The best part about that is that he did such a great job saying our names like two seconds

before. It's Saran, which we should do a great job on, and Vaidyhi. Yes. There's going to be a quiz at the end. You all have to say it in unison, so I hope you were paying attention. Exactly. Just kidding. Thank you all so much for coming to our closing keynote. Super excited to be here. This is my first time at EmberConf. It is also my first time in Portland.

I live here. Also excited, though. Also excited, yes. Also, I think both of our first times doing a joint keynote, and what's really, really awesome about doing a talk with someone as wonderful and amazing as Vaidyhi is that if it doesn't go well, it's her fault.

So it's only 50% my fault, which is why I pair program. So you ready to get started? Yeah. I'm going to do this. Okay. Now I'm ready. So four years ago, when I decided to learn to code, I did it on my own. I spent 12 to 16 hours alone in my apartment. I quit my job.

I did all the books and coding tutorials and workshops, and it felt a lot like this. It was sad and lonely and frustrating. It was me versus the computer, and the computer was always right. There were a lot of lows and a few highs, but the highs were high enough that I wanted to keep going, and I did. So around two years ago, I was feeling pretty stuck.

I was about a year into my first dev job, and I was coding, I was building, but I wasn't really feeling challenged. I wasn't really feeling uncomfortable. So I decided to swing the pendulum to the other side, and I did possibly the most uncomfortable thing that a developer can do.

I interviewed for a new job, and I really went for it. I interviewed at places that seemed kind of intimidating and that I thought would push me out of my comfort zone and force me to keep on learning and growing. And towards the end of that interview, I was given a really, really hard question, and

I was really excited about it. A few months into learning to code on my own, I decided to apply and got accepted into a boot camp, and all of a sudden, I had 44 other people who understood what that journey felt like, and we high fived when things worked, and we held each other and

cried when they did not, as one does when you code. And finally, I had a group of people who understood both the highs and the lows, and all of a sudden, I was no longer alone. So if you have interviewed for a dev job, you often have a technical section of that interview, and I interviewed at a company that was pretty intense, and it was a very

long five-hour interview process, and towards the end of the interview, they ended by giving me a really hard computer science problem that I had never heard about, and I felt a little bit scared, but also, I finally felt challenged in a way that I really

hadn't felt since I had first started learning how to code. Having that community at that boot camp made the journey so much easier, and having that interview got me excited about coding all over again. But my community cost me $11,000 and three months without a salary, and I felt

very lucky that I could afford to do that, but a lot of people can't. And the true value of that boot camp was really that community. It was having those 44 other people in that room with me, and I didn't like the fact that if you wanted that type of support system, at least back then, you had to pay a lot of money for it. I wanted to find a cheaper and easier way to connect people.

So eventually, that five-hour-long technical interview came to an end, and I didn't actually end up getting that job, nor did I end up solving that computer science problem. But I did get something else.

I got this itching desire to understand what everyone else in that room seemed to already know, the basics of how computers worked, and the fundamentals of computer science. I just didn't like the idea that everyone else in that room knew these building blocks and that I didn't.

I really wanted a seat at that table, but without spending all the money and time required to get a CS degree. So I thought of a solution. At that point, it felt like everybody was doing Twitter chats. Show of hands if you know what a Twitter chat is. Show of hands, show of hands, show of hands. A few people, okay. No worries. It's your lucky day. I'm going to tell you all about it.

Oh, I know. Oh, you know. That's great. That's important. I know. I would hope that you would know. I know. I've been paying attention. I've done this talk many times. So a Twitter chat is when we have a hashtag and usually a time to meet. So sometimes it's once a week, twice a month, sometimes it's monthly. And there's a moderator, there's one account who gives out questions. And the idea is to use the hashtag to have a conversation on Twitter.

So I said, oh, I'll start a Twitter chat. And I'll start it with the hashtag code newbie. And every Wednesday at 6 p.m. Pacific time, 9 p.m. Eastern time for basically the last four years, I use this chat to bring people together and ask questions. So I thought of a solution.

After that interview, I decided that I was going to change and be one of those people who had a seat at that table. I was going to catch up to everyone else and teach myself computer science. But how on earth do you teach yourself all of computer science by yourself? I didn't have the answer to that question, but I knew how to make goals.

I'm really into lists. So I decided that I was going to teach myself one topic every week, and I would write about it every week for the whole year. And I was determined to stick to it, and I actually did. She did. She really did. We have proof. We have all the blog posts. Yes, let's do a round of applause for that.

Absolutely. And I remember when she tweeted it, she had like this pinned tweet, and she's like, I'm going to do this series. And I thought, that's cute. We'll see, Vaidy. We'll see if you actually keep up with it. And every few months, I would check on her on Twitter, and I would look in and say, did she really do, did she do blog posts this week?

And she always did, and a year passed, and you actually did it. It's very, very impressive. It was a very long year, but it's over now. I actually started with the simplest things that I could think of and that I at least had heard of. So the first thing I wrote about was binary, or base two.

And as the series went on, I realized that this was like becoming its own thing, and I should probably give it a name. So I decided to playfully call it Base CS. So everybody get the joke? No? Okay, let me explain it to you. So the joke, so the joke is that it's pronounced Base CS, but it's spelled like basics, like the basics of computer science.

It's okay, it took me like a whole year to figure this out. This is the part where I need like, but I'm, there you go. And the only reason that I figured it out is because I was trying to type in a word document, I was trying to type out Base CS, and it kept autocorrecting it. Like the first time autocorrect was useful, and it kept saying like,

Base CS isn't a thing, and I'm like, it's totally a thing. Like, you should talk to Vaidi. And it kept changing it to basics. And I was like, why would I want to call it, oh, the basics of, it was amazing. It did take you a while, but you got it. I got there. I did. That's good. So the Twitter chat for me was really just my excuse to bring people together.

The real value was in all the conversations and connections that happened. And I hope that they'd happen, and they did. Over the years, we've had people make friends through the Twitter chat, find mentors, get jobs, all through bringing people together. So wait, there's been a Twitter chat every week, really? Yeah, for the last four years, we've done 207.

Today will be the 208th Twitter chat. Did you ever miss one? Yes, yeah, I would like a round of applause. Thank you. Thank you very much. There was one Wednesday that we did not do a Twitter chat, because that was the day I got married, had a wedding, and

I was busy doing something else. Sorry, Leah. That's an acceptable excuse. That's fine. I'll let it slide. So as I, throughout the year, as I would write the Base CS series, I noticed that more and more people were reading. Sure, there were new developers and those with some experience, but

there were also people who had PhDs in computer science who were getting value from this series, which was super exciting. And as time went on, I found myself actually engaging with all of these folks around the world. I would answer their questions whenever I could, point them to computer science resources that had been helpful to me.

And sometimes, I had crazy ideas like, I'll host a live stream where I'll let people watch me write a post. How did that live stream go? It was one hour of me asking myself, how does this work? And then Googling, and you're like, no way, how does this work? And how does this work?

And then I'm on Wikipedia, and I'm like, wait, 25 people are watching me. My God, what do I do? I didn't do another one, I just did the one, so. That answers that question. But I think my favorite part of the whole process and the whole series itself was being able to engage with all the people who were reading and benefiting from it.

One of my favorite things that I did was connect with some of the most invested base CS readers, and I would actually send them customized, hand-drawn postcards to wherever they were in the world, which is really fun. Yeah, those postcards are beautiful, absolutely love those. So about six months into doing these Twitter chats, I realized that I didn't have a Twitter chat, I had a community.

And after a few months, I realized that it wasn't just me who had been struggling to try to teach myself computer science and felt alone the whole time. There were lots of other people just like me. And in our aloneness, or feeling alone, we were actually all together, and I had created a community.

I would describe my community as being inclusive. And I feel like we use that word a lot, this idea of inclusive communities. And I think it's a bit misleading, because it makes it sound like you literally want every single person in your community. And the truth is, I don't really want every single person in my community.

I wanted to create a space where people who were kind and welcoming and supportive could come in and hang out and support each other. And I didn't want to have, what should we call them? The assholes, I wanted to keep out the assholes. So- Yep, that's the word. Right, yeah, yeah, so you want the assholes. So I did two very intentional things. I created rules, and I became a cheerleader.

I never started out thinking that anyone would actually read base CS. I mean, sure, it would be cool if they did, and if it helped them. But I wasn't writing it for the masses. I was writing it for the version of myself that wished that that resource had existed when I was trying to learn all these things on my own.

And because I didn't have a CS degree, the writing was kind of different than most resources. I tried to make it as friendly as possible, and the writing would never be judgmental or condescending. I never assumed that someone would know what a word meant or how a concept functioned, because I didn't know what it meant or

how it functioned. And in trying to make it fun and friendly, I used drawings to try to make it visually appealing. Now, I didn't necessarily have assholes that I was trying to keep out, but there are a lot of gatekeepers in the world of computer science.

And a lot of the content can be made inaccessible and kind of guarded in an ivory tower, especially if you don't have a CS degree. So the creative choices that I made in creating base CS unintentionally kept a lot of these gatekeepers out of the base CS community.

Every Twitter chat starts with three rules. Be supportive, be helpful, be nice. It's part of our code of conduct. It's a set of rules that we shout from the rooftops. It sets the tone, it sets expectations. But the real way to keep the assholes out is to be incredibly,

disgustingly nice. So one base CS reader once wrote in and told me, as a self-taught programmer and girl, I have to say that all the pink in the base CS series makes me extra happy. And when I read this, I was like, that's so great. That was totally a mistake and an accident.

I didn't mean for that to happen. The thing is, I never set out to make base CS extra pink to try to compensate for something. I was really just trying to make it fun and friendly. There is a lot of pink in base CS, though. Do you just personally like the color pink? First of all, it's a highly underrated color. It's great.

Second of all, I have a problem where when you walk into a stationery store and you see like a set of pens, you're like, I must own them. And then you walk into a lot of stationery stores and suddenly you have like 50 pens. I'm like, oh my God, now I have to use them all. And I had to come up with a reason, right? That's why I added all that pink. So you have sets of pens and you underutilized pink in real life.

So you overutilized it in base CS. Well, I had managed to keep that a secret for like over a year and now you've just totally added me. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Now, I don't know if I'd say I'm a nice person. I think I'm okay. But when I put on my code newbie hat, I'm your best friend.

I'm your coach. I'm your cheerleader. I will fill your feed with exclamation points and hearts and emojis and a whole lot of affirmations. It's pretty gross. Yeah, it's a bit much. You know, I didn't even realize how bad it was until about two years ago when I had my arm thingy. Did I talk about my arm thingy?

No. Wait, what arm thing? Let me tell you about this arm thingy. So two years ago, I was sitting at home and I had this terrible, terrible pain in my right shoulder. It got so, so bad and over the course of the day, it got worse and worse and worse. And then literally two minutes, two minutes before the Twitter chat started, it got

to a point where I was crying and howling in pain. Oh my God. It was pretty bad. It was pretty bad. And my poor husband, where is he? Is he here? Hi baby, how you doing? You're doing great. So he looked at me and he said, we have to go to the emergency room. We don't know what's happening. We don't know what's wrong with you. And I said, no, it's time for the Twitter chat.

And I said, I'm going to dictate. You're going to type. We're going to do this. Just one hour. We'll be fine. That's how I talk when I tweet. And so he's typing and I'm like, more smileys, more smileys. And Susie will tweet, I made my first pull request. I'm like, congratulate Susie.

And he'll reply back with, congrats, Susie, with one exclamation point. We don't do that here, OK? Three exclamation points, minimum. And there comes a time when you find yourself screaming emojis at the person you love. And you really start to see yourself differently.

And it was intense. I'm an intense person. Wait, so have you been secretly really annoyed with me in our friendship because I only send two exclamation points? You could do better. That's all I'm saying. I love that you have chosen this moment to tell me that in front of everyone. Any opportunity I get to make you a better friend.

I'm just kidding. I love you so much. You're the best. But it's serious work. And it's very intentional. I want to make CodeNewbie extra, extra safe and extra friendly. Because there are people who frankly need that. And the people who need that will come and stay. And the people who think it's too much and the people who think it's kind of gross will leave us alone. You don't want to sit with us.

And that's OK. So we're very upfront about who we are. We are unapologetically supportive. We are relentlessly positive. And when you do that, what happens is the people who need it will come and fill your mentions and your timeline and your feed with all this positivity and good vibes. When I wrote Base CS, I was also particular about what I said and how I said it.

The thing is I just didn't realize the full impact of what I was saying until much later. I specifically used the words we. Because whoever was reading this post and wherever they were, I didn't want them to feel like they were alone. I wanted them to think that there was somebody with them while they were learning.

And I used the words afraid and intimidated and scary because that was how I felt about learning some of these really, really tough and technical concepts. I wanted to acknowledge that it was totally OK and valid to feel this way.

And honestly, I still haven't come across a computer science resource that really does this. And I think that's what set Base CS apart. It validated all of these feelings and by acknowledging their existence, it brought this whole group of people to the front of the stage.

And by acknowledging their existence, they started to feel seen. Base CS was not about being taught at but rather learning together. I was very intentional about serving other code babies. I, on the other hand, was far more accidental.

I was really just trying to do right by my past self. But both our paths led us to the same place, finding people who had the same pain points and bringing them together. But what about everyone else? Yeah. In writing for myself, I inevitably left some people out.

I'm a visual learner. So reading and writing really makes sense to me. It's how I process and understand concepts and deconstruct the world around me. A lot of what we do at CodeNewbie is on social media. Twitter is a huge part of how we engage and interact with the community. So if you're not on Twitter, it's really hard to be part of our community.

If you're not awake at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, first of all, what are you doing? But also, it's really hard to be part of our community. If you just are the type of person who doesn't appreciate that kind of really over-the-top, gushy feeling kind of thing, then it's also really hard to be part of our community.

So even though we tried really hard to include everybody, except for the assholes, that's true, for a long list of reasons, it was really hard to find a space for everyone. We will always unintentionally leave people out. Base CS also isn't for everybody, because not everyone learns the same way.

There are visual learners, but some people are auditory learners, while others learn by doing. They're kinesthetic learners. I left so many people out by my choice to create a written series. And even if I made it super fun and approachable,

there were still going to be some people who would fall through the cracks. The truth is, no community is truly inclusive. By now, we've launched our own conference called Codelands, happening May 4 and 5 in New York City. Check it out if you're in town. And we also launched something I'm super proud of, which is the Code To Be podcast.

And we've done 168, I think, episodes at this point. And we interviewed developers of all different skill levels and backgrounds of walks of life. And I love podcasting as a medium so much, because it's a really easy way to educate and entertain on the go. So for my community of really busy learners and students and parents and working adults,

it's the perfect tool. You've had some really awesome guests on that show, right? Who are some of your favorites? Well, there's this guy named Yehuda, who's been on the show. He actually talks a lot, so it's a two-parter. There's a part one and a part two. But he says important things, so it's OK.

I have heard of him, so I have to obviously listen to that episode. I missed it. Yeah, there's also this really awesome woman named Vaidihi is on the show. Oh, I missed that episode. Yeah, OK. Well, you have to check it out. You have to check it out. Yeah. But most of my content is about people and their personal stories. We don't have a lot of technical things on that show. And I really wanted to do a podcast that was more technical.

I just didn't have the content. I had the opposite problem. I had a wealth of content, but a pretty limited medium that I could really express it in. And if you don't learn best by reading, then Base.CS becomes inaccessible to you. But I knew that there were some people who would just never get to use the written series

fully the way that I wanted because they were probably other types of learners. That's when I reached out to Vaidihi and said, let's turn Base.CS into a podcast. That way, my community gets all this really great technical content. And my community would benefit from a different way of consuming my content.

It was a win-win. So we launched the show. And we thought, we'll probably get a few thousand downloads for season one. We got over 100,000 downloads in season one and rave reviews. Obviously, it went way better than either of us had expected.

And we were thrilled to be able to serve both of our communities in entirely new ways. We heard from listeners through Twitter and via email how much they loved our hilarious conversations. We are pretty funny. You know, I've been trying to tell my husband for years how funny I am.

And now I have proof. So thank you for that. You are welcome. But then we heard from one listener in particular whose story was a bit different. He was blind. And as it turns out, there aren't very many resources that teach technical concepts through

a purely auditory medium. In fact, a lot of technical and learn-to-code content is very visual with screenshots and videos. So for this listener, the Base.CS podcast wasn't just a matter of convenience. For him, it was an entire game changer. When we decided to collaborate, we knew there'd be an overlap in our communities.

There are lots of code newbies who are excited to learn computer science. And there are a lot of people who are reading the Base.CS series and learning computer science who are code newbies. And when we created the podcast, we assumed that most of our audience would be in that intersection. And that was true, but it wasn't the full picture.

This is the real picture. In creating that podcast, we did have some overlap, but we ended up reaching an entirely different group of people and also filling an entirely different gap. We just couldn't see it.

We were only equipped to see the communities that we were a part of, the pain points that we personally felt. So obviously in retrospect, looking back on it now, it seems really ironic that in the process of trying to fill a gap that was so obvious to us, we missed another gap entirely

that was so obvious to that blind listener. We ended up doing that very same thing that we had seen everyone else do. We were so heads down and consumed in filling the gaps and the pain points that we had experienced that we never bothered to look up and see what other pain points there

might be in the same space. And now that we both know that this gap is there, it seems so obvious. But if that pretty obvious gap was invisible to both of us until recently, you can't help but wonder how many other gaps are there that we don't know about? What do you see that we don't?

We should all try to think of those gaps, those communities we're not serving, not reaching, not welcoming. It's our responsibility as individuals, and we should take that responsibility seriously. But here's the problem. Expecting a single person to be able to serve everyone is just really unrealistic.

We all have our biases, our viewpoints, and even our blind spots. So even when we try to include as many people as we can, we still have to deal with all of those. So what can we do? How can we fill the gaps that we don't even know are there?

We can start by empowering the people who can see them, the people who have lived through and experienced firsthand the very pain points and problems that we haven't, and those that we never may be able to. And it's the people with lived experiences who are in the best position to see and address some of these gaps.

These are the individuals who are going to know exactly what to look for and exactly what to do to help fill those voids and address those pain points. And those are the voices that we have to amplify. So I feel like I hear people talk about this idea of empowering others a lot.

Like empower people seems like a nice rallying cry. But what does that actually mean, and what does it look like? Now, okay, this is undoubtedly a big question, and a lot of possible answers. But I don't actually think you need to do that much to be very impactful. At a very basic level, one of the simplest and most impactful things you can do is to

listen. If you have even a little bit of a platform, you're now in this position where you have to speak, but not just speak. You're like supposed to say important things, is what I've been told. But the thing is, leaders aren't just those who come to the front of a stage and speak.

They aren't just the ones who talk and command. They also have to be able and willing to take a step back and listen. And in taking that step back, they empower. And listening can start with a very, very simple question.

What do you think? I love this question. I use it often. It's an invitation. It's permission. It empowers people to share their lived experiences and join that problem solving process. Okay, but that question alone is not really going to get us very far until we create

safe spaces. So creating safe spaces has always sounded really weird to me. It sounds like this bureaucratic process where I have a big red rubber stamp. I'm just going around being like, safe space, safe space, safe space, right? Yeah, I don't, what does that even mean? Sometimes it has this sense of permanence, like you can just designate something as safe

space and therefore because you designated it once, it's going to stay safe forever. Like you can just mark it as safe, walk away from it, pat yourself on the back and never think about it again. But true safe spaces need to be maintained and nourished like a good cook face. Having something like a code of conduct can help, definitely sets the tone.

But a lot of that heavy lifting happens behind the scenes in conversations and interactions. How do you respond when one of your employees says something problematic? What do you do when a coworker makes an inappropriate joke? What happens when someone has taken credit for work that they did not do?

How do we handle these moments as managers, as employees, as individual contributors, and as maintainers? Do we look the other way in these moments or do we speak up? That's what really makes and keeps it a safe space.

When we push back, even in small ways, we shine a light, we empower. And when we are the ones in positions of power, positions of leadership, positions of privilege, it becomes our job to lend that power.

Retweets are great. I'm always down for a retweet. But what's more impactful is a job offer, a speaking opportunity, a promotion, a pay raise, sponsorship, introductions, collaborations. What resources do you or your company have that might help make someone's work a little bit more impactful? So for a lot more in-depth examples of how you can actually use your privilege,

we both highly recommend that you check out Anwan Simmons' talk, Lending Privilege. So we talked about all these different things that we can do as individuals, but what does that mean as an industry? Well, when we start to do small things to empower the individuals,

we'll start to see pockets of people with a shared problem and pain point begin to find solutions and also find one another. Just like all those people who were struggling to learn the computer science fundamentals. Or learning to code.

Those pockets are going to blossom into communities, and that's when we'll start to see true diversity. When people from different backgrounds come together, new and interesting solutions are going to begin to sprout up. There are a lot of flower references in that last one.

Look, I know you're coming from San Diego, but it rained a lot here, and I'm really excited for spring, and I had to hold back from putting a bunch of flower emojis. Thank you for holding back. I really appreciate that. Took a lot of restraints. There's a saying used to describe the importance of representation. You can't be what you can't see, and to some degree it's true. It is hard to be what you can't see.

It's a lot easier to be the thing that's been modeled for you. But you can still do it. In fact, there are tons of amazing people who have become the very thing that they didn't see. And in doing that, not only did they give us a voice, they gave visibility to so many of us.

And in fact, we started the base CS podcast because we didn't see that in the world. But if you look at this saying and turn it around, it can be misinterpreted as, if I don't see it, it must not exist. And that tends to be a big part of the argument of diversity and inclusion debates.

I don't see women coding all day, so there must not be very many women who code well. Or, I don't see very many people of color speak, so there must not be very many good people of color who are good speakers.

Instead, I have three podcasts, I'm just saying I speak very well. Instead of the lack of visibility being viewed as a symptom of the problem, it's seen as proof of non-existence. When I first tried to learn computer science after that technical interview,

I thought it was just me who didn't know this stuff. And it's because I didn't see anyone else struggling, so I assumed, oh, they must not exist. But in learning it myself, I realized that I wasn't alone, which is so funny because when I first saw this idea of the base CS blog series,

I thought, wow, how come no one's done this yet? It seems like such an obvious problem, something I've definitely struggled with. And when I was first starting to learn how to code, I thought it was just me who was having such a hard time. I didn't see other people struggling, so I assumed that they didn't exist. Except, hello, I'm here, I was one of those people.

I can't tell you how many times I felt so stupid when I was trying to learn how to code. Apparently that's what programming is, feeling stupid, that's what I've learned. They didn't tell us that though. They don't tell us that, how? But after creating Code Newbie, I realized that I also wasn't alone. We started our projects because we didn't see what we wished existed in the world.

And in becoming the very things that we wished existed, we realized that there are other people who were just like us. And in stepping to the front of the stage and saying, I exist, we shone a light on everyone else who we thought didn't exist either.

So what if instead of thinking, if I don't see them, they must not exist? Instead, we thought, if I don't see them, maybe it's because they're quietly working in the dark, hoping to wonder. Or maybe our ability to see them isn't even what determines whether or not they exist.

True. Maybe, just maybe. They've actually been there the whole time, just waiting for enough light to find each other and finally be seen. Thank you. Thank you.