand new show

called the Base CS podcast. And yeah, okay. I did not pay them, I swear. Now, this Base CS podcast came from a woman named Vaidehi Joshi. And she, I need to take you all everywhere. Y'all are awesome. Oh, my goodness. And she,

here's the third one. Ready? And she also graduated from the Flatiron School. There you go. And she did not have a computer science degree. And she really wanted one. She wanted that education. And so she decided she was going to teach herself. So for a year,

she was going to learn all the computer science, and she was going to turn it into blog posts. Every week, she was going to publish a blog post. And I remember seeing the tweet announcing she was going to do this, and I thought, yeah, okay. That sounds like a lot of work, and I know you have a job job, so we'll see how far this gets. And she did it. 52 weeks later, there are 52 blog posts, and they're really good. And I read that,

and I thought, we need to turn this into a podcast. Because if we did, we can make computer science education accessible through a whole different medium. And so now, we do these 20-minute episodes where I'm the student, she's the teacher, and she's teaching me computer science, and there's lots of puns and bad jokes, and it's great.

Raise your hand if you've heard of Car Talk, NPR, NPR Show Car Talk. Okay. Someone recently compared it to Car Talk. They said that it was Car Talk, but for computer science, and that is very accurate. So if you like Car Talk, you'll probably like The Basiest Monkeys. And so about one season in, I get an email from a listener, and the email says,

thank you so much for creating this. This was wonderful. It was super helpful. And it's been really important to me and my being able to level up because I'm blind. So a lot of the computer science education that I've tried simply isn't made for me.

I can't consume it. And this is one of the few mediums that's actually worked. And I read that, and I thought, holy crap, that's awesome. But it also made me very aware that in all the stuff I was doing and the content I was creating and the people I was trying to help, not once did accessibility cross my mind. I never asked that question of, oh, how does this

affect people who learn in different ways? I didn't think about that. And in that email, it drew my attention to the fact that, well, if you can't hear, then what do you do? You can't listen to the podcast, so what do you do?

And so because of that email, we iterated, and now we do transcripts. So we transcribe all of our BACES episodes and our CODEMY podcast episodes. But here's the thing. If that one listener hadn't spoken up, we would not have transcripts. It's not something

I thought about. So if we look at the different examples we talked about, the BACES podcast, the CODEMY podcast, the CODEMY Twitter chats, these are all online projects, which is great, because that means if you have internet connection, then you can join in, you can participate, you can download, you can subscribe. It's awesome. But there's something really

special about in real life, right? There's something different about being in this room, looking at all of your beautiful faces and hearing you and talking to you. There's something very different and special about that. And if I think about my own career as a developer, conferences have been super important to me. And I really wanted to do

something for newbies. But the thing that I understood from all the conferences I've gone to is that most conferences aren't great for newbies. They're just not made for newbies. But once again, have no fear, I am here. And I'm going to build the ultimate conference for newbies, and it will be called Codeland, the land of all the code.

And this conference is going to be magical. But what makes a magical conference? What does that look like? Well, there are a few things that are particularly important, some specific pain points for newer developers. One is it's really important to follow and understand the talk. That's nice, right? To understand the things that you hear,

that's a good idea. And what makes this tricky for new developers is when they go to technical talks, even the ones that are called beginner friendly or newbie friendly aren't really newbie friendly. They're new to this particular topic friendly. But not new to code friendly. And let me explain what that means. When you

learn your first language, usually it hurts. It's really painful. You don't know how to navigate the docs. You don't realize that error messages are your friends and you should read them, not run from them. You don't realize that when things break, you did not break the machine. There are lots of little things about learning that first language that

can be hard for new developers. But once you've gotten past that, you're onto your second language or your second framework, it's a lot easier. You know how to use the docs. You may not actually read the error messages, but you consider reading the error messages. Yeah, that's right. We're getting better. And it's much easier for you to look at

something that's broken or not working and go, that's totally normal. That's just how it is. So when a new developer hits a roadblock, they go, oh, my God, I feel so stupid. I don't think I can do this. And a more experienced developer goes, I feel so stupid. Must be doing something right. That's the difference. And so when new

developers walk into these technical talks and they hear these words and jargon and buzzwords and all these things that they don't know about, they go, oh, crap, they get overwhelmed, they get frustrated, and they check out in a way that I don't think more experienced developers do. And so to combat this, to help people stay on the same track, we created these conference

booklets. And these conference booklets were a huge pain to make, but totally worth it. These conference booklets were me going to all of our speakers and saying, I need two things from you. I need a list of all of your resources, so that if people want to learn

more about this topic, they know where to go. And I want a list of all the tech terms that will be mentioned in your talk and a definition. And so for every single talk, you get a little cheat sheet. You get a little cheat sheet, you go straight to that talk, and you have your terms and definitions, you have your resources, you have your talk title and your speaker bio, so you know which talk it's for. And it was a really great way of

saying, hey, you won't get lost. We're here. We're taking care of you. And it was super, super helpful. The other thing that's super important is that newbies need the why. I think the more technical we get, the more in the weeds we get. We get really excited

about the weeds. We get really excited about the implementation and the how does it work and what is it doing. And we sometimes kind of forget the who is it for and why are we using them in the first place and what are the side effects. We forget to take a step back and talk about the bigger picture. But for new developers, that bigger picture is really important.

That's the part that gets us really excited. And so to make sure that we address this at Codeland, I personally coached each of our speakers. Over the two years, there were over 80 speakers, and I worked with every single one of them to go through their talk outline, their notes, their slides, and their actual presentation to make sure that the message,

the framing was going to connect with our audience. And the last piece that frankly might be the most important one is that this magical conference needs to be financially accessible. Conferences are super expensive. They're expensive to put on and they're expensive to attend. And a lot of us might take that for granted because we probably have companies

that are paying for our tickets, paying for our hotels, and if they're not paying completely, they're probably heavily subsidizing a lot of that. But for people in the community, they don't have those jobs yet. They're going to the conference to get those jobs where they can go to conferences for free. They're still teachers and nurses and truck drivers.

And if they go to a conference, they're paying out of pocket. And if we think about the expenses of a conference, sure, there's the ticket, usually a couple hundred dollars, sometimes a couple thousand dollars. And then there's the hotel, depending on where it's located. It can be a hundred, a couple hundred a night. And one thing that I really appreciate about

RubyConf and RailsConf is that they move around. They try to go to big cities, small cities. They try to make it geographically accessible. But most tech conferences don't do that. They stick with the big cities. So if you're a new developer and you're trying to get to a conference, now there's a pretty expensive flight that you have to pay for.

So if you think about it from someone who is going and not getting subsidized for going, they're spending potentially thousands of dollars on three days that may or may not help them be a better developer. That's a big investment. And so what we did to help to

alleviate some of those financial burdens is we had a scholarship. We had an opportunity scholarship. And we covered whatever you need to be covered in order to come to the conference, whether that's flight, hotel, childcare, metro ticket. And we wanted to make sure that the reason that you didn't come wasn't because you couldn't afford to.

So conference is awesome. Everybody loves it. They think it's the best thing ever. It's wonderful. But here's the thing about conferences. If you forget something, if you miss something or if you mess something up entirely, there's not that much you can do about it. You can't like deploy a new build of a conference.

You know, like it's not really, it's not a thing. You just kind of have to take notes, sit with it and hope you do better the next time. So here are all the things that I wish I had done and things that I missed. We're going to call them learnings. Here are the things that I learned. Number one, one of the things that I learned, one of the things that I missed was closed captioning. Shout outs to closed captioning at RubyConf.

Shout outs to you all for that. It was something that I didn't think about that first conference. Someone reached out, I think a week or two before the conference, said, hey, are you going to do closed captioning? And I was like, what? What now? Who?

Didn't think of it. Didn't cross my mind. Another one, child care. Shout outs to child care. RubyConf child care. Wow. Also something that just didn't cross my mind. Someone brought up, someone said, hey, is there going to be child care? And I was like, who? What? Next one, dietary restrictions. This one, I wasn't that bad. I asked everyone

what their dietary restrictions were. I asked on the ticket and said, please tell me all your things and I'll take care of it. And I also told the caterer, I said, here, all the things, please take care of it. But I forgot to ask about labeling all the food.

So I had people throughout lunch coming up to volunteers going, can I eat that? Is that vegan? Is it gluten free? Is it vegetarian? And it became this little problem, but an annoying problem, especially for the people who were looking for food that they could eat and not being able to find it. And the last one, the last one I'm going to share with you all, is photography and privacy. This one takes a little bit of explanation.

So here's a tweet that we saw that says, I love this idea for events and conferences. This is Stephanie Hurlburt. If you don't know her, you should totally follow her on Twitter. She's awesome. And she tweets, it helps some people feel more comfortable, but it would have helped me attend events at all after I escaped an abusive relationship

and was worried about stalking. I wasn't able to go to any events for months. And it's a little sticker that you put on your badge that says, hey, please don't take photos of me and definitely don't post photos of me. And the only reason I saw this tweet was because of this other tweet. This is from Hunter. Hunter, where are you? I know you're here somewhere. Where are you at? Hey, Hunter.

Hunter tweeted directly at us and said, code newbies, maybe you all can do something like this for Codeland. Just a simple yes or no on whether a person wants a sticker at check-in would be super easy. And I said, yes, Hunter, that would be super easy. And we didn't know about this in time for that conference, but for next year,

we're going to be ready. Next conference, I took my notes, I have my to-dos, we're going to fix all the things. Codeland 2018 happens, and I'm proud to say that we iterated on these things. We got closed captioning. We had a child care fund. We got those food labels for those dietary restrictions. We got those stickers for the photography and privacy. But here's the thing. If all those people hadn't spoken up,

if they hadn't raised their hand and said, hey, did you think about this? We would not have made a better conference. Codeland 2018 comes to an end, and in my closing remarks, I say these things. I say, look at all the things that we didn't get right the

first year, but we improved this year. Thank you so much to everyone who said something. Thank you for the feedback. It was super helpful. And I said, if there's anything that we missed this year, please let me know. Please keep that feedback coming. Send me an email, tweet me, DM me, let me know what things we can improve for next year. That night,

conference is over, back in my hotel room, sitting at my desk. Open up my laptop, and I have an inbox full of things that we missed that year. Here are a few of the things that I learned. Someone tweeted and said,

you should have more environmentally friendly options. Was that you? Were you the person who emailed me? Someone said, hey, you should have water coolers instead of water bottles. I think that that year we had, okay, don't judge me. Okay, we're friends, right? Don't judge me. We have like over a thousand water bottles, and I'm thinking it's super convenient. You just

grab them, you go, you got hydration on the move. It's awesome. Great for conference attendees, terrible for earth. That's what I learned. Thanks, Marty. And that was something that was called to my attention because of that email.

The second thing, a prayer room. We had a few attendees who were running around trying to find a private space to pray, and someone had to call that out to me and say, hey, this happened, you should think about this for next year. This next one is interesting. This one was a quest for a low carb lunch. Let me explain. One of the lunch buffets that we had was called

a summer picnic, and it was mac and cheese, fried chicken, I think some mashed potatoes, good food, wholesome food, comfort food, right? Kind of like Thanksgiving. And I thought, it's delicious, it's going to be great. But the thing is, when you have a menu that's that

heavy, and you're sitting in a room for six hours, single-track conference, and there's a lot of people, so it gets warm, you get a little sleepy. And it can be hard to pay attention if you just had a ton of mashed potatoes. And so this person said it would be really great if there were just some fresher, some greener options. And that just never

occurred to me. I'm thinking, I like mashed potatoes. Doesn't everybody like mashed potatoes? But that was something that just never occurred to me. Another one is bigger seats. I had someone reach out and said, hey, I'm a bigger person. These seats were kind of small and uncomfortable.

I'm sitting there for six hours, and it literally hurt. It hurt my body to be at this conference, which is not something you want anyone to say about your conference. And so I read these things, and it's really easy to look at even just this list, this little snapshot, and go, really? Come on. I've got to worry if my furniture is inclusive.

What does that even mean? What is inclusive furniture? I don't know. But now I've got to think about all these things. This is a lot to think about, especially as a conference organizer. There's so many things to do, so many things you can miss, so many things you're juggling at the same time. And it can feel like my list just got a whole lot longer.

But this wasn't a list of things to do. It wasn't just that. It was a list of things that I missed. It was a list of my personal blind spots. And I looked at these emails, and I was honestly really grateful for all the feedback. And I was really thankful that

so many people reached out and told me what I could do better. And there was one email, one particular email that I got from a woman who had some really thorough feedback. And I read that email, and I responded, and I said, thank you so much. It's given me a lot to think about, a lot to consider. And I said, you know, this email was so helpful. You need

to go to all the other tech conferences and take notes and tell them how they can improve, and then we'll all have the best conferences ever. And she responded, and she said, oh, I don't do this for everyone. In fact, this might be the first time I've done it. I did it for you because I know that you'll do something about it.

And that email reframed the inbox for me because the inbox wasn't just a list of my blind spots. It was a list of all the people who believed that I would fix it. But how do they know? How do they know that I care enough to do all these things? Because if you think about the

work of a conference organizer or a community builder, a lot of it is completely invisible. Think about the things that you see. You don't see me sending hundreds of emails to potential sponsors hoping to get this funded. You don't see me on the phone with a caterer hoping to get enough mushroom burgers for all the people who need mushroom burgers. You don't see me

lugging hundreds of conference booklets from the printer to my car hoping they're going to fit in my suitcase. You don't see any of that. In fact, the only things you see are a few tweets and you hear my voice asking some questions, and that's kind of it.

The bulk of the work is invisible. Most of the work is done in the dark. There's nothing you can point to and say, you see that thing right there, that thing that she did, that huge act that proves that she will take this email seriously. You don't have that. It doesn't exist. So how do you know? The only thing that is there is these series

of little acts, these little interactions, these little things that I've been doing consistently for years, and it turns out that's the stuff that matters. It's these small, consistent acts that build trust. It's not that one key hire. It's not that one project you just open sourced.

It's not that one initiative you've announced and you're proud of. That's part of it. That's one part. It's these small, consistent acts over time that build trust. It was constantly going through this loop that we talked about, understanding, building, listening,

iterating over and over again, no matter how big the problem is, how small the problem is, constantly going through this loop. This is what community building truly looks like. It's not that glamorous. And when you do these things over and over again, you run yourself this loop over and over again, that's how you make people feel safe and wanted and welcome.

And when you eventually find your community, it's wonderful. Oh, it feels so good. Hopefully, you found some of that today. Hopefully, you found some of that at this conference. When you find your people, you find the folks who are going to support you and love you and help you, it feels wonderful. It feels great. To belong, to be understood is an amazing

feeling. But for the people who create that space, it's just a lot of work. And it's work that frankly never really ends. There's always going to be something to build and to fix and to make better. And I remember even when I was a kid watching my mom manage

that magical living room and watching her run around. And I would look at her and go, oh, man, I want to be like that. That looks exhausting. She'd always collapse at the end of an event after everyone leaves, and she'd go, oh, I'm so tired. She would kill me for

doing that accent, but it is spot on, I swear. It's spot on. I hope she's not live streaming this. But I would look at what she did every single event, and I would go, oh, man, I definitely don't want to be like that. Which is kind of funny now because as I'm getting older, I'm finding myself slowly turning into my mother. Have you gone through that in

your life yet? Yeah? Where you're like becoming one of your parents. I say things, even the way I laugh, the way I answer the phone. I hear my mom coming out of my voice. It's kind of freaky. It makes me a little uncomfortable. But when it comes to community building, all I've ever wanted was to be like her, is to make you feel safe and wanted

and welcome. Thank you.